Tested: 1981 Dodge Challenger—The Mitsubishi One

From the September 1981 issue of Car and Driver.

Few new cars have tiptoed into the marketplace with less fanfare than the 1981 Dodge Challenger. You didn’t see the new Challenger buzzing across your TV screen, or hear about it on the ra­dio, or find it in very many magazine ads. That’s because all the Detroit-style hoopla that Lee A. Iacocca and his New Chrysler Corporation could stir up last fall was directed at launching the all-­important K-cars.

What Chrysler didn’t bother trumpet­ing was that the Challenger was thor­oughly refurbished for 1981. Every piece of sheetmetal aft of the front fend­ers—the floorpan, the doors, the roof, the rear quarter-panels, the trunk lid, and the tail section—is fresh, 0.6 inch has been spliced into the wheelbase, and three inches have been snipped out of the overall length.

Such major surgery is rare for cars as new as the Challenger and its twin, the Plymouth Sapporo—both of which were rolled fresh off the Mitsubishi cargo ship in 1978. At this point in the pro­gram the designers generally dole out new grilles or redone taillights, not new bodies. So we felt the new Challenger deserved our attention.

As you no doubt know, the previous Challenger was Chrysler’s first assault on the Toyota Celica–Datsun 200-SX–Mazda 626 sporty-sedan market. While these cars have never been the favorites of hard-core drivers, they are nonethe­less what a lot of folks think sports se­dans ought to be: good-looking, rela­tively efficient automobiles that let you get involved in the process of driving. They’re pleasant rather than aggressive, but far more fun than your everyday Im­pala.

The old Challenger fit that descrip­tion to a tee. Its particular bent was a dose of Cordoba-style luxury and a standard-equipment list that rivaled an Accord’s. But in spite of all this—and strong reviews from the press—Dodge has been selling only one Challenger for every ten Celicas that go out the doors of Toyota dealers.

If Mitsubishi was looking to perform an image remake on the Challenger to help its prospects, it certainly went about it in an odd fashion. It takes a keen eye to tell a new Challenger from an old one. The designers were appar­ently so intent on maintaining the new car’s family resemblance that they es­sentially re-created the old car. The sweep of the sheetmetal was barely al­tered in the process, and even such styl­ing details as the rear-quarter-window gills and the creased-at-the-ends rear glass have been retained.

So close is the resemblance, in fact, that it takes a side-by-side comparison to see the new car’s differences: a new roof, more glass, a more horizontal rear deck, and a crisper, trimmer look to the body sides.

Functionally, the revisions are all in the right direction. The flatter rear deck increases luggage capacity by over one cubic foot. And the extra 0.6 inch of wheelbase, coupled with relocated rear coil springs and floorpan changes, opens up three more inches of rear leg­room. The rear seat is now adult-rated for short trips, if not day-long cross­-country jaunts.

If the designers didn’t make any radi­cal changes, they at least didn’t hurt the Challenger’s come-drive-me good looks. Inside, too, this year’s Challenger is easily more appealing than before.

The Cordoba look—with its vast acres of plaid cloth—has given way to simple, European-inspired furnishings. The seats in our red-and-silver test car were stitched in a handsome dove-gray fab­ric. Matching fabric inserts were sewn into the doors. A new dash compresses all of the instruments—which include a speedometer, a tach, and gauges for oil pressure, coolant temperature, amps, and fuel level—into a neat cluster di­rectly in front of the driver. Chrome is used sparingly. The stick shift and the parking-brake lever are now sculptured from soft vinyl.

Slipping behind the wheel puts you in the same no-nonsense frame of mind as a BMW 320i does, but the Challenger is far from Teutonically austere. The stan­dard-equipment list includes power steering, power brakes, full instrumen­tation, a digital clock, a tilt steering col­umn, reclining buckets with a lumbar support for the driver, an AM/FM-stereo system with four speakers, dual electric outside mirrors, remote releases for the trunk lid and the fuel-filler door, and more. The options list includes four-wheel discs, alloy wheels, and a six­-speaker stereo—all of which our car had. In typical Asian fashion, it’s all carefully finished and fitted together as tightly as a jigsaw puzzle.

After this sort of aesthetic buildup, we couldn’t help but have high hopes for the revitalized Challenger. But the hard truth is that it just can’t deliver the high level of functional satisfaction its form promises. This isn’t to say the Challenger is a bad car. Actually, it’s quite pleasant to drive, rock solid, and the equal of the competition. But it still lacks the spark that lights an enthusi­ast’s fire.

For one thing, the Challenger isn’t very efficient. Hiding under the taut skin is the overweight body structure of the old Challenger—a car that was on the porky side when it was introduced four model years ago. The new car, at 2780 pounds, is heavier than just about anything its size, and it’s within a couple hundred pounds of a Mustang V-8—a car that is significantly larger inside and out.

Pulling so much weight around takes its toll on fuel economy. The Challeng­er’s standard 105-hp, 2.6-liter Silent Shaft four-cylinder—the same engine that powered the last-generation Chal­lenger—works hard enough on the EPA city cycle to deliver only 20 mpg. And the 22 mpg we recorded in real-world driving is only average these days.

The Challenger does redeem itself some when you lean hard on the throt­tle. Though the engine starts to grunt above 5000 rpm, it still has enough gumption to haul the Challenger to 60 mph in a brisk 11.7 seconds, and keeps on pulling up to a flat-out 103 mph.

While it performs decently, the Silent Shaft four is more impressive in two other ways. First, it is quite torquey, and offers the midrange punch you’d expect of a larger V-6. Second, it’s one of the smoothest and quietest four-cylinder engines—a fact especially noticeable at highway speeds. (As its name may re­mind you, the Silent Shaft is blessed with a pair of balance shafts that rotate at twice crankshaft speed, thereby quell­ing much of the shake, rattle, and roll produced by big fours.)

Highway cruising, in fact, is the Chal­lenger’s forte. With the road flowing under you at 80 mph, wind and engine noise are commendably hushed and the suspension is happy in its work.

Things are not so harmonious when the road turns twisty. The Challenger’s underpinnings—MacPherson struts in front and a rigid axle located by four trailing links and suspended by coil springs in the rear—are tuned more for easy commuting than for hard driving. The compliant suspension gets a little rubbery in the knees when you try to hurry through corners, and the power steering is flat numb and all too easily upset by broken macadam—the single biggest deterrent to happy motoring in the whole car.

This is about how we recall the older Challenger. So for all the changes Mit­subishi has made, there’s been precious little progress—and that leaves us on the fence about the new Challenger. It’s still an easy car to like, but a tough one to love. Either way, we think it deserves better than to languish in the backwater of the sporty-car market.

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com