Chrysler Goes Front Wheel Drive
Bringing out new front wheel drive cars
“I think Chrysler's European experience with front wheel drive (FWD) was instrumental in bringing that concept to the United States. Two European Car of the Year awards (the C6 in 1976 and the C2 in 1978) were helpful in convincing Chrysler management that that FWD was a desirable architecture for future US small cars.” Thus said Burton Bouwkamp, a Chrysler product planner (see his history of the Dodge Charger from a product planning perspective). He continued:
I think [my work in Europe did have an influence] but the only specific example that I can think of is that I was instrumental in having load sensing proportional valves added to the braking system of all our domestic cars. In Europe I learned what I call one on the commandments of braking, "Thou Shalt Not Let The Rear Wheels Skid." Even the low priced rear engine/RWD Simca Mille had a load sensing proportioning valve. (I think GM wished they had incorporated load sensing proportioning valves in their "X" Body braking system. They added this after a massive recall.)
Burton Bouwkamp, who was also involved in the development of the Horizon, also explained why the K cars did not use the independent rear suspension of the Horizon: “Our NVH (noise/vibration/harshness) objectives for the K car were higher than the L Body so we did not strive for rear suspension commonality.”
While the K platform was altered as needed to cover a very wide range of cars and minivans, that appears to have been less a result of advance planning than one might have thought (though the creators of the platform and architecture may have enabled its expansion through their choices). As the Reliant and Aries were developed, though, more bodies were added on. “My section's (Body Engineering's) primary project was the "K" car but we had more than one ball in the air. We also had to work on the 1981 Imperial, 1983 "E" Bodies (stretched "K" cars but on the same platform), the 1984 mini-van, the 1984 "G" Body (Daytona) and the 1985 "H" Body (LeBaron GTS). ... We had many sessions regarding quality. Unfortunately, there was too much effort spent on blaming each other and not enough effort on working together to solve the problem.”
As for coming out with Chrysler versions of the K-cars and extended K-cars (E-cars): “It was not desireable but it was all we could afford.”
Why front wheel drive?
We thought FWD was the future for passenger cars. Apparently, so did our coleagues at GM and Ford. The FWD advantages of improved traction, better straight line driving stability and a lower, flatter floor pan convinced us. The disadvantages were higher cost and a crowded engine compartment and the inherent understeer characteristics of FWD.
We did know that RWD provided better cornering due to oversteer and drifting characteristics so we were not surprised that performance cars stayed with RWD. We were surprised that large cars returned to RWD.
Dropping trucks and rear wheel drive cars
One official wrote:
In 1979, Chrysler’s senior management met in Boca Raton, Florida, for some serious long-range planning, away from the distraction of everyday activities at Chrysler’s Highland Park, Michigan headquarters.
The “Boca Raton Accord” was a decision to drop entirely out of the rear wheel drive truck business by 1984. This was when management made the decision to convert all cars to front wheel drive, and it was decided that Dodge couldn’t be in the front wheel drive car business and in rear wheel drive for (only) light duty trucks.
Not only did Chrysler decide to quite making rear wheel drive trucks, but it decided to disband the truck engineering group immediately. Dodge Truck engineers who retained their jobs were filtered in with the various car divisions’ engineering staffs. Dodge Truck drifted for several years until a truck engineering department was re-established in 1987 with the purchase of Jeep. At that time, a new engineering group called Jeep/Truck Engineering (JTE) took over all responsibility for both Jeep and Dodge Truck.
To put that into context, the company’s new rear wheel drive cars (R bodies and M bodies, not to mention the less recent C bodies) were sales disasters; the early F bodies were selling at a decent pace but not as well as the company needed, and they were reportedly not especially profitable. The front wheel drive Omni, meanwhile, was Dodge's second best seller in 1979, easily beating anything but Aspen (which it came close to), and at Plymouth, Volare had a stronger lead over Horizon, but it was still surprisingly close. The writing was on the wall. With the leadership able to see and drive the Reliant and Aries prototypes, still a year away from production, they could see the advantages of front wheel drive in terms of providing usable space in a small package; for most customers, the K-cars were far ahead of the rear drive cars of the day.
This meeting might well have been the motivation behind the 1981 Imperial, 1983 E bodies, and other early K variants; they were needed to replace the “mid-sized” Chrysler Corporation cars of the time, none of which were selling especially well.
An engineer commented that once this decision was made, the truck engineering group was used as a “dumping ground” for engineers not wanted elsewhere, for whatever reason — the same accusation Evan Boberg would later make about the Liberty Group. There were numerous conflicts with Jeep engineers when Dodge started creating a new truck again, the Dodge Phoenix project — which was dropped at Bob Lutz’s insistence and replaced with the BR project, yielding the successful 1994 Dodge Ram. That would reverse the Boca Raton accord and reaffirm Dodge's involvement in trucks.