Does The New Dodge Charger Mean That A Revived Chrysler Cordoba Won’t Be Far Behind?

“I know something of those years. Remember, it was a time of great dreams, of great aspiration.”
Ricardo Montalban as Khan

Some of the most interesting characters in movies and shows are the tragic ones; their triumphs are matched only by even greater defeats. Meth-cooking assistant Jessie Pinkman in the series Breaking Bad is a perfect example; literally beaten to within an inch of his life on numerous occasions but still miraculously surviving to see another day. In the automotive world, easily one of the greatest long-suffering-but-still-standing figures in the smallest of the Big Three: Chrysler. Well, I mean Daimler-Chrysler. Sorry, Cerberus. No, it’s Stellantis now, right? See what I mean?

Chrysler has certainly seen peaks and valleys, including some big-hit automobiles just like Ford and General Motors have had. The difference is while the Blue Oval brand can proudly display something like a shiny 1965 Mustang as one of their greatest successes and have the public fawn all over it at a museum, the biggest sales winners from Chrysler tend to be cars people either forget about today or simply don’t look back on with great fondness. Sadly, few found big hits like a Dodge Aries K, an Omni, or the off-the-charts market dominating 1984 Caravan minivan to be ultra-desirable cars then or now, and that’s a shame (word of note: I’m aware that Jeep products were smashes but I consider things like the CJ/Wrangler, the XJ Cherokee, and even the ZJ Grand Wagoneer as creations of the Willys and AMC brands that did the initial development).

In fact, one of Chrysler’s true sales juggernauts and bright spots from the otherwise very-dark-for-them seventies was a car that’s often the punchline of jokes. Despite strong six-figure production numbers in each of the early years it was offered, it’s a car that embodies all that some see as being wrong with the automotive malaise disco era. Like a Pet Rock or polyester suit, it’s something people wanted to hide in a closet a few years after they bought it. However, like everything else, that age is now seen as “cool” and “retro” by those who didn’t live through it. Is it time for this forgotten Chrysler sales star to come back? Let’s take a look.

Battery Charger

No, the nameplate I’m talking about isn’t the 2024 Dodge Charger EV. The latest “first electric muscle car” edition was unveiled with much hoopla last week, the latest of many cars that have revived (or attempted to revive) Chrysler’s storied muscle car names.

The latest Charger harkens back to arguably the most celebrated iteration of this nameplate; the sinister-looking Coke-bottle-shaped 1968-1970 model popularized in mainstream media like the Bullitt chase, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Fast And The Furious, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, and even oddball appearances in things like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This generation of Charger was a sales success with over 96,000 sold in the first year alone.

Of course, this success was rather short-lived. By the time the more luxury-oriented 1971 model appeared, the golden era of the muscle car was ending with rising emissions control requirements, higher insurance rates, extra safety equipment, and ultimately soaring gas prices after the 1973 energy crisis. Charger sales steadily declined.

In 1975, the Charger moved entirely into the territory of the new category of “personal luxury” car. Popularized by entries such as the Chevy Monte Carlo and Pontiac Grand Prix, this segment took off and pretty much trounced the remaining so-called “muscle cars” that were now often not much more than pathetic sticker packages. With performance no longer an option, manufacturers embraced the cushy luxury coupe where the “sportiness” was confined to the fact that they had two less doors than the mom-and-pop sedans they were based on. Sales of this Charger were dismal, with only 30,000 leaving dealers.

Oddly enough, Chrysler sold a nearly identical version of this car that, in contrast, completely exploded on the marketplace. If we brought it back, would lightning strike again?

He Said “Soft” Corintian Leather, Not “Rich”

Product placement, image, and marketing is everything. It’s been said that in interviews for hosts on the Home Shopping Network, candidates are given a simple number 2 pencil and told to wax eloquently about it for five minutes (“This is a precise tool for putting your thoughts and dreams into reality…”). Indeed, a two-door Dodge Coronet with some extra chrome is hardly something special, but people might think it is if you make a fancy crest logo, sell it under the “Chrysler” brand and call it…Cordoba:

Look what happens when you park this “small Chrysler” in front of a lovely casa grande, play a flamenco guitar, and make it appear to be owned by Ricardo Montalban, one of the most suave and self-confident looking actors of all time.

