Do you remember the first time Dad came home with a brand new car when you were a kid? The paint was perfect, the interior…oh, that smell!…how it all was? For a lot of people, that was the trigger that got them interested in cars: Someone brought a new vehicle home, the kid got interested, and there was a bonding session as the elder explained to the younger all about their new pride and joy sitting in the driveway. Such was the case for me right about the end of 1988. My grandfather’s ’84 Chrysler E-class just wasn’t working for him anymore, even though it had maybe 40,000 miles on it and looked like a million bucks to five-year-old me. So one crisp October day, we loaded up, drove down to Perkins Chrysler-Jeep in Colorado Springs, and we ended up driving away in a 1989 Chrysler New Yorker Landau very, very similar to the one featured in this Regular Car Review. All of the gadgetry was awesome in my young mind, the dash glowing, the seats moving every way I wanted with a push of the button, the trunk with the auto-down feature that I could take a nap in undetected and in full comfort. It was wonderful. He ended up owning that car through 1994, when he traded it in on a 1993 Chrysler Fifth Avenue.
This was perfection to me in 1988.
Fast-forward twenty-six years, and all I see are Ultradrive transaxle failures and the joys of Chrysler wiring systems. There isn’t much positive to say about a New Yorker of this era, but damn if they aren’t a plush car to drive when they are running right. Unless I end up in a place where I need a winter beater, I have no intention of ever adopting one of these things. But the guys at RCR look at it subjectively and don’t straight-up hammer the living hell out of the car, which is good, because when you’re a kid and that car is awesome, you don’t want to think about how much of a pile it truly can be.
