Look At These Wonderfully Wrong Guess-Drawings About Mopars: Cold Start

Much like yourself after drinking an entire 64oz Big Gulp of your preferred beverage (I’m guessing a mix of Ginger Ale and Grape Fanta, a combo you call a Minnesota Viking) and then going on a 6-hour road trip, modern automotive journalism really adores a good leak. Usually, the exciting leaks are when a car that’s been kept a secret gets photographed so everyone can see it, but if you have no spy photography, sometimes you gotta make some guesses.

Those guesses are usually seen as CG renders today, or I suppose now even AI-based ones are getting more popular, too. But back in the day, these were all just hand-drawn sketches, sketches based on rumors and verbal descriptions of upcoming cars, with the artists left to fill in a lot of gaps.

I happened to see some of these sketches in a March 1974 issue of Popular Science, and I was really charmed by the ones I saw, because they were so delightfully wrong, but wrong in a way that made me kind of wish they were right.

These drawings were speculative sketches of rumored new smaller cars to come from Chrysler, and as you can see, they look pretty much nothing like what ’70s Chryslers looked like, but perhaps maybe resembled the “captive import” Mopars of the later ’70s and into the ’80s. Kinda.

Like, take that Challenger up there; it’s a pretty sleek design, very removed from what Challengers at the time looked like, which was this:

Those are great, but they’re huge, and clearly not the expected downsized cars that this old article was speculating about. Also, what the hell is the Hamburglar doing out there? Is that his funky dune buggy back there? Should Challenger Couple be concerned?

Illustrator Harry Bradley I think did a fantastic job on these sketches, and I love the novel designs he came up with. I think he was basing his drawings on rumors about Chrysler’s upcoming captive imports from Mitsubishi, like what became the Challenger in 1978:

With that in mind, you can sort of see where cars like this imaginary Barracuda may have come from:

That kink in the rear hatch/glass is pretty novel; the proportions are sort of strange, but I kind of like this, too. that rear glass opening almost feels like an open truck bed? Proportionally, it feels a little Lambo Urraco, too?

These smaller Dodge ideas are oddly appealing too, feeling sort of European/Opel-ish, but that could be the illustrator’s disregard for US lighting regulations, because rectangular lamps like those would not have been legal in America of 1974. The grille is interesting, too, feeling like more of an intake instead of just a grille, an idea that really gets pushed far in this sketch:

Look at the front end of this Dart sketch; it uses what look like correct-proportion US-spec rectangular sealed-beam headlights (1974 was the first year those were legal) but what really interests me is that grille: look how it waterfalls down from under that cantilevered hood, also really emphasizing that space as a place to suck some air the fudge in.

It’s weird, but I like it.

Like this wagon design:

That’s such a clean and crisp little wagon! Look at all that glass, it’s so airy! I really like this, especially the nice integration of the side marker lamps into the bumpers.

Somewhere, I suppose, there’s an alternate universe where these were Mopar’s cars of the late ’70s and ’80s, and I suspect that changed everything. If you don’t believe me, just as Empress of the Americas Grace Jones. She’ll set you straight.