Damn, that’s pure magic; it’s not the actual car that’s being sold but the idea of the car and the lifestyle it purports to be a part of. Mr. Rourke wafting along the Pacific coast in this elegant brown machine? Watch that a few times and you actually want one of these things. It certainly worked at the time, even though today the whole “Corinthian leather” line is used as a joke in situations where someone might be trying to talk up some substandard product (Not in the case of Autopian membership of course]. The impossibly elegant and gracious Montalban fessed up to the ruse in an amusing interview on David Letterman’s show years ago:

Despite its humble origins, the Cordoba sold more than 150,000 units in 1975; that was over sixty percent of all Chrysler division cars sold that year and five times the number of almost identical Dodge-branded Chargers. Cordoba sales remained strong for the next few years, though they wouldn’t be enough to keep the company from approaching bankruptcy (uh, for the first time) in 1979. Like most tragic heroes, the brand lived on, and oddly enough the Charger name was reborn again several times. The Cordoba name, however, did not survive, a victim of changing trends that killed the original Charger. Still, it’s 2024; wallpaper is back in home décor, people unashamedly wear platform boots with flared pants, and a network even made a Bee Gees documentary. Could a new Cordoba be far behind?

“I Like What They’ve Done To My Car”

Ricardo unconvincingly uttered those words in the ads for the last-gasp downsized 1980-1983 Cordoba with a standard “leaning tower of power” slant six-cylinder:

However, I do believe that the great Fantasy Island star would legitimately dig our proposed rehash had he not passed on in 2009. Considering that the original Cordoba was almost identical to the concurrent Charger, I think the launch of the new Dodge muscle car means this is an ideal time to bust out a new Chrysler-branded luxury coupe.

(Full disclosure: I did this as a complete joke, egged on by our Thomas Hundal, but actually started to like the results. This only shows you how troubled I really am).

Here’s that new Charger again:

There’s no way a Cordoba would be a fastback like the Charger, so I showed the new Cordoba as not only a notchback but as a full-up convertible coupe. Up front, the new Charger has sharp-edged “pontoon” style fenders that are shockingly similar to the front profile of the 1975 Cordoba.

Additionally, this forms a hard break line for us to drop in a Cordoba-style nose with the Jaguar XJ6 rip-off round headlight and upright grille nose. The headlamps are not sealed beams (they’re XJ8 units photoshopped in, you Parts Bin junkies) and the grille surround is body-colored instead of chrome, with the hood faired into the shape. The distinctive side marker lights from the old car are used instead of the new Charger’s ubiquitous throw-them-in-the-wheel-arch units.

Those same sharp-edged fenders are used in back on the 1975 car, there’s a protruding “box” shape on the trunk lid from that car:

We’ll do the same thing here, with Cordoba-style taillights and that protruding surface on the trunk lid faired into the horizontal surfaces.

You can see owners of this updated Cordoba telling their friends that “it looks a lot like a Bentley coupe if you squint real hard”. In reality it appears more like a Mustang before they started adding concave taillights and other shit in attempts to make it different from last year’s model. The important thing is that it’s clean and would appeal to the target market of “Blue Bloods” watchers and shuffleboard players that lament the loss of the Sebring drop-top. You can see that despite the rather minimal differences between the Cordoba and Charger we’d be talking about a car for a totally different kind of buyer that finds the Charger seen below to be “greasy kid stuff”.

Now, I know what some of you are asking for, and here it is:

For many of you, a Cordoba without large B pillar “opera” lamps and landau vinyl roof would be like seeing Saturday Night Fever era John Travolta in a tweed jacket, so hopefully that gives you the option you want.

Smiles, Everyone

The Chrysler brand is sort of on life support now, and it’s hard to say what (if anything) could breathe new life into this nameplate. Nobody’s gone broke going after Boomer nostalgia; just like when the Cordoba was released, it was never really about the physical attributes of the car itself as much as the way it made the buyer feel. If this silly revival could take a sixtysomething back to the time when he was smoking like chimney, thirty pounds lighter in a polyester shirt and buying that first nice new car from the Chrysler/Plymouth dealer down the street, I’ve already sold the thing.

Better yet, the Cordoba solves one serious hypocrisy of this new Charger. You might remember that our Jason reported on a system the new EV model has which includes fake exhaust sounds and even devices to make the car shake as if it had a V8 with bad motor mounts under the hood. As he pointed out, it’s rather absurd the lengths Stellantis is going to in trying to reverse the pure silence of the electric Charger. Seriously, my kid’s PowerWheel Ram truck toy had simulated engine growls and he thought it was a bit stupid at age eight; he turned it off.

Ah, but a Cordoba would thrive on such absence of road or engine noise and take advantage of the inherent qualities of silent performance and a chassis that could make your ride quite (Ricardo dramatic pause here) pleasant. If it’s good enough for Mr. Montalban, it sure as hell has to be good enough for your pedestrian self, dammit.

Or does our hypothetical Ricardo need a 1981 Imperial revival instead?

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