Just as it feels like we’re entering a new malaise era, the original decade of automotive sloth is finally getting its flowers. Call it the shifting of the sands, greater perspective in the classic car world, or simple rose-tinted glasses, but some of the ’70s’ more humdrum metal is finally worth money. The Plymouth Volare isn’t a particularly remarkable car, but late last year on Bring A Trailer, someone paid $30,000 for this slab of absolute 1970s brown.
While the decade of disco and prog rock saw some fascinating automotive developments in Europe and Japan, things were quite dreadful in America. A combination of safety regulations, emissions standards, fuel crises, and sheer corporate arrogance led to bloated, underpowered, tacky tat littering domestic showrooms. The same year that Honda released the sharp, well-equipped, and well-made original Accord, Plymouth dropped one off at the pool with the Volare.
Succeeding the legendary A-Body, the Volare ushered in some substantial advancements for Plymouth from computer-aided engineering to drip rail deletion for the pure purpose of aerodynamic efficiency. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite come out of the oven fully baked. Not only did it look like it was wearing its dad’s suit, it developed a reputation as a frequently recalled mode of transportation. The inaugural 1976 model had eight recalls, and here are my four favorites out of those.
POSSIBLE FATIGUE FAILURE CAN OCCUR IN THE FRAME SUPPORT PLATES (FRONT SUSPENSION PIVOT BAR SUPPORT PLATE) THAT CONNECTS A PORTION OF THE FRONT SUSPENSION TO THE VEHICLE FRAME ON THE INVOLVED VEHICLES.
ON THE INVOLVED VEHICLES, DAMAGE TO THE FRONT WHEEL BRAKE HYDRAULIC SYSTEM COULD OCCUR DUE TO FRONT WHEEL BRAKE LINE TUBE CORROSION. FRONT WHEEL BRAKE HOSES MAY BECOME BRITTLE AND CRACK DUE TO PROLONGED OPERATION IN COLD TEMPERATURES.
POSSIBILITY THAT THE AUTOMATIC LOCKING LAP BELT RETRACTOR ON FRONT OUTBOARD SEAT BELT ASSEMBLIES MAY INTERMITTENTLY FAIL TO ENGAGE IN THE LOCKED POSITION WHEN THE BELT IS EXTRACTED FOR OCCUPANTS USE.
POSSIBILITY THAT FUEL VAPOR RETURN LINE MAY HAVE BEEN MISROUTED IN A MANNER WHICH ALLOWS INTERFERENCE BETWEEN THE LINE AND ALTERNATOR DRIVE BELT.
How do some of these issues even happen? You’d think that interference between the fuel return line and the drive belt would never make it past factory quality control, and fatigue in a critical suspension component should’ve been found during the vehicle’s development. Also, that brake line failure recall was issued when the first Volares were around one year old, which is an unacceptably short timeline for brake system corrosion or soft line damage.
Of course, the recalls slowed down as Chrysler learned how to build the Aspen and Volare, but even for the 1979 model year, one profoundly dumb SNAFU slipped through the factory gates, necessitating a recall.
ON THE INVOLVED VEHICLES, THE FUEL FILTER INLET, OUTLET, AND VAPOR RETURN FUEL LINE HOSES MAY DETERIORATE IF CONTINUOUSLY EXPOSED TO UNDERHOOD TEMPERATURES GENERATED DURING VEHICLE OPERATION. IF HOSES FAIL, FUEL LEAKAGE COULD OCCUR.
How did Chrysler not plan for heat deterioration of brand new soft fuel lines, especially since this recall didn’t affect 1976 model year cars? Maybe almost going bust in the late 1970s was deserved, as shoddiness like this isn’t attractive or sustainable. Mind you, there are two sides to every coin. The Plymouth Volare and its Dodge Aspen twin are historically important cars, even if for the wrong reasons. Plus, given their humdrum transportation role, relatively few survived, which could explain why someone paid $30,000 for this 1979 Volare sedan on Bring A Trailer.
Come to think of it, this is likely the nicest Volare sedan in the entire world. It had one owner from new until December 2023, has covered just 2,400 miles, and comes with all the literature and receipts one could possibly want. Sure, there are some minor imperfections like a cracked grille to work around, but this brown-on-brown-on-brown survivor is a slice of the real 1970s. A decade of discontent, distrust, and dissatisfaction.
