I was in the adult playground that is Las Vegas, Nevada, about a week ago when I spotted our featured car. A closely knit group of my friends gathers annually around this time of year to take in some sights, sounds, eats and drinks. We each try not to blow our respective gambling allowances within the first day there. My own such stipend is paper-thin. I was that kid at Chuck E. Cheese who played the one game he was sort of good at (Skee-Ball) the whole time, not wanting to waste my tokens on even Whack-A-Mole, at which I was terrible. Contrary to what my insurance day job might suggest, I’m fairly risk-averse.
While I do enjoy a little casino action, when I’m not with our group, I’m usually happiest when exploring unfamiliar areas with my camera. I’m glad I took a chance by venturing into the part of North Las Vegas Boulevard just north of Interstate 515 (not far from Zappos’s world headquarters) when I spotted this TC making a left turn in traffic.
Much like I am a sucker for the blinking lights, neon signs, glitz, old Americana and superficial glamour of the Fremont Street District of downtown Las Vegas, I genuinely like the TC, which might be seen by some as the rolling equivalent of a Plymouth Reliant K in a bedazzled and sequined jumpsuit. I’ll tell you this, though: when I first saw a picture of a TC on a brochure at the 1987 Detroit Auto Show as a seventh grader, I thought it was one of the most beautiful cars I had ever laid eyes on. I kept a copy of that brochure in my backback while trekking to and from middle school until its front and rear covers had started to delaminate. I still have it in storage, somewhere.
While I preferred the similar-looking, downmarket LeBaron’s prettier, sloping face with its hidden headlights, I loved the TC’s sumptuous-looking leather interior and exotic, faux-Italian heritage as a quasi-Maserati (a Quaserati?). I also thought the portholes on the detachable hardtop were a nice, retro throwback, about a decade before Ford brought them back on the eleventh-generation Thunderbird. And the TC’s “trident” badges? Haawwwt.
Fellow contributor Brendan Saur did a fantastic and comprehensive job of profiling the TC right around this time last year. Paul Niedermeyer also wrote up a TC the same color as the one I saw back in 2014. Our subject TC is probably the only one I’ve seen in any color in probably twenty years. It was even more jaw-dropping to see it in traffic, and in such nice apparent condition.
This year, we stayed at the Downtown Grand Hotel & Casino, which had originally been the Lady Luck, opened in 1964. I would consider the end result of the Downtown Grand’s 2013 renovation and reopening a complete success, working off the great bones of what had been a resort complex with a great footprint and an ideal location right off Fremont Street. This property had faced some uncertain times, financial and otherwise, between the Lady Luck’s closure in 2006 and the Downtown Grand’s unveiling in 2013, but I measure its success by what ultimately came to be.
How does the Lady Luck’s / Downtown Grand’s refurbishing compare with Chrysler’s success in reworking the K-car platform into the TC’s “Q”-designated platform? To borrow a phrase from 2005, perhaps not so much. Mr. Iacocca and his crew really did try to make that proverbial (Gucci) silk purse, but didn’t do quite enough to convince more than a handful of buyers – all told, about 7,300 between 1989 and ’91. But darned if the TC doesn’t still look beautiful to these eyes. Seeing this one last month was much like rediscovering a first, serious, seventh-grade crush. Ciao bella.
Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada.
Saturday, September 24, 2016.
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Cool find and nice write-up – always love your posts!
Nice find and I love in that first photo the comparison of the TC’s “formal” upright roofline to the modern Sonata’s fastback, which is now the norm.
Great find! I cannot see one of these without remembering the newspaper ads from my local ChryPly dealer offering massive discounts on onsold TCs after they had been discontinued. I suspect that this dealer bought a bunch of them at fire sale prices and thought they could make a killing, but those ads ran for a loooooonng time.
Someone in my neighborhood was driving a red one of these a couple of years ago, but I have not seen it in awhile.
I have always had mixed feelings about this car.
On one hand, the T.C. was based off the Chrysler LeBarron so it has a nice modern shape and angles (for its era). The circular window added the “I’m different” and special aspect to the T.C (in a good way).
The Interior was a mix of over padded Italian leather, mixed with Chrysler cheaper parts like the climate / radio control units. Same units that could be found in the lesser K-Cars. To me the T.C. is forgettable since no one really saw these on the road when they where new. I guess the rarity would make them more of a collectors item today.
Not sure it the T.C. was worth the $36K asking price back then for a loaded one. That was solid BMW / M-Benz territory for mid level models.
Just my take.
FWIW, the TC was supposed to be in showrooms the year before the similar-looking LeBaron. Iacocca had planned other joint ventures with Maserati, but the way this one went, that was over.
It’s just another typical Chrysler ‘what might have been’ if de Tomaso had had his sh!t together and gotten the TC to the states when it was scheduled., i.e., way before the new LeBaron convertible. Certainly wouldn’t have been a hit, but not remembered as a huge loser, either.
