Greg B.
Senior Member
Some of you may remember the magazine Popular Mechanics from years ago. I was a pretty faithful reader when I was a kid and found it interesting - they had articles about cars but also goofy "do-it-yourself" articles ("Build this nuclear reactor in your basement and heat your house for pennies a year!"). One of the automotive things they did was a series of Owners Reports, presumably based on questionnaires they mailed out.
It turns out most of Popular Mechanics is online and you can search these articles. I found several from the 60s and 70s about our C-bodies. There were some common themes. Chrysler had some very loyal buyers back then. They referred to people who had bought 20, 30 or 40 cars from Chrysler over the course of their lives. They also had many fans of the way the cars rode and handled. The unibody cars seemed very strong structurally compared to others of the time. Fit and finish was a constant complaint about Chrysler at the time though, with people complaining about loose trim, wind and water leaks, and generally poor assembly quality. No surprise.
I found a couple of reports for the fuselage cars and was surprised to see some criticisms of the styling both inside and out. People found the interior of the '72 Plymouth stodgy compared to the competition, for example, and a report on the '70 Dodge mentioned that the car didn't really stand out in looks, and that the dash design allowed the instruments to be obscured by the steering wheel and have its lighting reflected in the windshield at night. A report on the '69 Chrysler just slammed it for assembly quality, as did a similar report on the '67 Chrysler. People seemed to love to complain about the size of the glove compartment back them and every one of the reports I read included that.
I don't know how accurate these reports were, though, since I also read one on the Volare/Aspen that was absolutely glowing. Reading it you would have thought it was for a Benz - people loved them in the first year.
It turns out most of Popular Mechanics is online and you can search these articles. I found several from the 60s and 70s about our C-bodies. There were some common themes. Chrysler had some very loyal buyers back then. They referred to people who had bought 20, 30 or 40 cars from Chrysler over the course of their lives. They also had many fans of the way the cars rode and handled. The unibody cars seemed very strong structurally compared to others of the time. Fit and finish was a constant complaint about Chrysler at the time though, with people complaining about loose trim, wind and water leaks, and generally poor assembly quality. No surprise.
I found a couple of reports for the fuselage cars and was surprised to see some criticisms of the styling both inside and out. People found the interior of the '72 Plymouth stodgy compared to the competition, for example, and a report on the '70 Dodge mentioned that the car didn't really stand out in looks, and that the dash design allowed the instruments to be obscured by the steering wheel and have its lighting reflected in the windshield at night. A report on the '69 Chrysler just slammed it for assembly quality, as did a similar report on the '67 Chrysler. People seemed to love to complain about the size of the glove compartment back them and every one of the reports I read included that.
I don't know how accurate these reports were, though, since I also read one on the Volare/Aspen that was absolutely glowing. Reading it you would have thought it was for a Benz - people loved them in the first year.