This car embodies the decade of malaise, from its stagflation to its lost faith in government to its widespread abandonment of futurism in architecture. Though nostalgia compels us to cherry-pick the best moments in life and keep them under eternal ethereal mist, perspective requires us to remember the bad times too. A pristine Plymouth Volare reminds us of how far we’ve come, and given its sheer rarity, maybe $30,000 is just the right price for it.
Update: The winning bidder of this Volare appears to be a car collector who’s won 77 auctions on Bring A Trailer for cars as diverse as a March-Cosworth 83C Indy car to a 1941 Graham Hollywood Supercharged Model 113. Judging by the user’s screenname, commenter Superfluous thinks the winning bidder may be car collector Vance Kershner, who had a Wall Street Journal feature on his Hellephant-powered 1973 Road Runner. Far out!
(Photo credits: Bring A Trailer)
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BaT rejected the 12,000 mile 75 Dart I was selling twice last year, but they took this car. There seems to be no reason to what they will take. I could have used $30k
It’s who you know, not what you have.
Really seems to be the case, the same sellers get to list over and over making absurd profits.
Isn’t it Volaré? They didn’t pronounce it that way, but they certainly liked fanciness.
It was Sam Malone, duh.
These sort of quality issues were so common around that time. It was rare for a vehicle to make it 100,000 miles.
I have to think that the buyer is someone younger than me, because anyone who has either driven or ridden in one of these things would NEVER want to repeat the experience, especially at a collector’s price.
I feel like this will be used up in a movie or something. I hope I’m wrong.
This one definitely freaks me out a bit. When I was taking Driver’s Ed in high school in 1990, the school had two of these as part of its range fleet. They were too old for us to use for “on the road” learning (that distinction went to the two best cars – a first gen Cavalier sedan and a Plymouth Reliant). The Volares and one Ford Fairmont sedan were used on the “range” – a big parking lot where we practiced basic maneuvers.
I just remember them driving and feeling like cars twice their size. Over-powered steering and no road feel, which I guess made them ideal vehicles to teach us parallel parking in? Ours were lime green and I think I prefer the brown.
While my partner and I were driving one, we found a bottle of Maalox tablets stashed in the sun visor. He threw them at other drivers while I learned to turn in reverse. Definitely a good time.
The Volare also has the distinction of being the only car I ever drove that cut off when you turned the steering wheel all the way to lock. And that power steering pump made the most interesting groaning noises.
So. $30,000.
Um. Congrats?
Can totally understand the need for a bottle of Maalox when driving a Volare. Is it gonna stay running? Fall apart? Blow up? Oh the uncertainty.
My wife’s late father had one of these in wagon form as the family car. He used to take it bracket racing on the weekends.
We need an Aspen vs. Aspen feature.
I can make that happen…
I’m thinking the buyer is one of those multi-million lottery winners who go completely broke 5 years later.
Mental illness + unearned wealth = willingness to spend $30K on nostalgic garbage?
There’s likely a market for these cars for period movie and TV shoots. Studios will pay a small fortune to get exactly what they want. A couple of props guys must have been out-bidding each other to get the only that’s in this condition.
aha, this is the only explanation I can accept
No way they’d pay this kind of premium for this car. Studio car places like that often rent/borrow older cars from the public. I know a few people whose cars have been used in the background of period movies and TV shows.
Exactly, that’s why parking lots in period shows are always full of the more desirable models models people actually preserved instead of the more ordinary family cars and econoboxes that actually cluttered parking lots in the day. Also why brand new cars (in the context of the piece) will have cracked dashes
I’ve also noticed that cars in some period pieces always look too nice. Bright chrome and shiny paint on everything, even commonplace cars on the streets. Back when rustproofing was almost non-existent, single stage paint was the norm and cars had shorter lifespans than today, that would not be the case. Even today, nine out of 10 cars in a parking lot have clearly not been washed in months if not years.
That’s also true. They also have weird age breakdowns – a show set in the Northeast in the early 1990s, for example, may have way too many 1960s/early 1970s models mixed into a mall parking lot vs Dodge Colts and Chevettes
Another thing I always look for is “are there enough VW Beetles?” I was born in 1993 so they’ve never been a common sight on the roads for me (except when I went to Peru). But watch any old movie, show, or look at any vintage streetscape photograph/video and there’s Beetles everywhere. If something is set in the 60s or 70s and you never see a Beetle, they didn’t do their car casting right. Unless it’s set in the South or something, where they weren’t quite as common.
