Autoblog’s free Readers’ Used Car Classifieds section is a great place to list your car for sale, and because these are readers they often list really interesting cars. Occasionally we find interesting listings in our what’s special about them. This 1977 Chrysler Cordoba was listed for sale at the time of this writing, but if the listing expires by the time you read this, feel free to browse for other great finds.
What do we know about the Chrysler Cordoba? Well, most everyone connects the Cordoba nameplate instantly to thoughts of soft Corinthian leather – upholstery that even the spokesman himself, the late Ricardo Montalban, admitted means “nothing. What does ‘David Letterman’ mean?”
But there’s so much more to this small Chrysler than just the optional seat material that somehow became a major pop culture reference. Indeed, Montalban calls the Cordoba small; this was America in the late 1970s, where a 3,700 lsb, 215-inch personal luxury car could be called “small”. The white example currently for sale in our Readers’ Classifieds section is a 1977 car, and it still has those round headlights with which the Cordoba was launched. However, 1977 was also the first year for the Cordoba’s T-top option, which sounds to us like the best of everything. These three initial years of Cordoba sales went smoothly, with production numbers ranging from a little under 140,000 cars to 165,000 cars.
Later on, Chrysler introduced a similarly cushy but cheaper LeBaron coupe under the facelifted Cordoba, and despite being based off the modest Aspen/Volare platform it managed to steal sales from the bigger car. Perhaps the Cordoba’s 400-cid V8 was a little out of fashion in those days. Certainly that was the case with the second generation, which only saw its big (318 cid) V8 fitted in 100 cars! For the last Cordobas, it was Slant-Six all the way to 1983 and then it was all over.
But that sounds like far too much doom and gloom to think about when piloting a white-on-white T-top coupe with a burly V8 under the hood. Especially when low-mile Cordobas are available for less than $ 7,000.
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