I must have had LeBarons on my mind from my earlier (Cordoba post) today. This one from the J-body’s later years pulled up beside me at a stop light. It’s a chrome-trimmed LX model, which you don’t see as often. Most of them are the monochromatic GTC. Those tape paint stripes are similar to the ones on my mom’s ’94 (Jeep Grand Cherokee). It’s seen better days, but isn’t in that bad shape for a 20-year old New England car. It’s owner is probably the original too, judging by the green Mass plates, which started being phased out in the mid-90s.
This LeBaron’s most likely a ’93-’95. The rear taillights on this one were made standard on all models in ’93, although high-end models got them for ’92. I didn’t get a look at the front to see whether or not it had the pre-’93 hidden headlights or the ’93-onward composite units. Regardless, I prefer the styling of the 1987-91 models with their hidden headlights and full-width all-red taillights with black accents.
I like this car as a convertible, but I love it as a coupe, and it’s a shame that few examples of that body style have survived. They look, to my eyes anyway, like a FWD rendition of Ford’s aero-T-Bird (which I’m also very fond of)… and I agree, the early look with the hidden headlights was much better. By the time they hit this re-style, the body was looking kinda dated and it didn’t mesh well at all with the attempt(s) to bring it into the 90s. Same goes for the last update of the Dodge Kaytona.
I’ve written elsewhere on here of driving an early 2.5 non-turbo convertible and how it was one of the worst cars I’ve ever experienced from behind the wheel… but even that experience didn’t squash my enthusiasm for these. I think I could live with a Turbo II GTC coupe – or better yet, one of the handful of ’90 GTCs with the VNT setup from the Shelby CSX.
Probably not the color I’d go for (it is nice, though!) but this is the best picture I could find of a GTC coupe online. They’re rare even on the internet. Never noticed that these have a “TURBO GTC” badge planted in the door molding – just like the “TURBO COUPE” badge on ’87-’88 T-Birds…
Love, love, love the Turbo GTC LeBarons. Back when I lived in Pennsylvania, we had a lot of trouble with the dealer who sold me my Lancer Turbo, the mediator was a zone rep from the Pittsburgh office. He showed up in a silver GTC. It was a gorgeous car. It had all of the toys.
I don’t know if it had a VNT engine, but whatever was under the hood was way more powerful than my Turbo I. In order to assuage me (and keep me from physically assaulting the dealer principal) he got Chrysler Corporation to fix a few issues under warranty (the 12 month 12K bumper to bumper warranty had run out). I told him how much I admired his car, he asked me if I’d be interested in taking it for a spin… Is the Pope Catholic? Do chickens have wings? Of course I’d be interested…
It was fast and punchy, and handled very well. It was my Lancer on steroids. I was trying to figure out how I could get one of these for myself when reality clicked back on. I had a baby on the way, and had just sold off my 5.0L Mercury Capri. Because car seats don’t work very well in coupes…
I still look for GTC’s occasionally when prowling for EEKs on eBay, but I rarely see them. Meaning, more like never. I think they all got used up and thrown away, like so many other FWD turbo Mopars of the era.
What a shame.
It really is… when I was a teenager, you could pick up FWD turbo Mopars extremely cheap and they had a (for then) sizable following on the internet that could show you all the tricks to squeeze more juice out of them. I always wanted one, but for whatever reason it just never happened – and then one day I blinked and they were all gone! Back then, you could buy a nice, solid Turbo K-car for $1,000 or less and turn it into a 13-second monster for a few hundred dollars and trips to the junkyard/Home Depot. It was that same appeal that killed all of them, because a stock Turbo I with 150k miles running 25lbs. of boost dialed in with a fishtank valve will not live long if driven hard!
When they were still plentiful, I always wanted to build a K-car New Yorker like that. Turbo II, big intercooler, lots of boost, 5-speed and whatever good suspension parts would fit hacked in… crazy fast minivans had already been done, so I figured the next most ridiculous car to hotrod was Mopar’s version of the “Little Limousine”. Actually, that still appeals to me immensely even now, but I’m probably too much of a wuss to try at this point.
