If the day ever comes that I find myself in possession of a winning lottery ticket that is of a substantial amount, I will be doing one of these builds, just for the freak factor alone. It’s been on my mind for decades, ever since my brain grasped the concept of what the Chrysler LH platform was all about. “You mean that cab-forward, looks cool but is just above hot garbage thing they sold in the 1990s?” Yeah, that one. I remember when they came out…to hell with your flying potato Ford, Chrysler stole the show with the initial LH triplets, the Chrysler Concorde, the Dodge Intrepid, and the Eagle Vision, and rode on the success with the Chrysler New Yorker and Chrysler LHS. It was almost an overnight sensation…suddenly, it seemed like everybody owned a Chrysler product instead of a Taurus. But they aged like milk, left out in the sun in a Phoenix parking lot in August. The looks are still cool, but the guts just didn’t hold up. The second generation wasn’t any better, really…more swoopy, but the infamous 2.7L time-bomb V6 really spoiled that party.

The beauty of the LH cars was that when it was designed out of the Eagle Premier/Dodge Monaco/Renault R25 chassis that had been a legacy platform brought in from American Motors when Chrysler acquired them in 1987. The Premier/Monaco were sold to fulfill the contract with Renault while work began on replacing the endless stream of stretched, widened and tarted-up K-cars that had become an Iacocca hallmark. The one notable thing about the LH platform was that it utilized a standard engine layout in a front-drive package, much like GM did with their larger front-drivers from the 1960s and 1970s. The platform originally had been intended to support front wheel drive, rear wheel drive and even all-wheel-drive, which means that with little work, you can rear-drive swap one.

Don’t judge me. The LH cars are roughly a quarter-ton lighter than the LX cars and have better aero. Tell me you wouldn’t rock a 440-powered Dodge Intrepid.