There may be a special place in automotive hell for this car because, shocking lack of taste and cynical badge engineering aside, if you believe the stories, Chrysler Co bailed on AMC’s plan to import the epic Alpine GTA V6 Turbo (which AMC had already federalized) to avoid stepping on the Chrysler/Maserati’s launch.
Oh, now I hadn’t heard that one before. Were it not for this car, we would have had the GTA over here? Wow. That’s extremely depressing.
Quite the rare dog you found. Of course, if there’s one within five miles, it will jump in front of your camera lens!
The red one you linked is the last one (perhaps only?) I’ve seen in the wild. There was at the Branson Auto & Farm Museum I wrote up recently, but I didn’t take any pictures of the TC. It was sitting next to an Allante, and the pairing was just kind of depressing.
I admire your affinity for these.
The Allante, the TC, the Reatta… I liked all of these cars back in the day and thought it was great that it *seemed* the era of boring, platform-variant cars was over. But yes…all of them seemed to have so much promise, which didn’t play out. It’s jarring to see pictures of any one of these in a junkyard.
At this past weekend’s fall Carlisle show, there were no less than two Buick Reattas for sale.
I see a few of these around Vegas. We have a lot of unusual old cars around here, mostly owing to the dry desert climate. If a car is garaged hereabouts, it can essentially last as long as the owner is willing to pay for maintenance and repair.
I have a sense that the owner of this car hit it big in the casino, one day back in 1989, and went to the Chrysler dealer and bought the fanciest thing they had. Then they never hit it big again.
Evan, your neck of the woods is definitely rich with CC-worthy subjects. And I had the same thought about the driver winning big and purchasing this car new! I can actually envision some gas station dialogue:
“Nice LeBaron, Ma’am.”
“This ain’t no LeBaron. This here [raising eyebrows]…is a Maserati. From Italy. [Dramatic pause…] Let me tell you a story…”
Who would have known that Chrysler and Maserati would have been reunited again via parent company Fiat almost 30 years later.
I see one of those a few times a week on my way home from work
Same color. But I’m in Goose Creek South Carolina not Vegas
Believe or not, during the summer time I can still see this car almost every the other day around metro Detroit and I didn’t know it’s that rare when I mentioned it during talking. I thought they sold a lot of those.
Well…. I’m a big-time lover of the late ’80’s LeBaron. In fact I’m probably one of the few who will argue that it’s one of the most beautiful designs of the late 20th century, despite (or especially because of) its humble K car roots. This TC, well, not so much 😉
It’s not that it’s an ugly design, I just see it as an overly fussy rendition of the prettier and sleeker LeBaron, although I’ll concede that the Italian leather interior treatment was pretty chic, even if it did only thinly mask the run-of-the-mill Chrysler switchgear, etc.
This particular car, and its color especially, reminds of me the only one owned by anyone I’ve personally known, and the tie-in to gambling brought it all full-circle. Back in the 80’s & 90’s where I grew up there was a group of cronies my father was tight with who had a semi-regular poker group. Dad didn’t play as he wasn’t a gambler, but since he had business ties and friendships with the whole crew he was privy to lots of insider info. The games took place in the back rooms or basements of the local businesses owned by members of the group. When the wife of a family friend was seen around town driving the same car as featured here I can remember thinking for certain that it was a “Poker Night Special”, as the local Chrysler dealer was known to be a participant and it wasn’t at all out of the realm, from past experience. The funny thing is that I couldn’t quite make out whether she was in that car because her husband (the owner of a large excavating company) had won or lost, as the car it replaced was a 1987 Jaguar XJ6. (My assumption is that there was a debt of a few grand owned to one party or the other and a trade-in/”purchase” was negotiated, as had apparently happened in other similar scenarios.)
Whatever the specifics, I considered it a loss, and having always had a soft spot for the wife in question (a really sweet lady) I felt bad for her.
This is awesome…all of it. I also consider the J-Body LeBaron one of the best-looking midsizers of that era, in coupe or convertible form. I remember reading that its dimensions were substantially smaller in every direction from most of its competition, but they seemed to combine luxury and sport in what I thought was an absolutely perfect ratio. I wanted a secondhand convertible, but I let my brother and a few other friends talk me out of what they considered a “chick car”. Nowadays, I just wouldn’t care and would drive what I like.
About the wife who got the TC (and I’m chuckling as I type this), why did you feel bad for her? I mean, did she look salty when you saw her behind the wheel?
lol. No, she probably never had a salty day in her life. I actually pretty much always felt bad for her, as her husband was a raging a**hole on a good day. The kids were good friends, so I had many Sunday dinners over there. She was probably the most patient woman on the planet, and I know she loved that Jaguar, so I could only assume that while she might have liked her new TC, she was just rolling with the punches.
