When Chrysler Australia wanted a mid-size car to take on Holden Torana and Ford Cortina, it turned to its French and the Chrysler 180. It didn’t go well.
Story by Tony Davis originally published in Drive on 13 November, 1998
The formula seemed to work elsewhere: start with a European car, whack in as many local parts as you can (but import all the really difficult bits) and reap the rewards.
Holden had the Torana, developed from the Vauxhall Viva; Ford crammed the Cortina with Falcon components to improve margins and meet local content requirements.
Chrysler Australia, whose acquisitive parent now owned a swag of continental brands, went to market with the Centura, a mid-size sedan with a distinctly Gallic flavour.
This, in retrospect, was not a good idea. The difficulties went beyond the “near enough is much too close” ethos of French workers of the day. The real snag was Georges Pompidou’s series of nuclear explosions in the Pacific (he was a French president before becoming a very ugly building).
When the first Centura shipments arrived from France (where they were sold as Chrysler 180s, pictured below) in mid-1973, Aussie unions put a total ban on handling the tainted objects.
Chrysler Australia had planned a late ’73 debut, but some parts and panels sat around for nearly two years before the Centura’s eventual launch. By then, the capacity of the imported four-cylinder engine increased from 1.8 to 2.0 litres and the 4.0-litre “245” Hemi six was made the top engine.
The company expected to grab a healthy share of the four-cylinder market from Ford and GMH but buyers favoured the Centura six over the four by a huge margin.
Many long-term Chrysler owners bought a Centura 245 instead of a bigger, dearer, more profitable “family-sized” Valiant. They did not seem deterred by the fact that the big six gave the Centura, as the Sun-Herald‘s Evan Green put it, “all the purpose and graceful balance of a bull in a trotting gig”.
The dated 2.0-litre made the car less nose-heavy but it was significantly slower than the six without being significantly more economical. It was soon dropped.
Quality control was short on both quality and control. Maybe it was all due to using parts which had sat around for so long, or maybe it was silly to try to Australian-ise and “six-cylinder-ise” a French four-pot.
Chrysler didn’t come close to its launch prediction of producing 20,000 Centuras a year. The model left the people shouting for less and production stalled irretrievably after little more than 30 months.
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