Indie Auto reader RI stopped by to respond to our story, “Four ways Lee Iacocca contributed to the decline of Ford and Chrysler.”
You suggest above that Chrysler wasted money on the 1980 Cordoba/Mirada, when they should have just put it on the Volare/Aspen platform.
But they DID, it’s on the coupe’s same 112.7 inch wheelbase and shares much in common with all F-bodies (and M-bodies).
They didn’t spend much to develop those, the full size R-body cars in 1979 probably cost a lot more. And even though I personally like them, after the first year, they were a flop.
Iacocca hated them, he even turned down a New Yorker company car when he got there. He said it was the entirely wrong size of car from what the company should be producing.
Of course, when gas prices dropped in the mid 80s they could’ve used an entrant in that segment, but they were gone by 1982.
Crown Vic went on for decades though.
— RI
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Here’s what I wrote: “Although the personal coupe was downsized somewhat, it would have made more sense to place it on a modestly changed Volare/Aspen body or even the subcompact K-car platform. To make matters worse, Iacocca brought back the Imperial as a high-priced sibling to the Cordoba.”
The first-generation Cordoba was a decent financial risk because it was essentially a reskinned Fury/Coronet coupe. It shared major body parts such as the windshield. In contrast, the second-generation Cordoba had a unique body (even though it shared the underlying platform). That meant it had much weaker economies of scale — which proved to be doubly important because Cordoba sales collapsed.
If the Cordoba had instead been a lightly reskinned Volare/Aspen it might have survived longer.
The Cordoba/Mirada design was virtually complete prior to the arrival of Iacocca. He had nothing to do with any of its development planning. That the Cordoba, especially, was a rendition of the Mark V can be directly attributed to Hal Sperlich’s direction.
During the development time of the Cordoba/Mirada the personal luxury car was still a hot market. The Monte Carlo and Grand Prix, even in downsized 1978 versions, retained good sales. The Cordoba/Mirada were far better designs than the downsized Thunderbird. I do not think of the Cordoba and Mirada as bad cars more as victims of unfavorable marketplace circumstances and a corporation that was making a major pivot focusing to all new K car based future.
One can argue that the idea of the smaller platform personal luxury was being adequately covered by the existing Dodge Diplomat and Chrysler LeBaron.
The 1979 R bodies were a turd even while still in the clay. The studio designers knew it. They had made far better proposals but each time management made the wrong choice. The future of design was the sheer look by GM which were killing it in the marketplace. The R body was old style and it was still more than a year away from introduction. Wrong car that would turn out to be introduced on the start of the oil crisis with questions already swirling on Chrysler’s survivability.
Chrysler had big failings during this time period. Sales were falling. Questions on the financial health of the corporation were losing them buyers. The Omni/Horizon were in late-stage development with the coupe versions well along (summer 1977). There was no K car clay.
Iacocca reportedly became president and COO of Chrysler on Nov. 2, 1978. He arguably had enough time to pull the plug on the 1981 Imperial and perhaps even ditch the new Cordoba body in favor of rebranding the LeBaron coupe, which would get sheetmetal updates in 1980. With the Cordoba’s downsizing their markets overlapped too much anyway.
By November the Cordoba and Mirada were effectively finished in the Design studio. Can’t say to what extent tooling was done but expect it too to be well advanced.
The Imperial on the other hand was an Iacocca decision, as I rember the story. That was a losing clay proposal for the Cordoba that was left off to the side in the studio gathering dust. The hunchback theme was a response to the first generation Seville proposal but well known that Mitchell had really wanted that then and likely was to be a future theme. The Seville did it best, the Imperial did it pretty well and Ford’s iteration was the worst.
I would argue that there was no to very little overlap of the Cordoba and LeBaron. Part of what made the personal coupes distinctive was that they did not have to accomodate a 4 door iteration.
If Chrysler had been in a relatively healthy financial position it might have made some sense to go forward with the Cordoba redesign. However, the company was in such bad shape that unplugging — or at least delaying for a year or so — the Cordoba redesign could have made sense even if it meant writing off some already sunk costs.
I don’t find it convincing that the Cordoba and LeBaron had “very little overlap.” Their pricing was quite similar and they shared the same platform. In 1980 even Ford downgraded the once fabulously profitable Mark series to a trim level of the full-sized Lincoln.
