Perception is reality

I’m old enough to remember the common complaint about Chrysler products and their not being able to start when a dark cloud loomed overhead.

Do you doubt me? Then harken back to the television commercial of the late 1950s (or maybe early 1960s – memories fade) when the commercial showed a Chrysler product with the hood up and fire hoses being directed at the underside of the hood while the motor kept on running. That was, I suppose, Chrysler’s way of proving their automobiles were no longer so susceptible to damp weather.

The reliability also left a lot to be desired.

I had some experience with such problems with government-owned Chrysler products when I was with the Bureau of Traffic Engineering in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Bureau had just split from the Police Department and thus had some hand-me-down vehicles and was also under the Department of Public Safety rather than Public Works.

In any case, I began to develop a great dislike for Chrysler products which, I’m very glad to say, would change in later decades.

Case #1 – I was asked to drive a reporter for one of the newspapers from the Bureau’s offices in City Hall over to the Claypool Hotel for some function or other and take one of the bosses’ ’56 Plymouths.

No problem. We hopped in the vehicle and I easily made my way over to Illinois and Washington Streets. I pulled up to the loading zone to let the reporter out and pulled on the pistol-type hand brake . . . which promptly came all the way out in my hand.

The reporter chuckled, of course as I tossed the part in the back seat then made my way to the garage. During the quick, fix I called my boss to tell him why I’d be late returning his car.

Case #2 – My partner Dick and I were using another boss’s car for surveying something on the south side of Indianapolis and were returning to the office alongside of what was then the Chevrolet Commercial Body Plant beside White River. Nothing seemed to be amiss with the 1956 Plymouth until we noticed an acrid stench in the car. Seconds later, gray smoke billowed out from under the dashboard.

I dynamited the brakes and pulled the handbrake – which held on this Plymouth, this time – and Dick and I bailed, car still rolling, right in front of the Chevrolet plant’s guard house.

They called their plant FD who called IFD, the usual pandemonium, etc. Car towed, repaired. Strangely, no news was made, but Dick and I were paranoid about Chrysler products for a long time thereafter.

Note, however, that in all honesty the problem may actually have been the police radio installation under the dash that caused the problem.

Case #3 – 1957 Plymouth wagon with 3 on the tree. Police package. Victim of the “Dark Cloud” syndrome. Much of the time my boss didn’t like it and wanted me to take it home at night. Actually his motive was rather underhanded since that baby blue Plymouth was so innocent looking we used it for radar studies of traffic to see how peak hour traffic moved and I was tapped for the very early morning shift (4AM to 1PM).

Sure, that wagon moved. That was the beginning of Chrysler performance legends as far as I was concerned but not enough to erase my nervousness about their reliability. What came next, however, was really ironic.

As I noted, that wagon hauled all sorts of equipment for surveys throughout Marion County and on one fine day I heard what sounded like an exhaust leak. Taking it back to the garage, a head gasket leak was discovered. That led to my boss giving me a royal chewing out for abusing “his” car.

So I was in the doghouse for the next week after the Plymouth came back after being repaired. But, taking top boss Stanley’s Studebaker (remember, folks, this was INDIANA!) for my work, I never gave it a second thought until Pete came into the office soon after I had checked in before lunch to pick up something or other, and he looked sort of rumpled.

“Wassamatter, Pete?” somebody asked him.

“Aww, that Plymouth died on me out on Pennsylvania Street on the way down here.”

Now, did I suppress a giggle? Or a snort? Of course not. Would I do such a thing?

What was found out later was that the other bank of cylinders had blown its head gasket !

A year later, with more evening schooling and listening attentively at the Academy and having good coaching by friendlies at the Indiana State Police, I sort of fell into traffic safety. At the same time, I “inherited” that same ’57 Plymouth wagon, like it or not, since I was on call 24/7 for accident investigation and carried bags of stuff for same.

That’s when I found out that the old ’57 could very easily dust off the ISP’s 1958 Ford police interceptors. Well, actually I only heard it said. . .

Later still, the Bureau was issued wee, little Ramblers and all sorts of odd vehicles. But it didn’t matter, they had radios, so I could still make the appropriate collar when some clown decided to cut open a major street at peak hour. That’s when I usually needed a uniformed officer (sometimes 2!), the wagon as well as the Street Department to plate the hole.

After I left the city to go with an insurance company as a safety engineer, I got a 1966 Ford that was apparently built as a “striker’s revenge.”

After many complaints to a boss who said I just didn’t like Fords, the car was finally checked out by the investigative firm which does lengthy digging into cases involving high value insurance fraud.

You want careful, if not paranoid driving? I’d already driven this POS 40k miles and hadn’t so much as scratched it. My boss paid no attention to my gripes until one evening I was working late on paperwork in the office and the assistant Regional Manager asked for a ride home. He saw how the brakes sank clear to the floor every time but how I could pump them up. He almost had an involuntary bowel movement as we approached a red light as I held off stopping the car until the very last moment, but I stopped it very easily.

I’d had a lot of practice.

That’s when the assistant manager ordered me to park the Ford in front of my apartment so it could be towed away the next morning.

What they found was beebees in the brake lines, pickup rear brakes on one front wheel, station wagon front brakes on one rear wheel, non vented gas cap which caused the tank to collapse which led to a capacity of about 12 gallons, and on and on.

As a quickie replacement, I was given a stored, used, 1967 Fury II out of the St. Louis office. Somehow that car must have been an accidental fleet order because it came through with the 383 4-barrel!

Notwithstanding my fear of Chrysler products, nothing could be worse than that Ford, so I was happy to go back to trying to put 60k miles a year on something more reliable than a vehicle Found On Road Dead. And by strange coincidence, the insurance company I worked for insured the Indiana State Police. Thus, with typical logic, somebody said “you were with the City, let’s make this YOUR account to service” so I ran into old friends.

