“The best looking Italian to show up in this country since my mother came over,” is how Mr. Iacocca describes the infamous TC by Maserati in this December 1985 interview with Car and Driver. If my feelings regarding the company’s famed CEO were equivocal before coming across this scoop, they are now most definitely skewed in a negative direction. Leaving the actual appearance of the Chrysler TC aside for a moment, that statement also took into account various other cars like the Ferrari 400GT, the Alfa Giulia Sprint and the 1959-60 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham, to name but a few of the large number of Italian-built cars sold in the US. There’s got to be an Italian word for chutzpah.
I will admit, it’s not a bad looking machine, especially for pre-Taurus Detroit, but certainly nothing to necessarily write home about. There were attractive, equally modern looking designs in GM’s F-body and the Corvette and at any rate, styling was the least of this car’s problems. Mr. Don Sherman’s coverage of the car’s genesis isn’t nearly critical enough to really drive the point home, even though there are shades of the misguided thinking which brought it into being.
Obviously, a magazine can only be so critical, but Car and Driver’s coverage of the ’86 Seville and Eldorado was much less favorable (that review can be read here). Still, if you read between the lines, it’s not difficult to foretell failure. For starters, Mr. Sherman mentions Iacocca’s earlier collaboration with De Tomaso while at Ford, invoking the sort of irresponsibility which got him kicked out of Dearborn. The exaggerated language further used to describe his relationship with various other parties within the corporation is also vaguely satirical, but still errs on the cautious side.
One wonders if any such restraint was necessary; Chrysler wasn’t going to give the editors at C&D anything worth covering in detail for the next six years (unless one considers the debut of the new 3.3 V6 worthy of a dedicated feature). They already knew this was, despite its assembly in an Italian-government managed factory (wrested from De Tomaso’s inept hands), K-car through and through–just for perspective, imagine if the imported Allante were based on the X-car. Such was the extent of the madness afoot in the creation of the TC.
But the best part? Mr. Sherman raves about Iacocca’s ability to get cars into production in record time, “without waiting for the next shipment of robots from Japan.” When this article went to press, production was expected to begin in 1987; the TC didn’t hit dealers until late 1989. And with no new platforms introduced by then, you have to wonder what the engineers under Iacocca’s command were busy doing in the meantime. History proves them to be a talented bunch, but this bizarre Italian collaboration embodies the degree to which their talents were squandered as the ’80s wore on. As creative as it can be, mental illness is rarely productive.
Related reading:
Curbside Classic: 1989 Chrysler’s TC By Maserati – The Deadly Sin Of Pretentious Overreach
No matter how ya dress it up…it’s still a K car.
And we would not deny it!
I once heard those seats described as “what one’s grandparents look like naked”. Not my own words, but I think it fits the bill. The leather was so loosely gathered that even when new, those seats looked like those in a 100,000 mile car.
Nothing in here but a couple of elephant skin rugs…
I like the look of these seats, I wish morecars had leather like this….would suck when everything gets stuck in the crevices…..also cleaning and conditioning would be annoying as it would be tough to evenly cover everything
To each their own. I feel they are the most comfortable seats I have ever sat in. Drive one of these cars for a few days you’ll get what I mean.
Richard Porter wrote (or at least put) that quote in his book “Crap Cars”.
Just about any redeeming qualities of the 1989 TC could be found in the much cheaper LeBaron GTC convertible. In 1987. And so, Mopar entered another of its many facepalm eras.
Very true! And the LeBaron was a better car anyway.
Why was the LeBaron better? I always thought of the TC as being a top-of-the-line LeBaron (as opposed to any sort of Maserati).
What made the LeBaron better? Just its price?
And with over 275,000 miles on my 89 TC, I would dispute that any day. There is no comparison in both quality of construction and ride quality, to mention only two.
My daughter’s high school (and then early college) car was an ’89 white LeBaron GTC with a white top and grey interior. It had a very high end stereo, trip computer, tempmatic AC and so on. The interior had a full headliner, VW style, and a glass back window.
She called it ‘Snowball’. It was a good car, and as the parent of a teenager, I can only imagine the fun they had. My son and I put on a new top and back window, refreshing the look of the car. I can say that car never looked old.
But, it was a K-Car, and it seemed to have a lot of electrical problems. It had the turbo II engine, and it loved head gaskets.
Her sophomore year of college she was driving a lot for school, and Snowball was traded on a low mileage green and gold Cirrus LXi with a sunroof and a Mitsi V6. She got married, and my son-in-law drove it 65 miles every workday.
They sold it with just under 200k miles, and it didn’t owe them anything.
