It is a rather familiar theme in this series, but once again I found myself needing a set of cheap wheels. This time around money was really tight, but I managed to snag my favorite low-cost beater yet. It even had a partial padded roof for the brougham lovers out there.
The LeBaron didn’t start out with the spiffy flat black paint job; this is how it looked in the seller’s parking spot. The other side was slightly also beat up, but somewhat less so. It had some dents and non-structural rust as well missing all the hubcaps. What it did have in its favor was a very low price tag and an included valid safety inspection. Alberta has safety inspections mandated by one’s insurance company for vehicles 10-13 years old, depending on the company. It’s mostly a way for garages to make a little extra cash and less about safety. In theory you need a reasonable windshield, decent tires, brakes, suspension, and exhaust as well as a working heater, lights and wipers. Most of time you can’t get away with less than a couple hundred dollars even if there is nothing wrong with the car. So having an inspection already done is quite valuable in a cheap car.
For the total all-in cost of $160, I was the proud owner of my first K-car. Let me tell you my wife was absolutely thrilled to see it come home with me. I was actually banished to parking it in our rear parking pad off the back alley.
For a cheap car the interior was not actually too bad. The headliner seemed to be held up (quite effectively) with a Remembrance Day Poppy.
The powered window on passenger side stopped working at some point so the previous owner disabled it, but apparently could not get the rubber weather striping back on and rigged this up instead. Nice solution with the wire, eh? My son tore off the wire the first time he was in the car. I glued the rubber back on but never bothered fixing the window.
I have been told the combination of digital dashboard and center console shifter is a bit rare.
Here is a closer shot of the digital gauges. My apologies for the darkness of the oil pressure/battery gauge between the speedometer and traveler gauges. It did function just fine but does not show well in this photo. What did not function correctly, however, was the gas gauge. I did not know it at the time, but when it read 1/4 that was actually dead empty. As you might suspect, I found this out the hard way on the way to work. Amazingly, it happened right next to a gas station which I managed to coast into. From that point forward when the gauge read 1/2 full I took it as a reminder to fill up.
My LeBaron was equipped with the 2.2L four cylinder engine, a SOHC design with an aluminum head and iron block. Both the intake and exhaust manifolds are on the rear of the engine, which allows the engine bay to look rather uncluttered but makes exhaust access tough. A bore of 87.5 mm (3.44 in) and 92 mm (3.62 in) stroke yielded a 96 horsepower rating when new. The official EPA rating for a 1986 LeBaron 2.2 is 21/24 mpg and mine achieved exactly 21mpg in almost exclusively city driving despite running a bit rich at times.
Several months later I was quite enjoying the little Chrysler. There is some beater charm to having the lowest cost vehicle on the road. The LeBaron even made for a fairly decent winter car, although being banished to the back alley made things challenging at times. I do love how the wind swept snow in the above picture manages to make the LeBaron lines even more straight and boxy.
Just as I was feeling quite smug for snagging a vehicle with lowest cost per mile, disaster struck. For the first time ever, the LeBaron failed to start in the morning. It would crank over but not fire. While it was cold at -20C/-4F, it was not cold enough to cause starting issues. I charged the battery over night, plugged the block heater in for a bit and added a bit of gas to the tank (since the gauge was questionable), but still no go. Then I left the hood open by accident and went to work for a few hours returning to snow in the engine compartment. Certainly not my finest hour. Over the next couple weeks I tried everything I could think with no luck. It finally struck me that I should try a different battery. Success. Oddly enough, the car would happily crank over but would not fire on the old battery.
About a month later, another cold-related minor tragedy struck the LeBaron. My brother in-law went to open the exterior passenger side door handle and it broke in his hand. This is a notorious sore spot for K-cars and this one was no doubt helped along because of the extreme cold at the time (-30C/-22F). Taking off the door card exposed some bungee cords that the previous owner had used to secure the window glass.
The door card itself was apparently a temporary substitution from the factory.
The car had always run rich, so I replaced the oxygen sensor which improved matters significantly. Access was a challenge but was slightly better from underneath.
