Word: mustanger
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...love affair with the automobile. He combined a knowledge of an automobile's innards with a shrewd, almost intuitive sense of what car buyers wanted. He stripped the plain-Jane body off Ford's dowdy Falcon and replaced it with a long-hood, short-rear-deck configuration called the Mustang that in 1964 set a record for automobile sales by a first-year model (418,000). Four years later he reached into Ford's spare-parts bin again and launched the limousine-like Continental Mark III on a Thunderbird chassis...
...Ford, lacocca dazzled buyers with the elan of a three-card monte dealer by spinning off the Mustang and Continental Mark series from existing chassis combinations. Now he is trying to do the same thing with virtually an entire line of cars. The $5,900 Dodge and Plymouth 1981-model K-cars begat the $8,100 1982 Chrysler LeBaron and Dodge 400, the $12,300 Chrysler LeBaron convertible (see box) and the 1983 Chrysler E Class and Dodge 600, which sell for $9,000 to $12,000. By stretching the K-car, he produced the luxury Chrysler New Yorker...
...seat Mercedes-Benz 380 SL that Chrysler has code-named the SL and will sell for about half the price. He is wagering an enormous amount, $700 million, that he can rekindle buyer interest in vans (see box). Chrysler claims the hybrid minivan will be as revolutionary as the Mustang...
...makers are now weighing in with competitively priced models of their own. Chevrolet, aiming at what General Manager Robert Stempel calls the "wind-in-the-face crowd," is planning to introduce a version of its Cavalier in May, probably priced between $10,000 and $12,000. Ford's Mustang was reissued in November as a smartly styled convertible for about $12,500 and was a big star in commercials during the Super Bowl. Early production problems have been ironed out, and Ford executives now foresee sales of 30,000 to 35,000 for their convertible...
Aside from the Mustang, LeBaron's only other Big Four counterpart already on the market is Buick's Riviera convertible, which came out in April. At about $25,000, the soft-top Buick is less a competitor than an elegant showpiece car, one of the most expensive built in America. Only about 2,000 have been sold...