I have a friend that has two of these TC’s, and they bring back fond memories of the past, and their cousin Snowball. Good times.
I would have bought this car just for the porthole opera windows, but then, I’m just an irresponsible person.
And if you kept it for decades it would have a high “WTF” factor now.
True, too true.
Wouldn’t you know it many decades later that both Chrysler and Maserati now are owned and part of Fiat much like Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Ferrari. Will Suzuki or Mitsubishi be next?
I wondered the same thing about Suzuki or Mitsubishi.
However there was recent rumors who was denied of bigger merger of Fiat-Chrysler with VW or Peugeot-Citroen and the future commercial van then Fiat plan for 2016-2017 will be made in a joint-venture with Renault https://www.allpar.com/forums/index.php?threads/renault-to-build-vans-for-fiat.156227/ might bring some new rumors….
Peugeot-Citroen Group would not be a factor here since they are already supposedly have an existing partnership with GM and the big Chinese Automobile Manufacturer Dong Feng. Say it aint so but upon reading the article link which you have provided us with and reading that link hopefully this will not come through. Volkswagen and Suzuki already had an acrimonious relationship from the start that both threatened to sue each other and go out of their separate ways. Could a partnership between Fiat and Volkswagen work? Knowing how much Volkswagen would want to dominate Suzuki, it may be another potential ugly divorce should Volkswagen and Fiat merge. Even though in the same context that Daimler (parent company of Mercedes Benz) also did not have a great partnership with its former longtime partner Chrysler along with Mitsubishi, Hyundai and Kia so it was a bitter breakup between themselves as well, now Daimler/Mercedes Benz has a much closer cooperative relationship with the Renault-Nissan Group.
Sorry not special enough looking.Too much like a LeBaron,which was a pleasant enough looker to justify buying one.What a let down when I eventually read about it,I was expecting a sleek Italian body with a big block Mopar V8 .Now that would have been a great car
Indeed! They got it backwards.
This Monteverdi came with a 440 Hemi.
+1 what an epic car.
+2 anyone remember seeing Gerald Harper drive one in Hadleigh?
Wow, that’s a nice ride! From this angle it makes me think of the Iso Grifo…or am I out of my mind?
ISO Grifo. Another total beauty. Mike’s 375 is far more straight edged, but both cars suffered ignominious restyling to the front clip over their lifetimes.
Neat car but 440 “hemi”?
Oops! My bad for careless Googling. Today there is a 440 Hemi, here’s a Mopar Muscle article.
Like the article says “It’s a statement made by non-Mopar wannabes for as long as many of us can remember: “Yeah, that’s a 440 Hemi, my dad had one of those.”
Thanks for the kind correction.
The 440 was not a Hemi. It was an RB engine. It was, however, a less expensive alternative to the 426 Hemi that produced plenty of power in its own right.
Wow, what a time warp, I remember receiving this issue in the mail, it was probably like the 2nd or 3rd C&D I had ever received from my then new subscription. I forgot that they previewed this car so early, this article is from 1985 and this sucker didn’t hit dealers until 1989. Wow.
I was, hell who am I kidding, still am a big sucker for wrinkly, soft baggy leather seats like that, the exterior of this car isn’t that bad looking, but the interior full of generic cheap Chrysler parts bin stuff is what really kills it.
I remember a friend of my fathers picking up a red V6 last of the TC’s for a super deal when production ended, it was sort of a mid life crisis car. I remember my old man asking me “is that a real Maserati?”, to which I replied, “no….not really”.
Agreed about those seats. I’ve never sat in them, but they look almost good enough to be in a Fleetwood Talisman. (I always wondered why they never came in a leather version….. Cadillac’s paisley patterns were wonderfully trippy, but I don’t think those were in Talismans, either…? I would love to have a Fleetwood with the more-subtle blue-and silver paisley.)
Monticello….that was the name of the crazy paisley patterned Cadillac upholstery, there are mysteries surrounding the availability of leather on Talismans, some say that it was, some say that it wasn’t I have never seen one in person.
I imagine it would be super difficult to replicate the velour pattern of the talisman in leather
I can only recall actually seeing a TC in the metal once — in a parking lot in Beverly Hills some years ago — and it is really quite a handsome car. The portholes in the hardtop are OTT, but the rest of the car has a nice shape. It still looks a lot like the LeBaron, although not quite as much as does in photos. That of course doesn’t excuse the ridiculous price or the fact that it came out after the very similar-looking and far cheaper LeBaron, which in places like California were all over the place until at least the millennium. (If you wanted an affordable convertible that could seat four adults, it was one of your very few choices at that point.)
