(You) buy you a k-car (a nice reliant automobile)…

NMNA

1981 Plymouth Reliant K-Car - $800 (Douglasville)

YOU, Buy this before my wife gets sad because it ended up at my house.

In reply to Gasoline :

Atlanta. Of course.

Extra points for an early BNL reference. Even more extra points for a "HEMI 2.6" badge. Talk about emasculating a legendary name...

Reminds me of a friend who worked for a GM dealership. Any time they got a turd on the lot that wouldn't sell, they drove it over to detailing and added a few hundred dollars worth of pinstriping. Then it would sell. In this case, just a hemi badge. Since I know the dodge, I will pass.

The Hemi badge was a factory piece.

Terrible, terrible idea along with adding air injection holes to the Mitsubishi 2.6L “Hemi” engine they used.

Chrysler at the time was struggling and they were trying to bridge the gap from their older stuff and customers.  Yet no one thought that selling a Japanese powered Chrysler with Hemi badges on it to mostly older people who still had memories of fighting said Japanese or of their parents fighting said Japanese might have been a bad idea.

Weirdly, it worked as the K-car did sell pretty well (once they ditched the 2.6L they ruined for the 2.2/2.5L they sorta ruined with terrible carburetor) and they used that architecture for nearly 15 years until the Neon/Cloud cars came along to replace them.

I would be tempted to add it to my K-wag fleet if it was closer.  Especially since  I have the Dodge Aries and the Chrysler T&C  plus this is the early one with the pop out wing windows on the rear doors.

The K cars came with 2.2 engines from the very start, BTW.  The 2.6 was an option. 

But not a real blue dress, that's cruel.

If I had a million dollars........

I am fairly certain that the 2.6 was the mitsu motor. The 2.2/2.5 were the moparian engines sourced from somewhere else. 

bobzilla said:

I am fairly certain that the 2.6 was the mitsu motor. The 2.2/2.5 were the moparian engines sourced from somewhere else. 

The 2.2/2.5 were in-house designed and built by Chrysler.  Not sourced from anywhere.

The 2.6 was the Mitsubishi motor, but Chrysler added "Jet" holes which weakened the heads and made them prone to cracking and failing.

https://www.allpar.com/mopar/22.html

https://www.allpar.com/mopar/22t.html

https://www.allpar.com/fix/26.html

I thought these cars were turds back in the 80's and now after all these years I just see them as old turds.

T.J. said:

I thought these cars were turds back in the 80's and now after all these years I just see them as old turds.

Compared to the rest of the "Big 3" they were at least trying.

No where near as good as Toyota or Honda of the time, obviously, then again none of the other "Big 3" were either.

I NEED THIS SO BAD

First year! I actually see this as a historically significant car. This is pretty much the archetype of modern platform sharing. At one point i counted 28 models based on the K architecture. The original K-cars also had an absurdly good volume/weight ratio. They were kinda huge inside for what they weighed. The proliferation of small turbocharged 4 cylinders in place of v6s in many applications (even minivans?). An idea ahead of its time, now the norm. 

The 2.6 really does have a hemispherical combustion chamber. It even has decent headflow. If it had high compression and a real cam like a 1970 426, it probably would make around 200hp. Its stock performance was pretty much par for the course of the period. They did put them in Starion/Conquests with a Turbo, which were far faster than any v8 mopar had concurrently in production in the late 80s. 

In case you can't get past the 2.6....

Does this one talk? "A door is ajar" - that one always confused me. Why is a door also a jar?

That Hemi badge alone is worth the price of admission.