(And by the mid 90’s that marriage was over, as were several in my parents’ periphery including their own. This was the waning of the conspicuous consumption era and the beginning of the “WTF was I thinking” era. Interesting times.)
I’ve seen a number of these, actually. The oddest place was at a Wal-Mart in Norfolk, NE. But, it seems like everything that Mopar ever sold in the last 40 years or so ended up here in abundance.
Bob Lutz gives some background on this car in his book “Icons and Idiots”. The ones to have are those equipped with a 5 speed. They only built maybe 501 of those.
I wonder if he did a better job in that book. I got a used copy of his book Car Guys. Luckily it was a used copy because by the time I got 3/4 of the way through I had to throw the book out which was a first for me. Got so irritated at listening to how great he was and everything was Toyota this and Toyota that. For a guy who loves fast cars then why is he flying his MD-500 helicopter to work everyday? He may have known what he was doing but needs more humility. Well, no surprise given that he was a brown shoe.
I dunno how you get such fine action shots Joseph. You can almost feel the umph of the TC pulling away from that light. If a 30 year old four-cylinder turbo is still on the road in a place as hot as Las Vegas that says a lot about the car. The dark tint on the windows tells me it’s a local car. I’ve always liked the styling too. I think the TC served as a fine halo car for the LeBaron line, at least among people who didn’t know about cars.
One of the few of these I ever saw was at night, where I noticed the dash and controls all glowed in red which looked great. Looks weren’t this car’s problem, except that the far more common, half-its-price LeBaron convertible looked so similar. The interior was a mix of nice leather seats and decent door panels but let down by switchgear and gauges that were obviously from the K-car parts bin. And of course, the whole thing rode on a lowly K-car platform, and all but the rare 5 speed manual equipped cars had the same Chrysler or Mitsubishi engines found in various plebian K variants.
The odd nomenclature (with the possessive “Chrysler’s”) was because there weren’t enough built for all Chrysler dealers to sell them, and the legal contract with dealers would have allowed all of them to sell any “Chrysler”.
If all Chrysler dealers weren’t entitled to receive a TC, how did the distribution actually work? Was there some sort of highest bidder thing?
Whatever it was, whomever ‘lost’ by not getting few (if any) TCs were the ones that ended up winning in the end by not getting stuck with TCs that were (in dealer parlance) ‘nailed to the showroom floor’.
Those cars are all over the Bay Area Craigslist for sale every week. Ironic since I would have never considered the Bay Area, from 1975-1990, to be fans of Mopar cars.
Frm here in the UK, I always found these an intriguing car, never quite getting the idea that the combination of a K car, a Maserati engine and all Lee’s toys wopudl make a valid Mercedes SL competitor
Car just leaves me cold. It`s got a decent leather interior, but the rest of the car capped off with that `56 T bird “porthole” top resulted in a stylistic mishmash, or, as they say today, a mash up. Another one of those cars that is interesting for all the wrong reasons.
Having owned 2 of these TCs over the past 10 years, it’s always good to see one being driven on the streets. They definitely were marketed incorrectly and priced way too high on introduction.
One unique aspect of the TC was the ABS system by Teves which used a pressurized sphere and a corresponding hydraulic pump. Some folks have converted the system to a more common system without ABS, I’m not sure why since parts are available and the support by the TC club is very good. By the way, the hardtop is molded plastic rather than fiberglass as most have assumed.
If the system is anything like the Teves used in the 89-92 Thunderbirds, I’m one of those folks. As you said, parts are available, but they’re very pricey, being purely NOS items or seller refurbished, and naturally when you replace one part like the accumulator, then the pump motor fails, replace that and one of the pressure switches fail, fix that and one of the dozen relays fail, replace those…. uhh, you never feel comfortable driving it anymore
and since it’s an integral design and backed right to the corner of the engine compartment it’s not even enjoyable to work on. The conversion to conventional in most cases is less than the parts and labor of keeping the Teves in prime condition, and in many cases today with the cars equipped being so old they’re secondary/fairweather cruisers, not really benefitting from keeping ABS anyway.
It was probably close or identical to the TC system. I remember the TC had a set of relays on the passenger side of the engine compartment which gave some owners trouble. I never had any issues with either car, so that’s why I favor the Teves unit—that and the originality factor.
A genuinely lovely car, and a really pleasant driver, just ridiculously overpriced (and overbadged). My boss had one which I drove a lot and I loved it. Pretty, reliable and comfortable, without the Maserati pretensions, I think it wouldn’t get the laughs it usually does.
I always wanted one of those cars, especially because of the awesome leather interior. Of course it would have to be tan leather, the 5-speed manual and the turbo engine. And, the car you shot, that baby still looks good as it has been well cared for.
CC effect – I saw a TC in this very color just last night. Didn’t get any photos, as it was rather late and quite dark, but maybe it will be in the same spot today (it was at a local specialty repair shop).
First one I’ve seen in quite some time, though I couldn’t say for how long.