Yep, I was born in 1985, and Beetles were still extremely common when I was a kid, up to maybe mid ’90s, but vanished practically overnight. The Super Beetle cabriolets, especially, seemed to hang in there as daily transportation the longest
For the last couple years of the Beetle in the US (78 & 79, maybe 1980?) you could only get the cabriolets, and there were multiple special “final” editions. I guess it makes sense that people who bought those kept them on the road the longest. I know that my ’72 Super Beetle was on the road into the early 90s, used as a daily driver by different members of one family the whole time. There’s no hundred thousand digit on the odometer, but I suspect it’s rolled over twice.
Cabriolet production did last into early 1980 in West Germany, but 1979 was the final model year for North America. It was supposed to have stopped completely in ’79, but there was enough demand with last minute orders and pressure from dealerships for Volkswagen to extend production at Karmann for a few more months
Good to know! It’s fascinating to me, just how common they were at one point. Probably because I wasn’t around for it. You don’t see a single body style car in such numbers today in the US, not even close.
Volkswagen sold 563,500 Beetles here in 1968, and it was already a 30 year old design at that point. Really amazing. That would make it the #2 vehicle on the market today, behind the F-Series’ 750,000, but 20,000 units ahead of the Silverado’s 543,000.
It looks like there were a total of 9.1 million vehicles sold in the US in 1968, meaning the Beetle made up around 6% of all cars sold in the country that year. The F-series made up about 5% of all cars sold in the US last year (15.5 million). And that’s across the whole F-series lineup, compared with one single model of the Beetle. I think my math is right there.
They made so damn many of them that they’re the perfect car to get into the classic car hobby with. I can find running, driving 70s beetles for 5k around here no problem. Parts are abundant and relatively inexpensive, and just about every city has a classic VW club. I’ve got a 1972 Super Beetle, had it since I was a kid. It was my entry to the automotive world and taught me so much.
It also created the kitcar industry, since Beetles were so damn common and cheap and largely unchanged for so many years, they were an easy universal fit donor for any fiberglass body somebody wanted to sell. We can’t really do that anymore, which is why the industry has mostly died – if you want to be in that business now, you pretty much need to fabricate your own custom chassis, which drives up costs and means that bodies from other manufacturers won’t fit. Theoretically, the Panther platform would maybe have worked, but kit cars that size were just never as popular as MGTDs, Frazer Nashes, Mercedes SSKs, Jaguar SS100s, etc
Which suddenly reminds me of movies and TV shows of the 70s and 80s, where there were so many banged-up 60s and 70s cars in the backgrounds, or used as stand-ins for the “hero” cars if they needed chases or accident scenes. A lot of them were often spray-painted in whatever colors were handy in the properties shop often with little or no masking over the chrome trim. Dents were rarely pulled or smoothed unless the car needed to look presentable close-up in the frame, and even then, the hasty repair can be obvious when viewing re-mastered prints on modern hi-def screens. Back in the day of 525 fuzzy interlaced scanlines on CRTs, none of it showed.
Fun fact, the beat-up sqaurebody Chevy pickup in Star Trek IV: Save the Whales was one of such vehicular “extras” that got promoted to “hero” vehicle. The sloppy rattle-can paintjob and generally shabby condition was directly from its previous uses as a background car and general-purpose beater extra in Hollywood service. Apparently, that’s what it went back to being after the movie, until somebody discovered it and it did a stint at the Volo automotive museum before being auctioned to a collector. No idea who has it now, but it’s out there somewhere!
This is how bad these cars were back in the day:
Back in 1979, my friends Father, who was an hourly Chrysler employee, bought his First brand new car, a 1979 Volare.it was Burgundy with a slant six, and when driving it one day the car SUDDENLY skidded to a stop, THE REAR AXLE HAD SEIZED UP! The vehicle had 1,100 miles on it!
Also the A/C did not work, which he discovered while driving home from the dealer after taking delivery of his brand new vehicle.
Someone paid $30,000 stupidity tax.
CP
Personally, I love it. That said, there’s one too many zeroes in that price.
This was the company that had developed the original Airflow concept some 50 years prior, with an aero efficiency that the production version didn’t have, and subsequently blamed the aero for people not buying it.
According to aerodynamacist Phil Knox, the DeSoto Airflow aerodynamic test mule with the long tail had a 0.244 Cd value. Which was probably about half the Volaire’s value, half a century prior to the Volaire. Imagine the impact THAT would have had on fuel economy. In the Malaise era, it probably would have helped sell more cars given the concern with economy and lack of performance at the time.
https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/chrysler-airflow-its-aerodynamics-39261.html
I rented a Volare wagon in 1989 when my car was in the shop. We called it “La Bomba” because it would Diesel (run on) for 20 seconds after shut off and then backfire.