The irony is that a few years later Chrysler found itself struggling in the affordable personal luxury car field again, but this time for the opposite reason.
In an era of cheaper gas, lower interest rates and a better economy the 1987-95 LeBaron brought a knife to the gunfight with the Fox/MN12 Thunderbird and Cougar. Despite offering the convertible version that the Ford products didn’t, the J-Body LeBaron was outsold by both the Thunderbird and the Cougar in every year of its existence; in collective terms the 1987-95 period saw Chrysler selling 511,715 LeBarons against 1,038,424 T-Birds and 711,780 Cougars.
In fact, the K-Car derivative even had problems fighting against the aged G-Body – in 1987 GM sold more Monte Carlos or RWD Cutlass coupes than Chrysler did LeBarons, with 83,440 LeBarons, 112,244 MCs and 90,024 2-door G Cutlasses finding a home that year.
Your example of the K car LeBaron is a great example of stretching a platform too far. Especially such a cheap level platform with an inability to accomodate competitive powertrains.
One could try to claim that the first generation Seville suffered some of this by starting with the Nova platform but the assertion falls apart when one understands just how many changes were made so that it only had a relationship to where it started from.
And the Seville wasn’t in the same situation as the LeBaron, in which it was made to face a more sophisticated and market-appropriate competitor.
Imagine the Seville going up against a Lincoln Versailles that would be an Americanized and more affordable take on the W116 or XJ, or at least anything more than a fancier Granada, and you’ll visualize the J-Body vs MN12 situation.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the 1987 LeBaron coupe was more profitable for Chrysler than the MN12 Thunderbird despite selling roughly 1/3 combined Thunderbird/Cougar sales. MN12 was an expensive platform to develop for just coupes, just as personal luxury coupe sales began their permanent plunge. From a financial standpoint, Ford should have moved Thunderbird to the Taurus platform or done another Fox platform restyling.
I do remember once riding in a 1987 LeBaron coupe and found it extremely unrefined.
Also, Steve makes a good point on the 1980 Cordoba. Chrysler restyled the LeBaron/Diplomat coupes for 1980, making them much more attractive than the 77-79 version, and with a few tweaks, and those could have been the new Cordoba/Charger coupes.
The MN12 may have been an expensive platform to develop – while I haven’t seen any reputable source, owner forums quoted figures of $1.4b and $2b for its development cost.
However, it was also an expensive platform that sold a million more cars whose base prices went from $14,612 for the ’89 Thunderbird to $17,885 for the ’97 Thunderbird – assuming an average transaction price around $20k, a million cars translates to some $20b in added revenue.
Then we can look at how Ford could price the MN12s higher than the LeBaron thanks to their sophistication – for example, in 1989 the base T-Bird, the cheaper of the two, was $3,117 more than the base coupe LeBaron and $617 more than the convertible one – and find another billion or so within the remaining ~500k cars.
Sure, between dealer margins and other fixed and variable costs Ford couldn’t pocket all the additional money, but I think these $20+ billion earned over the LeBaron gave Dearborn enough money to justify the MN12’s sophistication.
Ford President Harold Poling raked the MN-12 team over the coals for exceeding the original cost and weight targets. Team leader Tony Kutchta’s early retirement was spurred by management unhappiness over these cars.
Sales were okay, but the entire personal luxury coupe was trending downward by 1990. It’s noteworthy that this platform was never used for any other vehicle lines, and it expired when the Thunderbird, Cougar and Mark VIII were discontinued during the decade.
Given those results, it was just as well that Chrysler did not invest a large sum for a more refined LeBaron platform. Even a more refined and sophisticated LeBaron would not have sold much better than the one Chrysler did produce. The entire segment was dying by 1990, as buyers were migrating to either SUVs or premium imported sedans.
I vaguely recall reading back in the day that at one point the MN-12 platform was supposed to also be used for a Lincoln sedan (perhaps a downsized Town Car?). But that didn’t happen and the project team was instead criticized. At the time I wondered whether the project team was being blamed for what might more appropriately have been categorized as executive-level project drift.
