The worst Dodge, Chrysler, and Jeep re-used names

Hi there, this is Motel's Dave. I'm here to talk about the worst reuses of Mopar names on actual Mopars

Probably the worst reuse is the Dodge Aspen coming back as the Chrysler Aspen

Now, the Dodge Aspen was in some ways quite a nice car in that it took the old Valiant that had been around for a long time

It gave it a more comfortable ride. It gave it a much more upmarket interior

It did a lot of things well. but it was also very poorly tested, brought out a year before it should have been brought out

early rust out, all sorts of little problems, rattles, shakes, things breaking

Aspen was not a name that you'd think Chrysler would want to remember, but they brought it back for a Chrysler SUV based on a Dodge Durango

Why did they do that? Who knows? Another one, which is somewhat less awful, is the LeBaron

and here you have an imperial name for the absolute top car

Chrysler could make, and you bring it down and you slap it onto a version of the Aspen and Valari

The first compact Chrysler was the Chrysler-Liberin, and that was the name taken not so long ago

from the Imperial, the Hornet. So we have the famous Hudson Hornet. This is a full-size luxury

car with a really hot six-cylinder engine, a straight six, and the big thing about that was that

They had a dual carburetor option with two two-barrel carburetors, and they really optimized that engine for power

and the Hornet went out, and it dominated NASCAR for a while, as shown in the movie Cars from Pixar

And how did it come back? Well, it came back first on a economy car, the AMC Hornet

and then it came out on the Dodge Hornet, which is based on the Afro-Mail-Tenali

which is based on the Jeep Compass, which is based on the Dodge Dart, which is based on the Afromeo-Jolietta

Hornet is a great name. But if the current one doesn't have that much in common

other than aspiring to high performance and it's got great handling, and then you look at the original full-size Hudson Hornet

luxury car and you say, oh, okay, you're probably expecting me to say

that the current Dodge Hornet is the worst reuse of the name Hornet

and I'm not going to, that was the AMC Hornet. It was originally a full-sized car

and now for 1970 to 77 it was an economy car, and a compact at that they sold the hornet for less than two thousand dollars and let buyers choose two six cylinders a one ninety nine or two thirty two and the two the 232 at an optional two barrel that brought it to 155 brake horsepower which would be roughly 100 net horsepower

To get to the Hudson Hornet level, you really needed the Hornet SST, which had an optional

304 cubic inch V8, which made the Hornet, which was fairly light, kind of quick, as in zero

to 16, 10 seconds, and it only produced 210 break horsepower. which made it similar to the Economy 318 over at Chrysler

But it was really an economy car, not a sports car or luxury car

We have the Dodge Stealth. And that was a rebadged Mitsubishi. It was a true sports car, quite expensive, quite powerful if you got the turbo version

Not so much if you got the regular V6. Still pretty quick for the standards of the day

And they're talking about bringing that back as an all-electric Chrysler crossover

One which I think a lot of auto riders would bring up is the Dodge Challenger, the fire-breathing muscle car that was designed to be a fire-breathing muscle car from the start

It was engineered to accommodate the biggest, most powerful engines Chrysler had

And today they're quite valuable. The 70-74 Challenger, which is very similar to the 70-74 Barracuda, they did not sell well at all

and eventually they came back as a Mitsubishi, a compact Mitsubishi, a compact four-cylinder Mitsubishi

Now, they were pretty quick for their time, but still slapping on the Dodge Challenger name to those Mitsubishi's

was maybe not the best decision that they ever made. Next up, as long as we're talking about muscle

let's talk about the charger, this beautiful intermediate or mid-size sports car

always a two-door, very beautifully styled, very, very popular for a while

And what do they do with them? Well, they run out of money for a separate body

so they slapped a nameplate onto the Chrysler Cordova. And there were precious few differences from the outside

between a Cordoba and a Charger SE. And then, just to make sure

they took the Charger SE when that was done, when that had run its unpopular course

they eventually stuck the Charger name onto a 2.2-liter version of the Dodge Omni spin-off, the O2-4

Let's go back even further. Worst reuse of a name was Chrysler when they applied it to the old Maxwell Because here you have this really revolutionary advanced new Chrysler car Well maybe not revolutionary but definitely a major step of evolution