The LeBaron was proving itself to be a survivor, so I decided it was time give the appearance a make over. On a budget of course. I decided on a flat black paint scheme while retaining the red padded roof. Outdoors during the winter is not the ideal setting to re-paint a car, however.
Here is my middle son (aged six here) adding some paint. He also added a few runs but that was less important than the fun he had.
The paint job came out not too badly for a sub-$50 investment. Of course the further away one stood, the better it looked.
Summer rolled around and the LeBaron was still going. It ran amazingly well, in fact. I had never ventured outside the city limits with it, but there was a car show a couple towns over that I wanted to go to. At only fifty kilometers away, I figured I would chance taking the Chrysler with me. It did make it there just fine but on the return trip, it stalled and died about half way home. I popped the hood and the dip stick came up bone dry. I had checked it before heading out, so obviously the sustained high rpm driving on the highway had either drained or burnt up all the oil.
I called my wife who had little sympathy for me (she told me not to take the LeBaron that morning), but I managed to persuade my sister in-law to meet me. I had just done an oil change on the family minivan so I asked her to bring the waste oil from that along. I suspected the car was done for, but pouring in some used oil seemed a worthy gamble. Amazingly, the car fired right up and drove home with no further issue. I topped it up with some more used oil but kept expecting a catastrophic failure at any moment. Even on the old oil the LeBaron remained my daily (in city only) driver for several more months.
The end of road came for the LeBaron several months later, but not as the expected, dramatic engine failure, but rather, as a result of changing of insurance companies. We swapped over our existing house and automotive insurance which saved us a significant amount but it meant the new company wanted a fresh safety inspection. Unfortunately I did not feel that the LeBaron was worth the extra investment. I took it out for a final drive down a gravel back road then parked it. While it ranks as one of my best bang-for-the-buck buys ever, the LeBaron was not yet done giving, as I traded it straight across for my next project vehicle.
Excellent write up David and your time with the LeBaron also proves one of my automotive axioms. Beater cars, especially Mopars, are the best bang for the buck and the most fun to pilot around.
Come on, David: You fell for the hype!
You can’t beat a year of driving for right around 300 bucks!
That’s what’s called a “20-20” paint job. Looks good at twenty feet, or twenty miles per hour.
“…Alberta has safety inspections mandated by one’s insurance company for vehicles 10-13 years old, depending on the company. It’s mostly a way for garages to make a little extra cash and less about safety. In theory you need a reasonable windshield, decent tires, brakes, suspension, and exhaust as well as a working heater, lights and wipers. Most of time you can’t get away with less than a couple hundred dollars even if there is nothing wrong with the car…”
Albertans are lucky. Pennsylvania inspections have been a cash cow for inspection stations for decades. All cars get inspected. Either they do nothing and charge to much for six minutes’ work, or they find ( or MAKE…it is easy to yank on a wire too hard ) a problem and the browbeat the owner into a BIG and EXPENSIVE repair. Or they take a bribe…a few bucks to issue the inspection sticker anyway and not have to spens hundreds to fix the problem. Pennsylvania is one of those places where a burned-out bulb becomes a “Major wiring harness issue.” As if your proudly pampered car becoming a pile of brown flakes from a diet of road salt were not enough…
A few years back a Subaru Legacy owner was stupid enough to trust one of these Pennsylvania inspection stations to do his smog check. The smog check was done on a two-wheel roller with the other wheels blocked. This clown treated the Subaru like it was a front-drive car and burned up the front/rear clutch as the poor car tried to drive the wheels that had grip.
We in NY laugh at your overly strict safety inspections, but are jealous of y’all because PA uses less salt and more sand. We are also jealous of the fact your emissions testing is not state wide.
Not allowing rust holes bigger than a Quarter in the sheet metal is just stupid, but then the car flunks PA safety inspection and that sometimes means the car can be picked up cheap then registered out of state. I bet a mom and pop repair shop is less of a pain to deal with.
That system stinks. I’ve lived in Arizona, where they have state run emissions testing but no safety inspection. Here in Texas, we have private safety and emissions testing, but many places just do the testing and not the repair, so there is no incentive to make up problems to fix.
Here in Virginia, private garages do the testing AND repair, and it is a scam. Not as bad as Massachusetts, where the roads are horrid and you get flunked for just the tiniest suspension problem.