Had a high school girlfriend who drove her father’s, and she called it the Nasty Ass-pen
Brown: check
Manual: nope
Wagon: nope
FAIL! (cue sad trombone)
Paging P.T. Barnum, paging P.T. Barnum, we have another one…
We had a ’76 Dodge Aspen when I was a kid. I remember my dad cursing about all the recalls, the breakdowns, the rust. I recently found a photo of it parked in front of our old house, from what must have been the summer of 1979. I was struck by how old and tired it looked in that photo: dull paint, no hubcaps, rust along the entire bottom three inches. And it was only three years old at the time.
Did those childhood memories prevent me from buying a ’79 Volare for $175 when I really just needed a cheap car? No they did not. Did that Volare die in rush-hour traffic and leave me stranded? Yes it did. But did I revive it and sell it to some other sucker for $400? Yep.
The most shocking thing about the Volare/Aspen was that they directly replaced the Valiant/Dart – economy cars well known for their rugged durability – and had a lot of carry-over engineering, including the bulletproof Slant Six, yet ended up being so much worse than their predecessors in every conceivable metric to the extent that it was like they came from a totally different company. Really was emblematic of where the US auto industry in general, and Chrysler in particular, was in the mid 70s
Chrysler was hot garbage well into the 1990s.
These rusted, badly and almost immediately. A neighbor had an Aspen when I was a kid and you could practically watch the rust holes grow, aka watching paint die.
This Volare looks to be in fantastic condition. I’m reminded of the words of Belloq: “It’s worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless… like the Ark. Men will kill for it. Men like you and me.”
Pristine examples of crapcans can still be useful historical reference points.
What a fitting end to your life’s pursuits. You’re about to become a permanent addition to this archaeological find. Who knows? In a thousand years, even you may be worth something.
“Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?”
“Aspens. Very dangerous. Yugo first.” – Sallah
You’re the worst.
Don’t ever change.
Thank you! 🙂
I think the more appropriate quote here is, “Yes, blow it up! Blow it back to God!”
Gee Thomas – how could you forget to include the biggest Volare recall of all: the front fender rust-through debacle?
“April 12, 1980
Chrysler Corp. has bowed to government pressure to provide free replacement of rusted front fenders on 1976 and 1977 Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volare cars…
The FTC said its settlement with Chrysler could affect 200,000 Aspens and Volares, one-fifth of the total produced by Chrysler in 1976 and 1977. To qualify for free replacement, the fender must have rusted on the top near the windshield, where a design defect permitted salt water to accumulate during winter driving, causing severe erosion, the FTC said.
The replacement offer applies to all 1976 and 1977 Aspens and Volares nationwide, provided the rust problem occurred before a car was three years old.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1980/04/12/chrysler-will-fix-rusted-fenders-for-45-million/6cd6c832-63d4-4f4f-aa3f-acd356b0337b/
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My parents had a Volare and had to have both front fenders replaced, so I remember this part of the scandal too:
“The FTC also charged that Chrysler earlier had been willing to replace the rust-damaged fenders only to customers who complained hard enough.
So, anyhow, my theory on the buyer is that it’s some Chinese guy trying to get his money out of Chinese banks, and is therefore investing in “classic” (sic) American cars… and who knows nothing about them.
Who else would buy this thing?
There was an old lady in my home town who had a darker brown Volare that was in absolutely impeccable condition. I swear she washed it after every trip. Which is especially amazing since she didn’t exactly pay attention when driving.
So potentially a second really nice Volare out there.
Probably been fixed and repainted enough times that the body is actually not that old. The car, of course.
This Volare really screams HOT BROWN in a way only RCR can achieve.
If only that interior was a little closer to COLD YELLOW.
I had been thinking meth-bender, but your explanation works too.
The absolute nicest Volare sedan in the entire world should be $7,000, at most, on a good day. But, everything is worth what someone will pay, and we’ve normalized this as a society
You bought a 30,000 dollar Vooolllaaaarrrrreee’, uhohuhoh uhoh you made a big miiiisssttttaaaakkkkkeeee’ uhohuhoh uhoh.
☜╮(´ิ∀´ิ☜╮)
This lil guy might be the best one yet.
⊂(◉‿◉)つ