Saw this at a local estate sale this morning. Rough for sure, but looks to be all there. No idea if it runs. They were taking bids with the starting bid set at $1600. I do not know if it sold or what it sold for if it did. Not a large market for these, especially in this condition, I would think.
A desert car is a good start. The dash carpet and Mexican blanket seat covers don't do the selling a favor. The red leather needs a little greasing and eventual re-coloring, if the blanket-covered skin isn't torn already. If truly rust-free, it'd be a nice project. A red interior needs either silver, coral or white paint. Black sux, for this body style
I'm sure black was chosen simply for the unrippled sheetmetal during assembly. But I owned a '75, it was fairly loaded, but it did not have the console, console shifter, and what appears to be a gauge cluster. Those three items IMHO warrant someone getting it to restore it.
View attachment 57309 I beg your pardon! Black cars with red interiors are fantastic color combinations, witness my old (actual 79) Cordoba in black with red leather and T-tops. It took me a couple of years to find the good red interior pieces but the door panels were finally dyed red from tan.
Thank you! I wondered about the year of the estate sale car. The only reason I called it a '79 in the title of this thread is because the estate sale listed it as a '79, and I'm not familiar enough with these cars to know the difference. However, it should have occurred to me that pretty much all manufacturers had gone away from round headlights by 1979. I did some looking at Chrysler brochures, and the estate sale car is a '76. The cars were very similar-looking for '75 through '77 with round headlights, but the grills were different. Only the '76 had plain vertical bars. The '75 and '77 models had horizontal bars mixed in with the vertical bars. I've adjusted the title of this thread accordingly. The estate sale car: Here's a '76 from Wikipedia: 1975 Cordoba: 1977 Cordoba:
The estate car brings back memories of driving around seeing Cordoba's missing one or both tail light lens's. If I remember correctly there are no screws holding the lens to the assembly, just epoxy, and when it got a couple of years old became brittle and when you went over rough rail road tracks they tended to "POP" off. When the cars were 4 to 5 years old about 1/2 of them were missing a tail light lens.
Look at the difference. The round headlights gave the car an identity. I wonder what the designers were trying to do, by rectangularing off the front end to make it hardly distinguishable from other manufacturers' products. Did Chrysler simply fire expensive designers, to replace them with unemployed bank architechts?
I have to agree that the switch to stacked rectangular headlights caused the Cordoba to lose some of its distinctiveness. It doesn't look that much different from the '77 Chevy Monte Carlo.
I looked into changing mine to round headlamps and the 76 grille but the entire inner structure put the fender bolts in a different location. Any car that kept round headlamps after 1976 had a huge slump in sales, modern sells cars as well as fashion. (Also why 4th year with too similar styling on cars would see a drop in sales.)The big loser without round headlamps was the Jeep Wrangler ( I think it was the YJ), The Daisy Duke style Jeeps did NOT sell well so round headlamps came back. I also had to hand make seals to get the tops to stop leaking, they weren't pretty but the car stayed dry.
If you're going to change the car around that much, might as well just go buy a '76. It doesn't surprise me that Jeep buyers wanted round headlights. Jeeps are iconic vehicles, and everyone expects them to look a certain way, which is they way looked in World War II. Doesn't matter that it's 40 or 50 years later.
The 1976 Cordoba is still for sale. According to the newspaper, the current bid on the car is $1000, and it will be sold finally at auction at 2 p.m. (Mountain time) this Saturday, December 16.