I hear in MA you will flunk inspection if items that came with your car when new are no longer present. I heard a Saab owner failed inspection because one of the headlight wipers was broken off and while that is not required by law in this country their car flunked inspection.
Only two areas in Arizona have emission testing, Phoenix and Tucson.
I enjoyed the story about the LeBaron Brougham as I also drive what you call a beater. I repainted my 1985 Chrysler Laser 9 years ago with a paint roller and outdoor semi gloss house paint. Still look pretty good today.
Maryland requires a safety inspection when registering a car (done by private garages)… unless you are getting “historic” tags (for a car 20+ years old). So a nearly new car needs an inspection, but an old beater doesn’t.
Except if the car was previously registered in MD and it is given to a member of the immedient family(i.e. father gives car to son who lives at another address and son puts it in his name etc) or if the original owner or the last person to own the car who got it inspected decides he/she is not going to drive it and takes the tags off it and returns them. If they decide in 5 years to retag the car and start driving then they also don’t have to get an inspection for it to get tags due to the fact that it was inspected and tagged when the owner originally registered the car.
Also unlike a lot of states, Maryland has a great deal of oversight regarding the shops that can inspect cars. In Maryland all shops authorized to do the MSI(Maryland Inspection) can only do them of a licensed MSI tech is doing the inspection. If the shop does not have a licensed MSI tech on duty or employed in the shop then they are not allowed to do inspections. Plus the shops and inspectors are visited by a MD state Trooper who is assigned to various shops in a given area and who goes over the lists of cars inspected since the previous time and looks at all inspection equipment to make sure it is good to go. A person that has reason to believe that the inspector or shop is trying to get money out of unneeded repairs can contact that trooper.
After that inspection, the car never has to go through another until the car is sold to another person. Now we also have a emissions inspection called VIEP that is every 2 years for regularly tagged autos(i.e. no cars with Historic/Street Rod tags) I think the idea of the emissions test is sound but the way it is run is a crock of crap.
Nice looking car. I’m generally not a fan of Chrysler K Cars, but the LeBaron was a handsome looking car.
“Both the intake and exhaust manifolds are on the rear of the engine, which allows the engine bay to look rather uncluttered but makes exhaust access tough”
The same could be said about the starter which is buried under the manifolds.
I hard forgotten that all the early K Cars with floor shifters proudly displayed that they were front wheel drive in the place where a column shifter PRNDL indicator would have been.
I didn’t realise the engine wasn’t a crossflow (I’ve only ever read about them), but that is definitely a surprise for a brand-new for the 1980s engine!
Fun article David. Nice to see your resourcefulness extending this K-car’s life.
I’d be interested to see how many parts could be traded between an ’81 Reliant/Aries and a ’94 Sundance/Shadow. Chrysler certainly mined this platform.
My dad picked up one of these (’87 Lebaron) back in the mid 90’s for something like 400 bucks since he only worked a mere 2 miles from home and was an amazing cheapskate. It was the ugliest car I’d ever seen but ran like a champ with cold ac! It never died, and he sold it to get my brother a better car for high school. This along with our brief ownership of an ’89 Sundance (paid $200) remain my only K car experiences. Aside from being the automotive girl repellent that they were, they were good cars and actually pretty fun to drive. Also agreed that you can’t beat the feeling of owning and drivng a vehicle that cost about the same as a single new car payment, something I’m currently living out with my ’93 Ranger that cost me $800 15k trouble-free miles ago.
One of these – an ’87 in silver, with a grey interior – was my first car. My parents bought it used for my older brother, who drove it for several years, and then when I got my license it became mine in a complicated transaction where my brother got their old Plymouth Voyager minivan (he ran a DJ business on the side and needed to lug equipment) and I got the LeBaron and a promise of money towards a better car in the future.
I had it for 4 years, added a subwoofer, GTS blackouts, and fog lights during the time. It did need a transmission rebuild and a timing belt during that time, but it survived 8 years of driving by teenagers, including a bunch of trips from Maryland to NJ while I was in college.
Good write up on the joys of Beater-nomics.
