When the K-cars debuted, they grabbed ahold of a market that up until then Chrysler was avoiding like the plague: cheap, reliable basic transportation. And somehow, the success of the K-car managed to lift what just a couple of years prior looked like the Titanic ten minutes before breaking up out of the water and into not only the clear, but into profit. It’s easy to deride the cars now, thirty-something years later, but credit has to be given where credit is rightfully due.
That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t laugh at yourself. This spoof ad for a Dodge Aries has been around for years, but it does two things: it provides comedy, of course, but it also brought the car back into the minds of anyone I ever showed the video to. We all would love to bomb around in something with a blower sticking out of the hood or a Hellcat, but in the real world that shit just does not happen, so we make sacrifices. Honestly, for $200, I’d buy the Aries, tune it up, put a decent set of brakes, wheels and tires on it and drive the ever-loving hell out of it just because I could.
My first car was 88 Aries, tough car through college.