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Classic Cars Project Cars--You Get to Vote on "Hold 'em or Fold 'em"
19412 messages, Last post on Dec 03, 2009 at 3:45 PM
You are in the Classic Cars Forum. Your Host is mr_shiftright
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"...not really a bad car solid and reliable..." It's interesting that your Citation was reliable. Ours had some solid attributes (roomy, with good handling and performance for its day, for example), but reliability wasn't one of them. How many miles did your Citation have when you got rid of it?
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Replying to: lokki (Dec 27, 2008 6:46 am) I gave serious consideration to buying a new '85 Citation II X11 but ordered a Celebrity Eurosport two-door with the MPI V6 instead. I knew they were going to be discontinued and would take a hit on resale value. The X11 was essentially the same car mechanically but was cheaper to buy and could be had with a stick shift, unlike the V6 Celebrity. Sort-of wish I had bought one. The '85 Citation II had a one-year only dash design that was an improvement on the '80-'84, IMHO. Bill |
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Replying to: hpmctorque (Dec 27, 2008 7:01 am) Ahhhh.... I didn't OWN it.... it was a company car... so I didn't even do the maintenance. I had it for a year... maybe 5 or 6 k miles only since I only used it at my office. I guess reliable is a relative term.. I never had anything give me a problem while I was drving it... not true in the !  #%!% K-car. That was a noisy, rough, slapped together POS. It was dying lemon yellow too. The Citation was a lot better ride in comparison. |
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Replying to: uplanderguy (Dec 27, 2008 3:10 am)
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Replying to: lemko (Dec 27, 2008 11:14 am) I like the front end of the '72 Chevrolet for the same reason you like the '71, but I like the '71's wide rocker moldings versus no rocker moldings on '72 Impalas. A friend when I was a teen, had both '70 and '71 Impalas in their driveway. Although the '71 looked more Cadillac-like, I do remember him saying that the '70 was so much more solid. I know the '70's interiors were way nicer; no flat black plastic, black steering wheels, and hard plastic lower interior door panels like the '71. Bill
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I'm guessing that your K-car was an early pre-fuel injected one (81-'84?). Those carburated ones were awful, in terms of driveability. Fuel injection fixed the stalling and related problems, but I agree that the GM X-cars drove, rode and steered better than the Chrysler K-Cars. As long as we're talking about Detroit disasters, we shouldn't forget the Ford twins, Tempo and Topaz. These were introduced in the '84 model year, so ford had some time to do a better job than GM and Chrysler, but I'm not sure where these ranked compared with their GM and Chrysler counterparts. Does anyone have an opinion on this?
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Replying to: hpmctorque (Dec 27, 2008 9:05 pm) |
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You're right that the K car was an early one... and yes, I suppose the later ones were better. But oh my goodness.... that was a bad car. When I was a kid the family owned a 68 Plymouth Valiant with the 225 slant six.... It wasn't any paragon of advanced engineering but it was a solid little tugboat that ran forever without a problem. The K car seemed an insult to that memory. An aging accountant I knew owned a Tempo. It wasn't a bad car to drive, although it was truely an accountant's car. Boring and bland and plain to look at. It was a good thing that she bought the extended warranty.... I think that Ford ultimately lost money on that whole deal by the time they finished repairing everything that broke. I don't recall the details of the problems, but there were plenty of them, I believe. By that time I was on my second Acura Integra... which seemed light-years better than any of the American competition. |
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Yeah, the K-cars didn't hold a candle to the earlier Slant Six powered compacts. Although my family owned a Valiant, which exhibited the attributes you mentioned, we missed the bullet on the K-cars. My acquaintance with the K-car is from a family friend, who owned three of them, a carburated '81 or '82, which was really bad, in large part because of the carburater; a '85, which was much better than the first one; an '88 "Spirit-of-America", which was a little better than the '85. Our family friend, whose previous car was - you guessed it - a Slant Six equipped Dart, managed to get 100,000 miles from his first K-car, then the tranny went. The '85 and '88 each went >150,000 miles, so they must have been decent for cheap wheels. Of course, no K-car could even come close to the Integra, in terms of quality, engineering, reliability, durability, ride and handling, and so on. One redeeming attribute of the K-car was price. Our friend paid less than $10,000 for his '88, and less for the earlier ones. |
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Replying to: uplanderguy (Dec 27, 2008 12:01 pm) The '72 Impala is my favorite, of the '71-76 generation. I may just be biased, because my grandparents had a forest green hardtop sedan when I was a kid, that I absolutely loved, but overall I think it's just a clean, smooth, nicely styled car. I like the front-end with the low grille, that gives it a sporty look for such a big car. The '71 was good looking too, but I just like the '72 grille better. IIRC, for 1974, they changed the roofline of the Impala hardtop coupe. It still had a formal C-pillar, but just seemed a bit awkward. Plus, the rear window was no longer concave. The Caprice coupe that year went to stationary rear windows that were a bit narrow, and gave the car a mis-matched beltline. I can't remember if the Impala also got that style in '74, but for '75-76 I think the hardtop coupe was retired entirely from the Impala/Caprice line. As for build quality, the '65-70 models were definitely more substantial than the '71-76! I agree about the interiors, too. I really didn't like it when they went to the door panels where the lower parts were plastic. It wasn't too bad in the more upscale models, where they'd glue carpeting on there (it wouldn't always stay glued on, though)
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Classic Cars Project Cars--You Get to Vote on "Hold 'em or Fold 'em"