In stock form, even way more than the LeBaron coupe, the Lancer/LeBaron GTS were always my favorite K-derivatives. Every so often, I’ll take a look at the classifieds on turbododge.com and I saw an ’87 Shelby Lancer on there not long ago – mint, fairly low mileage… $7,500!! That’s a car I really love the shit out of and would love to own, but I could never live with myself knowing I paid nearly $8k for a 25 year old K-car!! I’ll just have to continue admiring them from a distance, knowing I missed my chance back when the time (and price) was right.
I definitely agree with you that the coupe looked way better. It looks fast and capable whereas the convertible looks like a slow boulevard cruiser. The coupes like that red one almost look like a concept car from the ’80s.
I also liked the interiors of the coupes. Though basically the same, the rear seats were much nicer due to the extra space not being taken up by the convertible roof.
Those are surprisingly nice seats!
Sean, my sentiments about the coupe version are much like yours. Have been tempted to want to get one, but haven’t found one on AutoTrader for quite some time. Am partial to red, but wouldn’t quibble too much on color if there were an immaculate one with low miles from the original owner who has all the records, receipts and original window sticker.
It looks like a 92 LeBaron. If you look closely at the area on the back of the Santa Fe near the door handle you can see the chrome of the top of the bumper and what looks like a painted metal surface above the chrome. That most likely is the metal doors hiding the lights
I had a 1987 Lebaron coupe(the first year of the new body style) it was comfy but a real crap box, I could not dump it fast enough
Don’t really know much about these cars but I never was fond of the tail treatment some 90’s cars got using the amber signal plastic as an accent, the Escort did the same thing. The earlier one was definitely nicer.
I think the amber turn signal treatment was to make the cars look a bit more euro, as most (probably all) european cars are required to have them I believe.
Makes sense. I know the Audi 5000 that had that treatment, it looked good on that though.
The dreaded green plate! No new ones since about ’86, and typically the sign of a slow and inattentive older driver.
Exactly! The easiest sign of an elderly driver. I hate getting stuck behind one!
“The dreaded green plate! No new ones since about ’86”
In the article, Brendan stated that the green plates started being phased out in the mid ’90s — that’s basically correct. The idea that no green plates have been issued since the Spirit of America plates debuted in 1987 is an urban legend. I’ve seen it stated in media articles, though, which leads me to wonder if current RMV management (or PR staff) may even be under the impression that this is true.
When the SOA plates appeared in 1987, the RMV replaced the green plates with SOA plates fairly quickly for every license plate type other than regular passenger plates (commercial, vanity, reserved number, etc.). For some reason, they did not do this with the regular passenger plates. It’s not just that they left all of the existing green plates on the road and didn’t actively seek to replace them with SOAs. They didn’t even start using the SOAs for new registrations. They continued using the green plates for several more years.
I’ve heard that the original intention was to change the regular passenger plates over to SOAs just like all of the others, but this was not done for budget reasons. I’m not sure quite what this means (why would budget reasons have prevented them from at least using the SOAs for new registrations?). Was there a huge inventory of green plates that the state felt they couldn’t just toss out? Was there a mentality that the only proper way to do the switch was to do a mass replacement, and if they couldn’t afford to replace all the existing plates, they wouldn’t start using the new plates at all?
In any event, the green plates continued in use, even for new registrations, for several years after 1987. When I registered my first car in 1988, I got a green plate. Until a couple of years ago, my daily driver had a plate on it that my wife had originally obtained for a car that she registered in 1991. My younger brother’s daily driver has a green plate on it that his longtime girlfriend brought into the relationship; I don’t know when she originally got it, but I believe she was born in 1978, so she wouldn’t have been old enough to have a driver’s license until 1994. When my wife and I bought our first new car in February 1995, we got an SOA, but I remember being surprised by that.