I wanted to like this car so much, but it has to be a Chrysler Deadly Sin. Plus the the dashboard- it looks like something out of a British kit car.
+1 It’s ridiculous how crappy this dash is. I don’t know if the LeBaron’s was really any nicer, but it was certainly less stupid looking. Bulbous, swollen dashboards with deep recesses were really popular in Detroit for awhile. Chrysler only flirted, but GM was way into them in the 90s.
I remember when the Chrysler TC first premiered. I had mixed feelings about the car. At the time I liked its styling. On the one hand it looked like an Italian car, like a Maserati. I found it more attractive than the Cadillac Allante. But it also looked like a Chrysler LeBaron, a cheaper (and not necessarily in a good way) quality version of the Maserati.
I actually saw one of these in traffic today.
You see everything in traffic!
When I sold cars, I sold a new GMC Jimmy to a guy that had one of these, he tried to trade it in, but he thought it was worth way way more than it really was because it was a “collectible”, this was around 1996-97 or so, the crazy thing is, that one of his other cars was a Sterling 825SL, one of the really rare hatchback ones, I guess a Scorpio wasn’t unusual enough, though if he would have owned a Merkur, the Sterling and the TC, he could have had the oddball car hat trick.
I read the accompanying article on these and it seems that the TC gets a lot of undeserved hate. Yes it was grossly overpriced, and that pale yellow is a total eyesore….but the car itself taken at face value isn’t ‘bad’ at all. The porthole is a bit wonky, for sure. But the guy in the other article who owns 11 of them has one posted in all black….sure does look nice like that.
The ‘deadly sin’ here is the 3 year long game of grabassery while Lido and his buddy at Maserati delayed the release of the car. I never knew that when these cars were out, but they weren’t on my radar. To me it was just a fancied up Le Baron, which is actually a well made car. I liked the GTC coupes a lot for what they were, but the K variant that had (and still has) my attention has always been the Daytona Turbo Z.
Well, you just explained it. It’s not the car itself which is bad, but given its price, its inefficient means of being produced and the way it was passed off as having some sort of pedigree, it says a lot about how Chrysler was being run under Iacocca. I’d like to see what they could’ve cooked up if they’d not wasted so much on corporate acquisitions and K-car redos. Maybe a Taurus-fighter? Maybe a good Omni successor? Who knows? Chrysler engineers have always done well, given the opportunity.
A lot of management attention was busy digesting and integrating AMC-Jeep that they bought from Renault in 1987.
This is one more example of a car that made no sense when it was new, but on the second-hand market, it makes a bit more sense. It’s relatively rare, somewhat exotic, and parts and service wouldn’t be much of a problem because it’s basically a K-car. As long as you don’t have to pay Maserati money for it, one of these might be fun to cruise around in.
I think it has that expensive ABS system that mechanics don’t know how to fix
“Hello America, I’m Lee Iaccocca and I’m here to tell you that Chrysler’s TC by Maserati is like a bowl of my sainted mother’s best pastafahzjoool – authentic old world Italian flavor prepared right here in the USA. So come over for supper sometime at your local Chrysler-Plymouth dealer, tell em Ma sent ya!”
Man, we’ve talked about how badly Chrysler fumbled the TC/LeBaron on here before, but seeing the (basically) finished product in a magazine article from 1985 really drives home the madness of keeping this car on the shelf for so long. The car that finally debuted in 1989 was hardly any different from this!
Aside from the porthole, I actually think they’re really good looking – even slightly better than the J-LeBaron. The handful that were built with the 16-valve turbo engine were at least somewhat special, but even with that, it’s a real WTF headscratcher. And that engine didn’t really make much sense either, as Chrysler came out with another, completely different, 16V engine around the same time that was more powerful and could be had in a lowly Dodge Spirit!
I’d say they should have just scaled back the TC as the top-level LeBaron, took Maserati’s name off of it and released them simultaneously, but that would’ve been really half-assed as well. Even if they’d fixed the crummy dashboard/trim, given it a less silly hardtop and brought the price down somewhat, the regular LeBaron coupe/convertible was always going to make them look like a rip-off. This was never going to be a convincing $30k ($64k in 2014 dollars!) car. It should have never existed.
I don’t believe in street racing, but if one of these ever pulls up next to the Allante, it’s on.
That would be interesting, depending on what each one is equipped with, a 4.1 or 4.5 Allante vs the 200hp Maserati head turbo with a manual could be pretty even match.
+1 on the 2.2 turbo. Never discount a turbo Mopar….if you were to race that version of the TC, you better pack a lunch.
