Let's Remember A Car: Plymouth Reliant

Not my car, I wasn't cool enough for a 2-door

Lee Iacocca became the CEO of Chrysler in 1979, after a long and successful career at the Ford Motor Company, where he had been influential in the development of the Mustang, the (original) Ford Maverick, and the Lincoln Continental Mark III, all of which fundamentally changed the American car market. Of course, he was also partially responsible for the Mustang II and the Ford Granada, but hey, nobody bats 1.000 outside of t-ball.

Yes, he had a pretty good resume, but somehow I must have missed the part where he worked at Taco Bell.

Iacocca's Lazarus job on Chrysler followed the Taco Bell model, after all: "Here are five ingredients. We'll combine them however you wish, wrap them in something, garnish it with various toppings and/or sauces, and we'll hand it to you. Our menu is big, but don't be fooled: it's all the same stuff." He brought Chrysler back from the brink by producing a full lineup of cars across three distinct brands. That isn't impressive, until you realize that like 80 percent of the cars were somehow derived from the K-cars: the 1981 Dodge Aries and Plymouth Reliant.

I'm not joking. Chrysler had the Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon subcompacts which were brand new for 1978, and a set of moribund triplets, the Dodge Diplomat, Plymouth Gran Fury, and Chrysler Fifth Avenue, which were just evolutions of the Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volare. Of that latter group of 3, the Diplomat and Gran Fury were primarily used as police cars and taxis. Only a handful found their way into private hands. (The Fifth Avenue sold surprisingly well, however.) Literally every other Chrysler car or minivan for the rest of the decade came from the humble K-car -- or just was a K-car, like the car we're remembering today, the Plymouth Reliant. Or maybe the Dodge Aries. They're the same car, differing only in the grille and taillights and (possibly) the dealerships that sold them.

People make fun of Chrysler and Lee Iacocca for building a car company that was like 80% just variations on a single car platform. The basic platform got turned into luxury cars, convertibles, sports cars, mid-sized family cars, upscale subcompacts, minivans, and even a limousine. Yet Ford, General Motors, and AMC were doing it too. The Ford Falcon's basic platform was in production from 1960 to 1980. General Motors kept its X-car platform in production almost as long, from 1980 to 1996. Its W platform lasted even longer, from 1988 to 2016. And the AMC Hornet/Gremlin/Concord/Eagle was so old the original design had holes in the floor for Fred Flintstone's feet.

The Aries and Reliant were boring cars. They were designed to be boring. They were born boring. They lived and died as boring cars. But boring itself is not a problem. Boring and bad, well, that is a problem. The K-cars were boring, and cheap, but they were really, really good at being boring, cheap cars. Chrysler designed them that way and kept them that way. It held prices down over the years. It undercut its competition by grouping the most popular options into packages and selling them at a deep discount, a practice that every other manufacturer would wind up following. In the Go-Go Eighties, the age of the yuppie, Chrysler was still willing to produce basic cars for people who didn't want -- or couldn't afford -- anything more. These days those cars still exist but people outright laugh at them: Nissan Versa, Chevy Spark, Dodge Journey, Kia ... anything, Mitsubishi Mirage, you get the idea. It was tacky to be broke in the 1980s, but now it's a sin. You get the car you deserve.

Most importantly for Chrysler in the 1980s, it fixed problems with the K-cars when it found them. That was a departure from its previous style. Just ask anyone who owned an Aspen or Volare. Some of the people who bought the first K-cars got burned by build quality issues. By the end, the Aries and Reliant were two of the more reliable American cars on the road. And they were the stuff that Chrysler built its renaissance out of. 

Have I ever owned or driven one? Indeed, I have owned one of these, a 1989 Reliant America 4-door sedan. It was basic. I wasn't keen on buying it because it didn't have a right outside mirror or a rear-window defroster, but everything worked, it only had 77,000 miles on it, and it wasn't my money being spent, so I wound up with it.

I never regretted owning it. It caused me very little trouble and it consistently got 26 to 30 MPG on the highway. The seat was comfortable but low and it leaned back too far. It didn't have cruise control, which was a feature I had grown used to on the flashy GM pieces of crap I had been driving, but it was still a great long-distance car, and it never left me stranded. The stereo was good too. It was a basic, cheap, dependable transportation appliance, which wasn't what I wanted when I was 22 years old, but it was what I needed. I have nothing but fond memories of it.