For a while, you might get a green plate, or you might get an SOA plate; it depended on what the Registry branch you went to happened to have in stock at the moment. From what I understand, the supply of green plates wasn’t completely exhausted until around 1997. I’ve been told that new car dealers were given exclusively SOA plates as soon as the RMV went to using them (this might explain why we got one in ’95), while towards the end the remaining green plates were all dumped on rental agencies, but I can’t vouch for either of those things.
I’ve always seen the green plates as more of a badge of honor than a sign of an elderly driver. Maybe it has someting to do with our demographics out here in the central part of the state, but I see a lot of people with green plates who I’d describe as more middle aged than elderly, even couples with kids where both cars in the household have green plates.
I was sad to see the green plate on my car go. When I took the car in for an inspection sticker a couple of years ago (at an unfamiliar station, due to my having waited until the end of the month to bring it in, and widespread power outages caused by an early-season winter storm which had knocked many inspection locations offline), the plate was rejected. I’m not sure what was up with that particular inspection station; I frequently see green plates on the road, and even SOA plates, that look far worse than mine did. It didn’t cost me anything to get new SOA plates — the RMV will replace green plates with SOAs for free — but it was an annoyance to have to go the local Registry branch to get new plates, and I would have preferred to keep the old one.
I agree with you on that. I have a relative whose only 40 and still has a green plate. A family friend only had to change to the red because her green plate was so worn it was barely visible.
I know of one other person whose green plate was rejected at inspection in the past few years, and I’ve seen some suggestion that the RMV may have at least a vague policy of encouraging inspection stations to get green plates out of circulation whenever possible. That having been said, enforcement seems wildly inconsistent. I see a lot of green plates on the road (and even some older SOAs) that look a lot worse than mine did.
I stand corrected.
Ha! My thoughts exactly! Whenever I see one I cringe.
This pretty much sums up how I feel about these cars…
I hate to tell you guys this. But the number one vehicle that would make it’s way from the local abandoned car auctions here in North Georgia to the worst of public auto auctions in metro-Atlanta was the Chrysler Lebaron convertible.
These vehicles would be bought for anywhere between $50 to $250, given surprisingly nice detail work, and then marketed to an uber-gullible public at starting bids of $1000.
There were plenty of other vehicles sent through the block on a twice a week basis. Old Volvos. Tons of Chryslers. The occassional Honda and Jeep. This was back in the Y2K era when the price of scrap metal was dirt cheap and you could buy a ‘spare car’ (one that doesn’t run) for anywhere between $20 to $50 before the $30 auction fee.
I won’t glorify my former domain for obvious reasons. But if you want to read about that past experience… here you go…
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/01/hammer-time-you-lost-the-war-dude/
Argh, here comes the nostalgia wave. Even though it was a complete piece of garbage, there are still times I miss my ’94 GTC convertible.
Hmm, I wonder if there are any mint examples on eBay?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=390616221363
…And suddenly the rest of my day is spent trying to justify the prospect of spending $3,000 on a 20 year-old Chrysler…
And if you continue another mile, on the left hand side, was the now defunct local neighborhood Chrysler Plymouth dealer that it was perhaps sold from. Wonder what it is now…
I own an 89 LeBaron convertible. I love the car. It has over 110,000 miles. It is a non-turbo 2.5. It will never win any drag races but that’s not the point of it. It’s in nice shape, never touched salt. Every once in a while I get an offer to buy it. It rides nice gets good gas mileage and the 2.5 is pretty smooth thanks to balance-shafts. The three speed tranny still shifts smoothly. With nice rubber it does an ok impersonation of a GT. It soaks up mileage very nicely and the top goes down. The front seats are some of the most comfortable seats I’ve ever sat in. I’ve own it almost 20 years now and it always makes me remember why I love to drive. Sometimes you don’t need to have the fastest car or the one that handles the best, you just need one that brings a smile to your face and turns back the clock to simpler days.
I own a nice 85 Lebaron convertible that I bought in 2012. It DOES brings a smile to my face every time I drive it, especially when I see guys or gals in exotic drop tops. The other day, a guy in a black BMW with the roof down rocketed past me. I just laughed my rear off.