Regular Car Reviews: 1980 Dodge Aspen

this is a 1980 Dodge Aspen for you girl give you some stars the deep but I'll never let you try my dodge a speeding car just to love you that's bridge two if you want to understand why Chrysler is no longer the innovative company it was in the 1990s all you have to do is look at the Dodge Aspen the mistakes Chrysler is making right now are the exact same ones that were making in the late 1970s and very early 1980s all right right this may say 1980 on the VIN plate right but this is clearly a mid 70s design the wood trim the acres of brown the square analog speedometer and that rotten embarrassing sadistic slant-6 engine that makes who cares it makes 80 horsepower for all we know not since the Plymouth Prowler has a combination of so many automotive parts let so many people down when the Aspen was new in 1976 you could get it with a 5.9 liter v8 but then that went away and this slant-6 engine peaks at about 3,600 rpm don't worry we're going to come back to this engine in a bit alongside its twin the Plymouth Volvo is one of these names that no matter how you pronounce that someone's gonna tell you you're doing it wrong Volare I'll stick with that the Aspen failed this almost bankrupted Chrysler it failed hard it failed completely in its own time it was a bomb not seen since the Manhattan Project this thing failed harder than Smith & Wesson mountain bikes life savers soda Coors Rocky Mountain spring water Sony Betamax the XFL had failed harder than the presidency of William Henry Harrison or the first assassination attempt on Archduke Franz Ferdinand a man whom fate demanded to be killed its status as a recall nightmare was mostly due to early body rusts and some generally or construction under the hood the recalls were for everything from emission controlled systems to seatbelt retractors however the aspen was still touted as the family car of the future with its big comfort and relatively low cost one of the things the aspen can do is sit six people this is one thing thanks to safety regulations we will never see again bench seats in the front and the back the aspen also had front suspension with torsion bars situated crosswise instead of lengthwise a transverse bars made for better suspension isolation which meant a smoother less : rupturing ride an FM stereo was an option this car has an AM radio and that's it now with most engines you have your intakes on one side your intake runners depending on what you want to call it your intake runners on one side and your exhaust headers on the other side but the slant six in the Dodge Aspen has intake and exhaust on the same side of the cylinder it alternates kind of intake exhaust intake exhaust intake exhaust does that mean what that means that when your air is coming into the cylinder it gets nice and hot from the exhaust that's coming out right next to it the last thing you want is hot intake air Oh real fart and if that's not enough the car is carbureted because of course it's carbureted they could have put the carburetor anywhere they could put it on the other side of the engine bay but no I've got an idea let's put the carburetor right on top of the exhaust headers what does that mean well if your carburetor gets nice and hot you get this thing called vapor lock which doesn't happen anymore now here's the fun part you'll like this but since it's a slant six the carb is basically on the exhaust oh so it's warm when it's warm at vapor locks you got a floor it and crank crank crank crank crank crank crank crank and when it starts up you guys do have Frodo but the root of the Aspen's problems late night with the car but with the think toilet that created it was a group of self-congratulatory men who sat around with their slacks around their ankles measuring each other's dicks using a ruler that had inch markers just a little bit too close together and they nodded to each other and then look to the public with garbage smiles and said it gets great gas mileage in commercials they got Rex Harrison Rex Harrison who was nominated for an Academy Award in 1963 for playing in English Julius Caesar and Cleopatra and won the Academy Award for Best Actor the following year in my fair lady he did a commercial for the Dodge Aspen where he turned up the British 22.8 SFU this is the lowest low point of Chrysler this is the official car of asbestos and unfiltered cigarettes the Dodge Aspen is for a man who's seen some things and he sips Boileau while coasting along route 78 on a desperate journey to forget Aspen is a motorized Merv Griffin special that runs off of 87 and hooker spit uh-huh oh the world must know the world must blow oh who is on here George Patrick George Jalopnik we'd like for the brown and I take it at Talladega my poop is going on a walk that was a real fun this is a wheel call pray Gillette is the razor that I'm holding front of me sometimes it's and yet I cannot help but offer this counterpoint it's aged well it's so horrible it starts to come around again it's like an old beat-up turntable that for some reason you prefer to use over some modern unit the owner of this car bought it from Florida and brought it here to Pittsburgh and it fits in with this city so well he's gonna swap out the engine at some point sure but parked up next to modern economy cars the Dodge Aspen looks dignified because it's not trying to be fast it's not attempting to be revolutionary it's like watching old footage from a football team during a rebuilding year it's nowhere near as painful over 20 years on the Dodge Aspen makes arriving a victory and I've never driven a car that was so much fun at 15 miles an hour man I mean this thing if we had this when we were lost downtown otherwise no big deal right just this one finger steering lalala you're as isolated as could be yeah still driving can we just do one more lap of this ah so if your listen anybody from Chrysler what I see happening right now is the exact same thing you were doing in the late 1970s and you can make all the references to the Grumman fighter from world war ii you want you don't have really good small cars yes you have the dark we said it before and here it comes again and I know this is proselytizing and Iacocca said it himself to Charlie Rose out of Chrysler wants to come back if we want to take you seriously again you have to start making small cars that Americans want to buy because all the heritage and nostalgia in the world doesn't mean a thing if the value of my car belly flops the second I pull out of the lot we were just regular folks trying to tell regular jokes but this quarry touched our hearts a spin and spin well is your nada darn

