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…