Interesting that nobody mentioned that there was a manual version of this car with a Maserati-assembled engine which was decidedly not K-car related. The parts were from various suppliers including a Cosworth head, Mahle pistons, Crane cam and more but assembled by Maserati.
I’d think these are relatively even more rare and probably a nightmare to fix nowadays if something went wrong internally but certainly an interesting variant.
Just checked Wikipedia, only 501 built with the 16V turbo (Maserati) engine. AFAIK it was still the same basic Chrysler 2.2l block, but very different beyond that.
IMO, that would be the only one worth having, even with all the headaches. The regular turbo or Mitsu V6 (both only available with automatic) bring my interest level down to zero.
Check out my TCs at ALLPAR http://www.allpar.com/model/tc.html
I didn’t find these to be bad-looking cars for their time, but aside from its price and visual similarity to the soon-to-be-introduced LeBaron, another thing that hurt it was that probably 90% of then were ordered in that putrid vanilla yellow. In black and other colors, this car was a lot more attractive.
The bodies for these were also made in Italy, like the Allante no?
That interior ..lol yuk….camel shit
I don’t think we are giving enough credit to the styling of this car in 1985. We have seen so many LeBarons that we see this and go “meh”. But in 1985, this was a beautiful car that predicted the smooth shapes that we would take for granted by the mid 1990s.
Hey, if they sold it in ’85, sure.
Yes, that was a problem, wasn’t it.
I thought these were a joke when they were new. Now I oddly dig them, would be happy to own one. But this is a man who likes the Versialles. Somehow I think the hipsters will avoid these.
Carmine, I think the they made in Italy, not by Maserati tho. The Wiki says Torino for stamping, Sparone for assembly, Milan for final finishing. Explains the crazy $33 k first year price.
I won’t fault Iacocca for hyperbole in promoting a new car. He is at heart a salesman, after all.
Speaking of the Lebaron convertible, 2014 is the final year for the 200 convertible. This ends the line of affordable 4 passenger Chrysler droptops that they have been producing since 1982. Too bad!
25 years later, Chrysler by Lancia.
In a previous CC of this car, someone explained why it took so long to get the TC built. Apparently, it was De Tomaso’s doing, with all of the Daytona chassis upon which the TC was to be built having been shipped to Italy in a timely manner, but then laying around for months due to Maserati production delays. Essentially, De Tomaso had Iacocca by the short and curlies since there wasn’t exactly a lot Lido could do in that situation; it would have cost a bundle to ship all those, now aged, bare Daytona chassis back to the US without a car on top of them.
It’s just another of those ‘what if’ scenarios in that the TC would surely have sold better if it had been brought to market before the very similar (and a whole lot cheaper) second generation Lebaron convertible. But with De Tomaso’s fumbling, about all Iacocca could do was just bite the bullet and live with the forestalled results.
It might even be said that the pricey TC debacle hastened Iacocca’s retirement from Chrysler. It certainly didn’t help him any, that’s for sure. Ironically, the TC seemed to be eerily like one of Iacocca’s first big luxury car missteps at Chrysler: the last RWD Imperial. Iacocca got away with that one by begging off that it was “too far along for me to stop it”. He certainly couldn’t make the same claim with the TC. At least the big Imperial, as bad as it was, got into showrooms when it was supposed to.
Automotive is a “no risks, no rewards” kind of business and the greats all have a TC (or two) under their belt. The line about it being the best looking Italian to come to America since his mom was a masterful way of using humor to defuse a sensitive situation, like Reagan did in that debate with Mondale.
I’d love to have a few drinks with Iacocca.
Imagine if Chrysler had designed unique RWD chassis for this car. Keep the same engine, turned the right way (north/south) using the Dakota belhousing to mate it to an appropriate 5 speed. Leave the looks alone from the windshield back. Stretch the front clip six inches; move the front axle forward a foot, relative to the doors.
Then this car would have been what Chrysler tried to pretend it was.
The TC was supposed to be a cheap to build halo car for the Chrysler showrooms—at least that was probably in Iacocca’s mind. It was priced too high and should have had a 5 spd available with the base turbo 2.2 as well as the 4 spd auto rather than the 3 spd auto only. But, that did not happen and the cars were dumped onto selected Chrysler-Plymouth dealer lots and sold with huge rebates. They still look good (IMHO) and provide an interesting look into the workings of an American car company and the influence of a single man.
Disclaimer—I own a Lebaron and a TC—they are both unique and interesting K cars.
“There’s got to be an Italian word for chutzpah.”
Braggadocio?