And what do they do? They say, oh, you know that old Maxwell that's been limping along that we've

basically fixed up as well as we can? The one that has mechanical brakes and a kind of primitive

engine that we didn't design, let's slap the Chrysler name onto it. They did that in mid-1925

and by 1927 they decided, oops, that was a bad idea. And so for 1928, the Plymouth was born

The Plymouth was just another evolution of the Chrysler 4, which was an evolution of the Maxwell

and that took this low-price car away from Chrysler. All right, now some people are also going to come out

and say that the Dodge Dart was a muscle car, which I guess it was, if you got the Dart Sport with the 340

but the vast majority were Slant-6 economy cars. There are just so many slant six darts made in so few high-performance darts of any kind, 3-83 engine, 340 engine, whatever

So not really thought of as a muscle car primarily then. It was an economy car

So I'm not going to really keep it in the running for worst reuse when we talk about the 2013 Dodge DART

Because that was really following in the original's footsteps to a large degree

it was a slightly larger than most compact car. It had engines that were in line with the competition

It was basically in the same category as the original dart. And if they had made an SRT version

then it would have been a really good reuse of the name because, yeah, no rear-wheel drive, I get it

But it was still the same class of car with different technologies

New Yorker, I'm not so sure about, the E-Class New Yorker really doesn't come close to the old R-body New Yorker or the C-body New Yorker

but understanding where the company was coming from, I can sort of forgive that. Sort of, but on the other hand, I also have to think that the C-body and the R-body New Yorkers

were built on a body that was really engineered to be a Chrysler, and the E-Class was just a

stretched Plymouth Reliant. The Monaco, the 80s Monaco, that was a Renault for heaven's sake

It wasn't even a Chrysler vehicle. What it had in common with Real Dodge Monaco

not all that much. It was a fairly big car, so there was that

It was nicely appointed. You know I could live with it being a Monaco overall Now then we get to the Jeeps and that a little tougher because you have two of them that came back the Cherokee and the Wagonier Original XJ Cherokee way ahead of everybody else

in terms of general design and some of the technologies. It was just an amazing vehicle. It was a

once-in-a-lifetime achievement, just unbelievable. A good, comfortable, quite competitive, on-road vehicle. I could handle very tough off-road trails. Had an excellent, advanced four-by-forces

that was easy to use, and it had amazing ground clearance, but it wasn't that high off the ground

So they managed to keep the door sills and the floor fairly low while having all the important underneath bits quite high up

and that required a lot of ingenuity. It was a very, very clever vehicle. It was surprisingly lightweight for what it was. It was amazingly lightweight

It was just an unbelievable achievement to Cherokee, the old XJ Cherokee

And then we have the current Cherokee, which is no longer made

can handle the portions of the Rubicon that Chrysler preserved at Chelsea just after it bought AMC

for testing new jeeps on. If you bought the trail-rated Cherokee, it was quite off-road competent

The problem is that they made all those not-trail-rated Cherokees, too, which kind of dilute the

whole thing that had no skid plates. It didn't really live up to the name. And the original

Wagoner was, again, in some ways, a technology tour to force, in that it had the first indexed

independent front suspension of any 4x4. It had an automatic transmission, the first 4 by 4 with an

automatic. And it was a big comfortable wagon. Kaiser Jeep relentlessly advertised that it was two

vehicles and one. It was a luxury wagon and it was also an off-road vehicle. The current

wagon here is a beautiful luxury car inside. On the other hand, when you come to off-road prowess

I have no idea because Jeep just doesn't talk about it. They don't release it. I don't believe that

they have skid plates on the wagon here, and I really would be reluctant to take one off-road

even though the RAM platform, the RAM-1500, can be a great off-road vehicle, as the Rebel shows

So those are my candidates for the worst reuses of Mopar names by Chrysler itself

Do you have one that's worse? Let me know. Do you disagree with my judgment? Let me know that

too. It's in the comments. That you might be interested in buying a century of Chrysler

are now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Apple Books

A Century of Chrysler by David Zatz. And with that, I'll sign off