Chrysler had great success selling rear-wheel drive vehicles B-Body car family in the 1960s and 1970s, with famous muscle machines like charger, Road runner, Super Bee, Superbirdand Daytona (not to mention Cordoba is so elegant) was riding on platform B. Bread and butter Chrysler Bs were average midsize sedans with Tilt-6 and small displacement V8s, and today Junkyard Gems is one of those cars: a 1973 Dodge Coronet Custom.
The ’73 Coronet is basically the same car as satellite ’73 Plymouth, with a few more luxurious and convenient features, and a correspondingly higher price tag. You could also say it’s the sedan version of charger. This is the second ’73 Coronet Custom I’ve found in a Denver area yard in the past year, after this very brown example we admired last summer.
It’s frustrating when I find the two Satellite brothers full of cheap trim, because my group of 24 Hours of Lemons just finished build a very precise copy belong to California Governor Jerry Brown’s Famous ’74 Satellites and we went crazy trying to find the debris.
Custom was the highest trim level for the Coronet in 1973, and you can get one with a V8 for a starting price of $3,129 (about $20,650 in 2022 dollars). The cheapest Satellite sedan could be $2,824 that year. While, GM provided Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu and it Pontiac Luxury LeMans siblings with four-door and eight-cylinder for $3,013 and $3,344, respectively. Ford can put you in a fitted V8 Sedan Gran Torino for $3,140 that year.
However, Chrysler delivered something that GM and Ford couldn’t match: LA-series small displacement V8 engine. To be sure, the quality of Chrysler’s electrical components is much lower than what you’ve seen at GM and Ford cars at the time, and the Chrysler B-Body still had the old-fashioned torsion bar/rear leaf spring front suspension, but the 318-inch Chrysler V8 combined better than any rival’s V8. . at the time (in fact, Chrysler continued to do 318s– later called Magnum 5.2— until model year 2002). If this is the 318 that came with the car when it rolled assembly line on Lynch Street in Detroit, then it is rated as 150 hp. I bet it would still run now if fueled with gas and starter power. At the end of 1973, certain geopolitical events may have made the car’s original buyer wish they could afford the fuel-aspirated Slant-6, despite its 105hp, or maybe even a Colt instead of a Coronet.
The vehicle’s registration documents show that it has a valid Colorado card as recent as 2018. Here’s an overhead photo of its old Denver address.
Even with the V8 in your new 1973 Coronet Custom, the base transmission is still a tree transformation manual. If you want a manual four-speed manual, you’d have to shell out an extra $202 (that’s about $1,333 in 2022 dollars), and a four-deck Coronet sedan would be great. Even so, even 49 years ago, most American drivers insisted on automatic transmissions in new car, and that’s what this car is all about. This three-speed Torqueflite slide box costs $211, or about $1,392 today.
Once you’ve spent that kind of money on a V8 and an automatic, why not shell out $65 (about $429 today) for a single-speaker AM radio? Some AM hits of 1973 to be well worth paying that kind of money for (Yes Yes, #first the song that year was Tony Orlando and Dawn schmaltzfestbut you can always change stations as it appears).
Long hoods looked cool in the early 1970s, so this car has two feet between the grille and the engine.
There’s some rust in the usual places, nothing to frighten Wisconsin or New Hampshire residents, and the interior has been charred by decades in the Denver sun. Detroit’s sedans of the early 1970s didn’t deserve to be restored when they reached this state, and that’s why this car did. a yard just south of Denver at this time.
Packs of fermented wet cigarette butts will give this car a pungent smell in warm weather, but I’ve shot this car in sub-freezing temperatures and it’s not that bad.
I couldn’t find the Coronet 1973-1974 TV commercial online, but this one for Satellite TV gives you the idea.