I wouldn’t say the non-premium coupe market collapsed all that much in the 90s – for example, the 95-99 Monte Carlo didn’t drop in sales that much from the 81-88, averaging about 75k units a year to the G-Body’s 110k and beating the last LeBaron’s 57k/yr, and the Thunderbird actually sold better in the 93-97 period (112k units a year average) than in the 89-92 one (99k a year average).
The real drop was in the mid 00s – the last gen Monte Carlo went from a steady 60-70k a year 2000-2004 to 37,143 units in 2005, and the Solara went from 40-50k a year 1998-2006 to 29,834 in 2007 and 23,091 in 2008. And I think it was RWD platforms again that gave the FWD personal coupe trouble – it’s probably more than coincidence that the Monte Carlo’s sales collapse was in the same year that the S197 Mustang and LX 300 came out.
Which leads me to a conclusion – if the customer base for a FWD coupe like the LeBaron was still there, buying an average of 70k Monte Carlos, 45k Solaras and 45k Cougars every year, could Ford have made some good money by making a new generation of the RWD MN12 T-Bird/Cougar for 1998? It sure would have helped amortize the platform’s cost even further.
As for the MN12 4-door Lincoln – my guess is that it would have been the 1995 Continental. I believe such a design would have helped both the platform (more units to amortize the cost) and the model (breaking out of the FWD ghetto to compete with the E-Class, 5-Series and GS head to head).
Come to think about it, the MN12’s market that I mentioned may have been exploited by someone else – Chrysler.
The LX/LD Charger and 300 are sedans, but they do share other characteristics with the MN12 – they’re large RWD Americans that may not be sports cars, but sure do provide a sportier alternative to the usual fullsize sedan at the same price, bolstered by a chassis providing a low-cost interpretation of the European RWD luxury car. It’s just that four doors broadened their appeal beyond the MN12 market.
That said, the market for that sort of car did decline in the US – while in 2006 the 300/Charger pair sold over 250k units, the downward slide began immediately in 2007 (with the recession not helping), and by 2011 even an all-new generation led to just over 105k sold. 2012 saw a major rebound to 168k LDs, but then the sales dropped to about 150k a year until 2017, when the next drop began. In 2022, their last full year of sales, the Charger and 300 only sold about 95k units in total, with the Chrysler accounting for just 14k of them – 10% of 2006 sales figures, compared to the Dodge’s 67%.
Canadian sales show an even bigger collapse, going from 10k LD Mopars in 2013 to about a quarter of that in 2021.
Some have said DEW98 was loosely based on MN12. I recall rumors that Ford was considering replacing Panther either with DEW98 or with long wheelbase Taurus platform in late 90’s, but Ford obviously chose not to proceed with either idea, perhaps because of inadequate return on investment, and just to continue Panther with little investment as well as Volvo derived D3 platform.
Regarding “project drift” with the MN-12 platform – from what I’ve read, management wanted a BMW 6-Series…at Thunderbird prices. Adding the independent rear suspension looked good on the spec sheet, but that drove up both the cost and weight.
I, too, remember reading about a Lincoln sedan being built on that platform. Too bad Ford didn’t take that route, instead of bringing out the unreliable 1988-94 generation of Continental.
Chrysler’s financial troubles and quality lapses were will known in 1980. Couple this with the 1979 energy crisis; is really any wonder a car both inefficient and mechanically outdated failed to make much of a dent?
After the R-Bodies were discontinued in 1981 the Mirada, Imperial and Cordoba became dinosaurs. They were even longer than the M-Body four-doors, and they shared the same wheelbase! (The 1978-79 Diplomat and LeBaron coupes used the four-door Aspen/Volare wheelbase, which went under the Mirada, Imperial and Cordoba.)
The 1980-on Diplomat and LeBaron coupes used the same 108.7″ wheelbase as the Aspen/Volare two-doors; and I think a Cordoba, Mirada and Imperial on that platform would’ve been more serious competition to the GM G-Bodies, and the Fox-bodied T-Bird and Cougar.
But like the old saying goes, “If our foresight were as good as our hindsight, we’d be be better off by a damned sight.” I wish my Miradas- all four of them!- were riding on the Aspen/Volare/Diplomat/LeBaron coupe chassis, but what’s done is done.