These and its siblings had been favorite imported used U.S. cars among hungarian drivers in the early ’90’s… 4 cylinders, automatic transmission, a/c and american style interior and exterior – for low cost! Thanks for posting.
There is nothing more satisfying to drive in traffic than the most clapped out beater on the road with clearly visible prior collision damage. You will ALWAYS get the right of way as long as you keep on slightly nudging forward either at a light, stop sign or when potentially merging into a different lane. It is by far the fastest and most exhilarating way to get from one side of a congested city to the other side. Bonus points if the license plates are either hanging off lopsided with one screw and/or partially covered in mud/heavily bent or propped on the parcel shelf.
But yes, the wife will generally frown upon said traffic superstar when it comes time to park it at home when it really deserves to be feted right up front with a separate spot light highlighting all of its glory mounted on the gable above the garage.
+ 100
+1 My £300 14 year old Ford Sierra was always given a wide berth and I could go for a night on the town (after I parked it) safe in the knowledge it would still be there next day.
I got £200 for repairs when it was hit by a moron driver knocking the front bumper off,£100 for 2 years driving show me a hire car firm that’ll match that!
My $450 93 Subaru went that way a truck backed into it and munted the l/f guard and bonnet his insurance paid $560 I hammered out the dents for free and later sold the car for $500, 10 months driving for basicly gas only and out of the proceeds I bought a $300 Toyota Corona diesel wagon in going order, I love beaters,Ive driven them for decades always the cheapest heap I could find and some mechanical knowledge and off you go occasionally right around Australia, but over there Chrysler products were always the cheapest and best Aussies shun Valiants, call the Wog wagons and similar only ethnic immigrants bought them new who cares they run forever and are easily repaired on the cheap.
Yes, the guy with the biggest, least valuable car always wins. This is why I so enjoy driving the 93 Crown vic when the kids aren’t using it.
There was a time when I had a BMW 5 series and a 66 Buick LeSabre. Driving the BMW was an exercise in frustration as the drivers in front of me would see me coming up behind and close ranks to prevent me from getting by. The Buick had different color fenders and hood, the front bumper was bent and driving it I felt like I was parting the Red Sea. It was so much fun to weave trough traffic with such ease.
I agree. I think of it as the two rules of the road: The rule of tonnage and the rule of paintjobs. If you have the biggest vehicle with the worst paintjob, you always have the right of way.
That’s one thing I miss about my old GMC van. I replaced all the rotted out doors but never got around to repainting them. Plus I had had to do some rust repair and repainted the repaired panels from a rattle can that wasn’t an exact match for the original paint. The body was four shades of blue, plus maroon and grey.
There are joys in a low cost car. I don’t have to deal with inspections, thankfully. But we are a high tax state related to the value if the car. When my 2002 Durango turned 10, the annual bill dropped to about $60.00. That is an absolute treat compared to my 2012 F-150 which was over $400.00 this year.
Late last year, we replaced a 1999 Jeep Cherokee with a 2014 Ford Escape (both stripper-level base models). Our car excise tax bill went from $48 in 2013 to $511 in 2014. I’d hate to see what the bill would be for a new luxury model. The bill does drop off pretty quickly as a new car ages, though.
This is in Massachusetts.
Nice article and what about cars that are over 13 years old?
I had known someone who had briefly owned an old ’85 Chrysler LeBaron sedan during the late ’90’s. It was perhaps around 1998 and by then it looked every bit like an old car with its less shiny silver paint. The Chrysler hood ornament was missing (probably broken off by vandals). Everything rattled whenever we went over a bump in the road. I just thought that it was remarkable for an ’85 to have a digital dash. The car had eventually been totalled in an accident.
Awesome choice!
Speaking of Pseudo-Luxury Crap, this K-Car version of the Chrysler Le Baron would have competed with the similar sized J-Car Cadillac Cimarron directly since both were FWD Sedans.
Yes, but the LeBaron made fewer reservations about being the Standard of the World, and so had fewer expectations of which it would inevitably fall short.
So is “The Top Hat” a bar, a magic shop, or a gentlemen’s club?
Yes.
I’m guessing it’s Alberta’s version of the “Bada Bing”…
It is a strip joint. I thought the slightly seedy vibe fit the car nicely.
