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Junkyard Gem: 1976 Chrysler Cordoba

With engine power way down and a sense of malaise settling over American roads, Detroit (and Kenosha) turned to opulent-looking personal luxury coupes on midsize platforms to lure car shoppers into showrooms. While John DeLorean's Pontiac Grand Prix started it all more than a decade before, one of the best-known of all the rococo personal luxury coupes was the Chrysler Cordoba. Today's Junkyard Gem is an early example of the Cordoba, found in a Northern California car graveyard last fall. The first generation of the Cordoba (1975 through 1979 model years) was built on Chrysler's B Platform, making it a sibling to quite a few of the most legendary Dodge and Plymouth muscle cars of the 1960s. This includes the Charger, Super Bee, Road Runner, Daytona and Superbird. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. While French and Italian cities were very popular for use as American-market car names during the second half of the 20th century, Spain wasn't completely ignored by Detroit. Ford offered the Granada, Cadillac had the Seville, and Chrysler decided to go with the ancient city of Cordoba as the namesake for its new personal luxury coupe. As native espanol mexicano speaker and longtime Chrysler pitchman Ricardo Montalban explains in the 1987 David Letterman interview above (skip ahead to 8:10), the correct Spanish pronunciation is really "CORE-doe-bah" with the emphasis on the first syllable, but Chrysler went with a spelling and pronunciation that was easier for English speakers to deal with. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. We can't talk about Ricardo Montalban and the Cordoba without watching at least one of the TV commercials that helped make the early Cordoba such a sales hit and put the term "Corinthian Leather" into everyday American discourse. Sometimes Ricardo described the leather as soft, while the terms rich and fine were applied on other occasions. This car does not have Corinthian Leather, which cost an extra $187 in 1976 (about $1,020 in 2023 dollars). Instead, it has the "Calacia velour" cloth-&-vinyl seat upgrade, which cost just $17 ($93 after inflation). The base seats were done up in "cashmere-like" cloth-and-vinyl.

Marchionne hopes Apple will partner with Fiat

Apple wants to make a car. Fiat already makes cars. Therefore, Apple and Fiat should partner to make an Apple Car. Makes sense, right? Clearly, it's not quite that easy, but FCA chief Sergio Marchionne hopes that Cupertino will consider Fiat a worthy candidate for partnership, assuming, of course, that Apple follows through with its overtures into the automobile industry. Marchionne is, according to Bloomberg, a self-proclaimed "Apple freak" who owns every kind of product Apple makes. He suggests that he understands the tech company's needs and wants. "Apple has a language, and you have to be able to speak that language," said Marchionne. "Usually the industry comes into that dialogue with a high degree of arrogance as we know how to make cars. That's not very helpful as their syntax is worth more than our ability to build cars." By "syntax," we assume Marchionne means Apple's sleek and modern design language more than the code behind its software. It's interesting to note that the FCA CEO seems to indicate that Apple would bring more to any partnership than the automaker would. Fair or not, we'd wager that more buyers would care about a potential Apple Car's design and branding than would be concerned with which automaker helped assembled it. A partnership with Apple may be exactly the kind of cure that the FCA CEO believes ails the auto industry. After finding it impossible to further pursue industry consolidation, a tie-up with the massive tech industry, particularly Apple, could generate some much-needed positive cash flow. At present, though, it's all just conjecture – Apple hasn't offered any hints as to the true nature of its so-called Project Titan automotive project, and doesn't seem likely to anytime soon. Related Video:

FCA issuing software update for 1.4M vehicles to prevent hacking

In the wake of a Jeep Cherokee being hacked remotely while on the road through its Uconnect infotainment system, FCA US is now issuing a software update for 1.4 million vehicles in the United States. Affected customers will receive a USB stick in the mail with the improved version; owners can check this website to see if their cars are affected. A large variety of models with FCA's 8.4-inch touchscreen infotainment system are affected. They include the 2015 Chrysler 200, 2015 Chrysler 300, 2015 Dodge Charger, and 2015 Dodge Challenger; 2013-2015 Dodge Viper; 2013-2015 Ram 1500, 2500, and 3500; 2013-2015 Ram 3500, 4500, and 5500 chassis cab; 2014-2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee and Cherokee; and 2014-2015 Dodge Durango. According to FCA in its announcement, the new software "insulates connected vehicles from remote manipulation." As of July 23, the company also "fully tested and implemented within the cellular network" additional security to prevent access to many of a vehicle's systems. FCA US says that it's conducting this campaign out of an abundance of caution and disputes the notion that there's a defect with these vehicles. Beyond the demonstration of the hack in the Cherokee, the automaker says that it's unaware of any other reports of these attacks actually happening. Related Video: Statement: Software Update July 24, 2015 , Auburn Hills, Mich. - FCA US LLC is conducting a voluntary safety recall to update software in approximately 1,400,000 U.S. vehicles equipped with certain radios. The recall aligns with an ongoing software distribution that insulates connected vehicles from remote manipulation, which, if unauthorized, constitutes criminal action. Further, FCA US has applied network-level security measures to prevent the type of remote manipulation demonstrated in a recent media report. These measures – which required no customer or dealer actions – block remote access to certain vehicle systems and were fully tested and implemented within the cellular network on July 23, 2015. The Company is unaware of any injuries related to software exploitation, nor is it aware of any related complaints, warranty claims or accidents – independent of the media demonstration.