Lee Iaccoca gets blame – or credit – for the 1981-1989 Dodge Aires and Plymouth Reliant K-cars, but unlike the minivan, this one’s really not his fault.
He simply took the ball and ran with it.
Though Iaccoca touted the virtue of K-cars aggressively once on board as Chrysler’s newly installed chairman (after having been fired by Henry Ford II), the K-car had been in development since the late 1970s. Management realized that battling the surge of high-quality Japanese imports with vinyl-roofed Volarés and Cordobas decked out in “rich, Corinthian” leather probably wasn’t cutting the mustard. These weren’t bad cars, actually. Just the wrong cars for the times.
They were automotive Aurochs, beasts engineered for very different times.
The change in scenery that took place between 1970 and 1981 – the year of the K-car’s launch – was dramatic. And not just at Chrysler. The entire American car industry did a parking brake 180 – converting pretty much its entire inventory from heavy-rollers with V8s and rear-wheel-drive to much smaller – and much smaller-engined – front-wheel-drive cars, both to meet changing buyer wants . . . and new government demands.
Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards were as much responsible for the transitioning of the industry as market forces. In 1975, the government issued a fatwa decreeing that every car company’s entire fleet of vehicles must average a certain mandatory minimum miles-per-gallon. It was the first time that the government intervened between car buyers and the gas pump.
Failure to make the CAFE cut meant “gas guzzler” fines for the offending car/company. These of course were passed on to buyers, making it increasingly harder to sell big – and bigger engined – cars.
The CAFE standard was initially set at 18 MPG for passenger cars but was on schedule to rise to an impossible 22 MPG by 1981 – and then again to an even more impossible 27 MPG by 1984.
Well, impossible for big cars with big V8s.
Radical change was the prescription. Downsized by more than half – and not just under the hood – the 1981 Aries K-car was a tiny car. And a light car. Just 178.6 inches long overall and weighing in at 2,300 lbs., the 1981 Aries K was nearly three feet shorter than a 1970 Charger – and weighed about 1,500 pounds less.
And under the hood?
A “Hemi” badge on a Chrysler product no longer meant a 426 cubic inch, 425 hp V8 – as it would have, back in 1970. In 1981, it meant a Mitsubishi-sourced “Silent Shaft” 2.6-liter four cylinders with a two-barrel carburetor – and 92 horsepower.
This was the ’81 K-car’s highest performing engine.
Chrysler’s own engine – the 84-horsepower 2.2-liter “Trans-Four” – the
“trans” not meant in a Bruce Jenner way, but as a reference to the engine’s transverse, or mounted sideways-in-the-engine-bay position – was the K-car’s standard engine. It would entertain its owners with an erratic, surging idle caused by the problem-prone computerized spark-control unit that resulted in the engine’s timing jumping by 2 to 5 degrees – as if the lock-down bolt on the distributor shaft were loose except it wasn’t.
When Chrysler switched to a slightly less crude Throttle Body Fuel Injection (TBI) system in the mid-1980s, it created another form of in-car amusement. As one contemporary reviewer wrote: “Chrysler’s TBI motors had a rather steep throttle tip-in, meaning if you tapped the rather stiff gas pedal, you got a lot of revs. Starting an automatic K-Car without jerking your passenger’s neck required a bit of practice; with the five-speed’s clunky shifter and abrupt clutch, driving smoothly was nearly an art form.”
Luckily, not much harm could come from a car that didn’t go very fast.
Zero to 60 times varied from a low of 18.1 seconds to as speedy as 10.6 seconds
There was no pistol grip shifter. No Air Grabber hood scoop option.
