2015 Chrysler 200 Limited on 2040-cars

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2015 Chrysler 200 sheds its frumpy past, V6 comes with AWD standard

The 2015 200 is the automotive equivalent of an ugly duckling turning into a swan.
In 2004, Chrysler's fullsize offerings were the lamentable Concorde and 300M - a pair of bloated, plasticky barges that hadn't received significant attention since before the dawn of the new millennium. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Chrysler unveiled its new 300, which rode on the bones of a Mercedes-Benz E-Class and had the look of a Rolls-Royce with a thug-life upbringing. It was cool.

Historic race cars highlight the RM Sotheby's 2023 Le Mans sale

Auction house RM Sotheby's is celebrating 100 years of the 24 Hours of Le Mans by organizing a big sale on the day before the race. The cars scheduled to cross the auction block have all spent time on the track, and the catalog shows how racers have evolved since the 1930s. Browsing through RM's auction catalog is like taking a five-minute course in the history of racing. The oldest car is a 1932 Aston Martin Le Mans 'LM8' that's had a remarkable life. It was developed and built for competition and entered in the 1932 24 Hours of Le Mans by the Aston Martin factory team, where it finished seventh. It was ultimately sold to a private owner but it survived, which shouldn't be taken for granted: teams often destroyed obsolete race cars, and the list of special vehicles that didn't survive World War II is longer than you'd think. Paul Sykes bought the car in 1955 and used it as his daily driver. Imagine walking out of a shop in a British village in the 1960s and finding a 1932 race car parked next to your Mini. Sykes ultimately bought another daily driver, but he kept the Aston Martin for a total of 55 years. The second-oldest car is a 1936 Delahaye 135 S with a body by coach builder Pourtout. RM notes that this is one of the most significant pre-war competition Delahaye models and adds that it finished second in the 1938 edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It continued racing until 1956 and then spent several decades hidden in storage. It was fully restored in 2005, and it's now eligible to compete in historic races such as the Mille Miglia and the Le Mans Classic. Restoring it was easier said than done: the car was rebodied twice before being tucked away. None of the cars crossing the block were built in the 1940s, so we skip ahead to the 1950s with a 1954 OSCA MT4 by Morelli. It's one of 72 built, according to RM, and only 19 of those were fitted with the twin-cam, 1.5-liter 2AD engine. It raced at Le Mans in 1954 but ended up disqualified following an accident. Another highlight from the 1950s is a 1958 Lister-Jaguar 'Knobbly' finished in yellow and green. We said that all of the cars crossing the block have spent time on the track, but that doesn't mean they were built to race. The 1963 Ferrari 250 GTE 2+2 Series III is a street-legal model, yet it's included in the auction because it was used as a safety car during the 1963 edition of the race.

Junkyard Gem: 1976 Chrysler New Yorker Brougham Hardtop Coupe

Even after OPEC served notice that cheap oil would no longer be a given and notorious eco-fanatic Richard Nixon decreed a national 55 mph speed limit, plenty of Americans continued to buy enormous coupes equipped with big-displacement V8 engines and cubic yards of cushy upholstery as the early Malaise Era ground on during the middle 1970s. In 1976, Ford offered the Lincoln Continental Mark IV, the Mercury Marquis Brougham, and the Thunderbird. The General had too many such cars to list here, including the Buick Electra and Olds 98 Regency Coupe. Chrysler was right there in the battle for Broughamic supremacy that year, with the New Yorker Brougham at the very top of the company's prestige ziggurat. Here's a raggedy-but-still-opulent New Yorker Brougham Coupe, found in a Denver car graveyard during the winter. Just look at that spacious Whorehouse Red™ interior and its pillow-topped Corinthian Leather split-bench power seats! I admire this luxury so much that my band in the late 1980s recorded a hymn to the Chrysler New Yorker. This car appears to have the $598 (about $2,750 in 2020 dollars) St. Regis option group, which included a "boar-grain" padded vinyl roof and opera windows. A few years later, Dodge offered a full-sized model called the St. Regis. The New Yorker Brougham was the most expensive model offered by Chrysler in 1976 (the Imperial went on hiatus for the 1976 through 1980 model years, only to return as a much more modest car). The buyer of this car got rung up for at least $7,269 (about $33,520 after inflation).  Curb weight wasn't quite as high as this car's imposing bulk might suggest: 4,752 pounds. That's a bit less than a new Dodge Durango today. A junkyard shopper scored the engine, which would have been a 440-cubic-inch (7.2-liter) V8 rated at a startlingly low 205 horsepower and all the torque in the world (actually, 320 lb-ft). Numbers like that prove that we now live in the Golden Age of Car Engines; even the base V6 in the current Charger makes 292 horsepower out of half the displacement of the 440. Even in a car this swanky, any kind of an audio system cost extra (contrast that to 2020, when even the humblest econoboxes have standard-equipment Bluetooth-ready rigs with many speakers). A plain old single-speaker AM radio cost $99 ($457), while the top-of-the-line AM/FM/8-track set '76 New Yorker buyers back $375 ($1,730). This is the AM/FM stereo radio, which cost $197 ($908). Not legal for sale in California.