Guess what?

That ’67 383 could blow the doors off the ISPs Mercury Interceptors both in handling and flat out running (or so I’ve been told). . .

That was followed by a ‘69 Plymouth, another 1969 in the Milwaukee office and then I was transferred to Home Office in Hartford. All the while I kept my 1960 Mercedes 220Sb which I bought, used, in 1964, for the munificent sum of $2,200 from the budding Mercedes dealer in Indianapolis.

It wasn’t until 1979 that I got my next – and dearly beloved – Chrysler Cordoba, in Cadet Blue, with all the trimmings of September of that year. She was a dealer demo and I got that $14,000 car for less than half that, keeping it for 20 years in showroom condition with minimal effort.

In the interim, I bought an AMC Pacer with the big 258-6 and 4 speed. A real Q-ship that surprised a lot of people as that little bubble ran away from them. I gave it to my cousin John, a firefighter in NYC since he was a pedestrian (definition of a pedestrian: a man with 3 cars and wife and two daughters with drivers’ licenses). The Pacer became his city beater.

A very short while later, John returned the favor and I got his big 1982 Dodge B250 van/wagon which he’d recently put in a new torque converter when he got a ’94 Dodge Sherrod conversion. The 318 only had 125,000 miles on it and I’d been looking to buy a Dodge pickup, so the van was perfect. Now we were a perfect Mopar family with – would you believe? – my wife taking title to the van and driving it daily.

A cute but telling anecdote occurred when she took a bunch of her office buddies to lunch one day. It was mid-winter and snow was piled high. One of the women who drives a little Honda said: “So this is what it looks like over the snow banks” as she looked out from the high vantage point of the big Dodge.

For another point regarding perception – and this could be fatal for Chrysler:

We had bought a 1999, 5-speed, Dodge Stratus at the end of 1998 from a highly recommended dealer. There was no problem with the car whatsoever. We loved it. The little critter got 23mpg in town and 34 on the road. I even stopped doing my own oil changes and most maintenance on the van and took it to the dealer for work.

Then one day I was on the phone arranging for an oil change or whatever and some smartass said:

“THAT’S A 1982? AWW, YOU WANT PARTS . . .” and abruptly hung up to switch me over.

We never went back to Mitchell Dodge in Simsbury, Connecticut.

A short while later, another relative’s father needed to supplement his retirement income. His Ford pickup had crapped out, stopping his little upholstery business. I called and offered the big Dodge which he happily accepted.

I then sold the Stratus to our veterinarian and made a deal for an older, classic Cadillac for my wife. Meanwhile, to tow our PopUp RV, I cast about until I found a 1995 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham on eBay and bought it.

No more Mopars. Teutonic arrogance has filtered all the way down to the dealers and I want nothing more to do with them, was my motto.

But fate soon intervened and my wife had become a Moparnut without me knowing it. What had happened was that the classic Cadillac I was about to buy suddenly had strings attached and I quashed the deal. Now we were back to one car, the ’95 Cadillac my wife thought was simply too big at 225” long. Besides, she wanted another Chrysler product !

So we started looking and we found a 2000 Concorde with 70,000 miles on a used car lot in Massachusetts. But it had the dreaded 2.7 motor. Yet, a finger under the oil fill didn’t reveal any real gunk, nor did the car blow smoke as I followed it on a test run when she drove it. So we bought it. What followed next was truly funny.

On the way to the Connecticut DMV, my wife came off the highway and, as was her usual habit with the Stratus, “shifted from first to second.” The only problem was, as most of you know, the Stratus has a pull-up hand brake beside the shift lever while the Concorde has a step-on parking brake.

Of course!

The “clutch” was the parking brake and everything came to a screeching halt, right beside one of the largest shopping centers in the state with traffic building to a jam rapidly.

Pretty soon we had three squads around us thinking there had been a rear-ender with my wife frantically paging through the owner’s manual trying to find out how to release the parking brake.

The first officer asked me what the problem was. I told him what I thought might be the problem. He stepped to my wife’s car, verified the problem, and radioed his dispatcher to find out if anybody knew how to release the parking brake on a Concorde (“Uhh, negative”).

Soon, my wife found that inconspicuous bar at the very bottom of the left side of the dashboard and we were off and running as the officers got back in their squads, laughing.

Thus far that Concorde has had 3 oil changes with Mobil1 in 5,000 miles, just to be safe and ensure that the oil galleries are cleaned out. The car runs beautifully and gets, according to a spreadsheet, about 17 in town. Really not much better than the Cadillac. We haven’t taken it on the highway to get an accurate long-range reading, but the overhead indicator shows 33.

Bottom line: Note how PERCEPTION can make or break an entity.

When I had that 1967 Fury II, suddenly everybody in the Indianapolis office asked to have Plymouths as company cars when replacement time came up. That’s how much
“image” and satisfaction (Remember Packard’s slogan “Ask the man who owns one?”) means.

Plymouth also had that 7/70 warranty at the time which didn’t hurt a bit, either. Overall, however, the field personnel, the “Road Warriors” who put on 40 to 70 thousand miles yearly on their cars, realized how comfortable Chrysler products were over the road.

I had more than one fellow ask me about the ride of the Mopars and I described it as sort of like sitting in a rocking chair. The response was not favorable until I noted that those damned Fords tossed you from side to side until your ribs ached. Then you could see the little light bulb go on over the head of the guy you were talking to.

Now, if we could only get those at the top of the corporation to think like car guys and not purely pinchpenny bean counters and let that love of cars trickle down. Iacocca did it and look what happened, back when.