Unless you were pulled over by one or found yourself stuffed into the back of one, chances are very good that you don’t know what the hell that slab-sided ode to awful is in that picture. In this case, it’s a 1981 Plymouth Gran Fury, an ex-cop machine at that. It’s an R-body Mopar, which means that this Fury, along with the Dodge St. Regis, Chrysler Newport and it’s upscaled New Yorker sibling, is one of two things: the last car to be underpinned by the B-body chassis and one of the biggest flops of Chrysler Corporation in the 1970s. Yes, underneath the blocky body was the same chassis that had appeared in 1962 more or less, and yes, this thing flopped hard. Chrysler had tried to duplicate what GM had done with the downsized 1977 B-body cars, but instead of making them look lighter and nimbler, they made them look like Sherman tanks by comparison. No wonder President Carter slammed Chrysler’s management team as “incompetent”…they were at the time.
Now, why would I bring up one of the few Mopars from the era I actually don’t like up on BangShift? Let’s go back to 2002-03. I’m a young soldier at Fort Hood with friends, several of whom are car geeks. We all like making runs to Austin for some libations on the weekend, and none of us want to put the few hundred miles per trip onto the vehicles. A few of us also have concerns involving drunk friends and interior cleaning…with good reasons. It pretty much boiled down to drawing straws out of people who really wanted to go party as to who was risking their ride that weekend. 
One day, while my buddy Joe and I were out and about, we found ourselves at a buy-here-pay-here lot looking at a slate-gray Chrysler Newport in similar condition to this Fury. It was a 360 car, it ran, and a brief trip up the road and back said it’d stay together for maybe a month before we needed to do something major. We knew it needed tires, we knew the car was beat beyond beat, but with a price tag of $550, we found ourselves weighing the options. We considered going in half on the car, and using the Newport as our Austin sled. So long as it drove, we didn’t care what happened to it. We even considered painting it black and white like a CHP car, running homemade side pipes and fitting it with off-road tires and chrome-spoke wheels for a psychotic hillbilly look. It was a good idea in theory, but it never came to be after discussion with some other friends kept bringing up the same note: “Are you two stupid?!” Lord only knows what our command team would’ve thought seeing the Newport parked in the lot.
In retrospect, that car would’ve been a money pit and eventually, would’ve probably wound up abandoned somewhere in a training area for a tank to shoot at. But at the moment, we had a good plan, we thought. At least we were smart enough to not act immediately. So that’s the story of the battle barge that almost came to be. Got any bad decisions that you almost fell victim to?
eBay Link: 1981 Plymouth Gran Fury A38
Buying a hippie van. I can’t remember the details of it but I’m sure it had a tacky flip up moon roof, bumper stickers that said, “Don’t Laugh, Your Daughter Might Be In Here” & “If This Van’s Rockin, Don’t Come Knockin” and those God awful, cheap full length running boards.