Channel: RegularCars

Views: 707,271

Rating: 4.8732352 out of 5

Keywords: Regular Car Reivews, 1980 Dodge Aspen, Aspen, Dodge Aspen, Dodge Apen Review, Chrysler

Id: wGnMVijx5GE

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 25 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

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[u/[deleted]]

The mass market cars in the seventies are so hideously forgettable that I almost like them.

[u/[deleted]]

In terms of meat, this was the best video yet

[u/Jaing008]

So did Mr Regular announce something to do with Jalopnik while on the pooper?

[u/Oglethorppe]

Isnt the Chrysler Aspen an SUV? Did they just reuse the name?

[u/backwoodsofcanada]

I really liked the comparison he made to modern Dodge here. Chrysler has never really had it down with the small car game, except maybe with the K Cars, but even those weren't great, they just sold really well for reasons I'll never understand.

The Dart isn't a bad car. As a matter of fact, it's actually a pretty good car. Sure, it's large for a compact car, I think I read somewhere that some governments actually classify it as being a mid sized sedan and not a compact car. See, Chrysler is trying to use that as a selling point, "Hey guys, our compact car has such a massive interior that it's actually classified as a mid sized car, yet we're still targeting the compact market!" This is their problem. They should be trying to sell it as an intermediate car, or even just a small mid size like what the Avenger was. Go read any review of the Dart. The biggest complaint is the size and weight of the thing. See, people who buy small cars don't want a small car trying to be a big car, they want a small car that actually feels small. This isn't the mid 1970s any more, saying you have the largest car in your class isn't always a positive thing. What the Dart needs is, hear me out on this, one of the V6s. It doesn't even need to be the 300hp one out of the new 200, the Cherokee has a 3.2L one that makes something like 275 which should be lots for a Dart. We know those engines can fit in the Darts platform, because it's actually really similar to both the 200 and Cherokee. Maybe not in its current iteration, but the Dart is due for a mid cycle update any day now and figuring out how to fit a V6 in there could be beneficial. Even with the 184hp 2.4L, the Dart feels like a bit of a dog. And it's just as heavy as many of the mid sizers on the market, plus now that the Avenger is gone, Dodge doesn't really have anything to fill the mid size slot.

See, as a Point A to Point B tool, the Dart is a great car. They're good on gas, and so far there haven't been any major recalls or reliability issues with them, they're good looking, and they armed overly expensive either. As an enthusiast vehicle though? Don't even bother. The 1.4L with the 6 speed manual is kinda fun, but it's still pretty underpowered for its size. I think Dodge saying "we have the only V6 powered compact" or "The smallest and lightest mid size" would sell way better in today's market than saying "we have the largest compact car".

Like I said, the Dart is due for a refresh pretty soon and we'll even be seeing a new generation sometime around 2017 if rumors are to be believed. Plus there's been confirmation that an SRT version is coming, and given recent events with SRT, the high performance Dart could even be an STI slayer... but they're gonna need to do some serious work before any of that becomes a reality.

[u/Fever104]

Let Deano show you how to pronounce Volare'

[u/[deleted]]

I love the look of this car. In 1980 I would have bought it. I really miss the squared lines, perpendicular glass, bench seats, column shifting nd small blindspots of cars like this. Put a better engine and replace the brown interior with black to make it great. Rectangle speedometers are awesome...you can really see them well.

[u/keirasocks]

It was just vapor lock!