At $16,000, Is This 1978 Chrysler LeBaron A Muscle Car Worth The Money?
If you want to move quickly but still look weird, then today’s Nice Price or No Dice LeBaron might be the car for you. Its incongruous mix of a potent mill and landau roof makes it a funky choice. Let’s see how much funk its price adds.
Time Magazine Turned Lee Iacocca’s Face Into an Automotive Work of Art
The great unknown can be a scary thing. That has led only the bravest — or most — explorers to lead the discovery of new lands. The same can be said when it comes to buying cars. In the automotive world, history is king, and jumping into a car, especially a model as complicated and as historically persnickety as last Friday’s 2004 Ferrari 360 Spider, without getting its detailed life story can lead to tragedy. That, however, is just what the seller of Friday’s otherwise fantastic-looking Ferrari asked buyers to do. A $79,000 price tag reflected both that lack of immediate historical background and the car’s less desirable F1 transmission. Both of those issues conspired to swap the Spider in a 62 percent No Dice loss.
Do you own a flag? Perhaps a traditional stars and stripes that you pull out for patriotic holidays? Or maybe you have a college banner from your alma mater that you unfurl on game days. But what about your Freak Flag? When and how do you let that one fly?
One way to do so would be with this 1978 Chrysler LeBaron coupe muscle car. This model of car is, after all, one funky monkey of a choice for building a stroker-powered stoplight contender.
Chrysler introduced the LeBaron in late 1977 as a tarted-up edition of the Dodge Aspen in the hopes of gaining some of the chi-chi market that Cadillac had created with the recently introduced Seville. Even though differentiated by a unique “M body” classification, visually, the sedans weren’t all that different from their lower-tier Aspen brethren.
The coupes are another story, riding on the four-door’s wheelbase rather than the shorter span of the Aspen coupes and gaining both a unique roofline and a far more sculpted trunk lid.
This generation of LeBaron would continue in production until the 1981 model year, after which Chrysler moved the nameplate to the smaller FWD K-Car platform. The larger, rear-drive M-body cars would quietly carry on under various New Yorker and Fifth Avenue model names until finally being dropped after the 1989 model year.
There doesn’t seem to be anything quiet about this LeBaron coupe. The noise starts with the color scheme. That’s arrest-me red with a black half-landau roof and black-painted five-slot Mag-style wheels. Accenting the appearance is a ton of factory chrome and a hood that features a big-ass double nostril scoop and a pair of ancillary gauges mounted right in the driver’s line of sight. All of this is framed with some Von Dutch-style pin striping, including a tramp stamp on the boo-tay.
The pinstriping extends to the engine bay, tarting up the radiator support in the front. Behind that sits a stroker 360, pushed out to 408 cubic inches and wearing a double-pumper four-barrel and tubular exhaust headers. The skeleton flipping the bird on the air intake top hat is a nice touch, as is the fire extinguisher, the presence of which leads one to believe that this car’s build was pretty well thought out.
That care extends to the cabin where the builder has laudably left everything alone save for the 727’s shifter. It’s clean and chromed and seemingly all in good shape. The only issue here is some seam splitting on the driver’s side bucket seat. HVAC controls remain in the dash but it appears that the car’s A/C and heater have both been given the heave-ho. That might rightfully make this a two-season car.
Regardless of the season, this LeBaron comes with a clean title and a whole bunch of new bushings and steering components already doing duty on the car. The ad claims 400 miles on the clock which might just mean since the stroker’s install since that’s described as “fresh.”
So, this is a weirdly wonderful and extremely eclectic choice for a muscle car. What could that possibly be worth? The asking is $16,000 and I know that there are Mopar maniacs in the crowd that are already salivating over the prospect of owning this. What about the rest of us? Could that price tag really reflect this odd-bodkin of a car’s real value? Or, does that make this LeBaron le bad deal?
You decide!
Buffalo, New York, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
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