These were not the cars provided by the manufacturers, they were picked up
at the local dealer just the same as the car you would have test drove.

I recall the article mentioning that because some of the manufacturers
would, as you describe, provide cars that were 'doctored' with non standard
equipment or mislabeled engines (i.e. a Nova with 305 stickers on the air
cleaner that was obviously a ss350).

When Chrysler Corp extended their warranty to 5 years they did have a lot of
claims but I don't think that ... reliability... was any different than any
other car of the era. In the mid-later 70's all cars were garbage and that
really did not improve till the later 80's when the US manufacturers finally
went to multi-port fuel injection.

My '86 T-Bird with throttle body injection had the same engine but with 50%
less power compared with my elder daughter's MPI '88 Cougar.

As bad as reliability was in American cars if you had a foreign car it was a
joke (or you were a hippie and drove a VW) Being 'Made in America" used to
mean it was a quality product and "Made in Japan's meant it was junk.

Things changed as the Asians learned quickly that Americans wanted larger
and more powerful cars that were dependable. Detroit met that challenge by
engineering and designing ugly cars that could not me made to run right
unless you broke off the limiter caps, drilled out the lead plug, adjusted
the carburetor to run on the cra**y gas they were now selling, and the
replaced the limiter cap with one available at any auto parts store so it
would pass the visual portion of the emissions test.

This was, of course, illegal but a 'real mechanic' (as opposed to a
technician) could get cars to run but not stay within the letter of the law.

We can check with Bill as to the particulars as it was in this era that he
ran the Chevron Garage.

PS


Who remembers the Honda 600?


> wrote in message
ups.com...
>
>
>>
>> For example somewhere around 1970 one of the car magazines went around to
>> the Chrysler, Plymouth, and Dodge dealers and took standard
>> 'demonstrators'
>> for a test ride to their local speed shop.
>>
>> The Hemi engines rated at 425 hp by Chrysler all put out 500+ horsepower
>> on
>> the dynos and the engines had not even been broken in.
>>
>> Those weren't HP versions, they were the engines that our parents (the
>> current generations grand and great grand parents) had in their Imperials
>> and Furies, and Coronets...
>
> Tee hee hee hee hee!
>
> Everyone now knows that the Big Three all had spies in the car
> magazines and many of the "demonstrators" were tweaked ringers. If the
> majority of standard production cars had these engines they wouldnt
> have been able to run on standard pump gas and would had a hell of a
> lot of warranty claims on transmissions, axles and driveshafts.
>