A friend in high school painted his Jeep Dispatcher with rattle cans. An off brand went on sale for 50 cents a can and he loaded up the shopping cart with Harvest Gold. It was the 70s. Not great, but it looked better than the rust stained Postal Blue.
Love the paint job Best Bogan Blak, hides a multitude of sins.
From 1982-83 Dodge also sold this as the 400, in the coupe, convertible and sedan forms, but no wagon (the Aries SE woodgrain model was the closest Dodge equivalent of the 1982-88 LeBaron Town & Country).
In 1983, the stretched E-body 600 sedan was introduced (Chrysler had these as the E-Class and the New Yorker, the latter with a Brougham-style landau top and which somehow outsold the E-Class). The next year, the 400 sedan was dropped and the 600 name was transferred to the coupe and convertible equivalents, both of which were retired after the 1986 model year.
In 1985, the Canadian-market Plymouth Caravelle was also sold in the U.S., to replace the Chrysler E-Class sedan, but the Caravelle coupe didn’t make it here.
Keeping track of Chrysler’s model lineups from year to year in this era is no easy task. Even more so if you throw Canada into the mix.
How come the cars that cost the least amount of money seem to last the longest? That’s been my experience more often than not, anyway – and this one is reminiscent of so many that I’ve owned, including the current $200 beater in my driveway, which I have no doubt will last way longer than I even want it to.
I also have to confess that I have a sick fetish for the little limousine K-cars. Every other attempt to transpose “Brougham” onto a tiny FWD format came off as disgusting, but these? Adorable! They’re trying so hard to be stuffy 70s barges and it’s impossible to take them too seriously. Replacing the New Yorkers and LeBarons of old was a bridge way too far for the humble K-platform, but the results are at least amusing. Black spraypaint is perfect because it fully subverts all those tired Brougham cliches!
And all things considered, they really were pretty good cars. The interior is much nicer than it has any right to be, they were comfortable and roomy for their size without being completely awful to drive, and they were fairly resilient little turds.
One of my strangest automotive fantasies has long been getting a New Yorker or K-LeBaron/T&C Wagon Turbo and doing a junkyard 5-speed/suspension upgrade. All of the K-derivatives are so similar that you can mix-n-match pretty much everything between them, which makes them both great beaters and science projects alike.
When I was a kid, my aunt Nancy had the sedan version of a LeBaron (a 1986-ish GTS, related to the Dodge Lancer) from the early-90s to the early-2000s. It was slowly starting to show its age towards the time she got rid of it and upgraded to a Stratus but I still liked it. It apparently had the 2.2 turbo engine as I recall the car had the Turbo badging on its sides. The maroon leather seating mimicked the styling you’d expect from a Mercedes and was nice even 15-20 years later. Fords and Chevies of that era–or even newer than the Lebaron–looked woefully outdated. It had the electronic dash which was futuristic too. I don’t think my aunt’s car had the “Front-Wheel Drive” label (a “reminder” label, as I call it) but I have seen it on several different models under the Pentastar brands.
Chrysler, in my opinion, generally is great with its timeless, classy designs. To me, the K-car variant LeBaron lineup could easily have extended into the ’90s with a few updates. As a young kid who grew up in the ’90s, it was the only ’80s car (and its ilk such as the New Yorker) that appealed to me. Every time I see a K-car LeBaron or New Yorker in good condition pass me by, I smile.
Another perfect example of Chrysler’s fine art are first-gen LH cars, the ’94 Ram, the Grand Cherokee and the cab-forward NS minivans. They all are about 20 years old now but to me still look fresh (that is, if they are maintained well), whereas all the other manufacturers struggle to pull that off.
If I had this LeBaron, I’d recondition it to factory-like condition and keep it around as a classic to complement its younger cousin that I have, a 2011 Chrysler 200. It shouldn’t be too expensive to do but I have to admit that only Mopar diehards like me would make that suggestion. It’s served its time this long as a embattled daily driver at this point and they’re getting increasingly rare. I plan on doing this with a first-gen Concorde in the next few years.
This was one too far gone restore. There would much more worthy candidates out there.
Big time score for $160.00.
I can’t think of this vintage LeBaron without thinking of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.