Junkyard Find: 1984 Dodge 600 Landau Coupe With Five-speed Manual Transmission
Once Lee Iacocca’s front-wheel-drive K-cars brought Chrysler back from near-death and into profitability, the platform became the basis of a sprawling family of K-related relatives. One of the earliest spinoffs was the E Platform, a lengthened K that gave us the Chrysler E-Class/New Yorker, the Plymouth Caravelle, and the Dodge 600. Just to confuse matters, the Dodge 600 coupe remained a true K, sibling to the Dodge Aries.
That’s what we’ve got here, and this Denver 600 coupe has some stories to tell.
Five-speed manual transmissions still seemed sort of racy in 1984. Because the slushboxization of the American car-buying public was well along by the middle 1980s, very few Detroit cars with luxury pretensions came from the factory with three-pedal setups; this is the first Chrysler E-Body I’ve seen with a five-speed.
Someone must have wanted that hard-to-find (well, not really hard-to-find) transmission and didn’t want to remove the engine, because this ingenious engine-support rig holds the engine in place. Maybe a junkyard visitor brought it along and then, its job done, left it behind. Maybe the car’s final owner pulled the transmission with the idea of fixing it, and then life intervened (in the form of a tow truck from U-Pull-&-Pay) and hauled away the car, engine-support bar and all.
Cheap but effective.
Although Chrysler hoped to snatch some sales away from European marques with the 600 coupe, the front end looks lifted straight from the incredibly non-Euro-looking (and pre-Iaccocan) Mirada.
We’ve got a no-holds-barred Whorehouse Red Velour™ interior here, and it still looks very clean at age 35.
I don’t know if Dodge still called the padded part-roof treatment a Landau by 1984, but that’s what this is.
I found a bunch of realtor-related paperwork from the 1980s inside, so I think the car may have died or been parked at a very young age.
Looks like a mere 72,922 miles on the clock.
Commitment? Pfft, that went out with the hula hoop!
If you like these Junkyard Finds, you can get to about 1,700 more of them by going to the Junkyard Home of the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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There is this insane guy in the K-Car and kin community by the name of Guy. Someone needs to do a welfare check on him. IT'S THE LAST ONE! SOMEONE MUST SAVE IT! I'VE BEEN STABBED IN THE BACK!!!
I believe it might have been a "Club Coupe," instead of a Landau. It was definitely a club coupe by 1985 and included the Landau roof as standard. A write-up from a few years ago: https://eightiescars.com/2017/07/30/1985-dodge-600-turbo/