While Sergio Marchionne ultimately united a large Italian automaking concern with a major American outfit, it’s worth remembering that Lee Iacocca, Chrysler’s Italian-American CEO throughout the Eighties and a major source of inspiration to Miami Vice’s Izzy Moreno, repeatedly attempted to inject the automotive passions of his ancestral homeland into Chrysler’s product line, starting in 1980 with the Omni-based Dodge DeTomaso, continuing with Chrysler’s 1987 purchase of Lamborghini, and ultimately culminating with the oft-mocked 1989 Chrysler TC by Maserati, the Pentastar’s entry in the European luxury-convertible sweepstakes.
At the time, Cadillac was treading the same waters with its Pininfarina-bodied, Hamtramck-assembled Allanté, which utilized a shortened version of GM’s E-body front-drive platform shared with the Toronado, Riviera, and Eldorado. In retrospect, it’s a little hard to take the General’s troika seriously, but in the day, they were still considered viable luxury contenders. Remember, Lexus didn’t arrive on the U.S. market until the 1990 model year. The TC also rode on a specialized platform, dubbed Q by Chrysler, which traced its roots back to the K-car and shared much with the Dodge Daytona and Chrysler’s redesigned-for-’87 LeBaron convertible. The TC dispensed with the Chrysler’s headlight covers, trading them for a nose job that would seem to presage the Maserati Ghibli II of 1992, gained an optional Maserati-assembled version of the 2.2-liter Chrysler Turbo II four-cylinder with a 16-valve head developed by Cosworth, and came standard with a removable hardtop featuring a round opera window.
The lingering question about the TC is whether the car was a cynical marketing exercise or a legitimate—if poorly executed—attempt by Chrysler to build a European-style sporting coupe with genuine Italian flair. This video, produced by Chrysler to educate dealer service departments about the new car, goes a ways toward answering the question. It’s terribly Midwest-centric—within the first three minutes, the narrator manages to mispronounce “Getrag” (Germany), “Modena” (Italy), and “Benicia” (California)—suggesting that Chrysler, from its perch in Highland Park, Michigan, really believed that the TC was sufficient to compete with vehicles from Germany, England, and its Detroit rivals’ luxury divisions. Why wouldn’t it be? It was one of only two cars on the market that paired American know-how with Italian verve, and the other was only partly constructed in Italy.
Watching the first part of the video, however, confirms every bias consumers have ever had about dealer service departments. Of of the new car’s prospective customers, the narrator admonishes: “In their jobs and their homes, they command respect. When a TC owner comes in to the service department, you should go out of your way to be courteous and helpful.” Because, of course, that harried mother of five with a slipping Voyager transaxle is not worthy of the same consideration. She’d invariably be back for at least one more minivan before the kids were grown, and it’s not as if Honda was building a product in the segment.
The latter portion of the video focuses on the brave new world of the TC’s anti-lock-braking system as well as the intricacies of the convertible top’s adjustment. Fun stuff for TC nerds, but it’s the intro that appeals to those of us interested in how the American auto industry threw it away and the strange, often sad trickle of automobiles that resulted from 25 years of circling the drain while Japan, Germany, and South Korea flooded our shores with cars that beat our homegrown machines on value and/or quality. It’s an instructive document, suggesting that, in our arrogance, we were bringing a knife we at least half believed was a gun to a firefight with the world’s hungriest pistoleros.
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