Junkyard Find: 1986 Dodge Lancer ES Turbo

The branches of the Chrysler K-Car Family Tree are far too numerous to describe here, since so many different K-derived cars and minivans were built from the 1981 through 1995 model years for the North American market. One of the rarest types is the 1985-1989 Dodge Lancer, and I've found an example in a Silicon Valley self-service wrecking yard.

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Junkyard Find: 1985 Dodge Lancer ES Turbo

Chrysler hadn’t been making the K Platform for long before they branched it out into the bewildering K Family Tree that confuses everybody to this day. Iacocca’s Chrysler-saving (or demise-postponing, depending on your point of view) platform gave us both the worst car in human history and a Dodged-down version of the swanky LeBaron GTS. Here’s an example of the latter that I saw in a San Francisco Bay Area self-service yard.

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  • SilverHawk During the time of the annual model year changes, Motor Trend would do a Preview edition that included actual pencil drawings of new grills and taillights, along with whatever spy photos they had. Those pencil drawings were supplied by the manufacturers. At the time, I had friends at AMC and Ford who made these drawings available to MT.
  • Todd Reasland "For the SV, the FWD starts at $23,680 and AWD adds $25,330. " Yikes...25K more to get AWD? :)
  • 1995 SC I think it's different now and the manufacturers just sort of leak them to the desired automotive "influencers" but it is still interesting with some cars. The C8 was a good example because it was such a radical change.
  • ECurmudgeon One wonders why they didn't just go with a fleet of RHD Ford Transits, but the answer is, of course, "money."
  • RHD Part XXXIV.Talk about whipping a dead horse!