I'm better at drawing than most people but not nearly as good anyone who could remotely be construed as an artist; my skill level stuck at a third grade level. Speaking of which, when I was a kid, more often than not my drawings were of cars. Not having a clue as to what I was doing and being a fan of ostentatious domestic luxury cars, my "designs" most often came out like our 1981 Chrysler New Yorker here.
When Chrysler "downsized" their full size line for 1979, it wasn't so much a downsizing as much as they just moved their mid sized "B-body" cars "up", the best they could do was blocky, awkward, derivative designs like this. Shoot, I could have come up with this.
I always found it odd, unfortunate and sad that Chrysler came out with these cars that bore no semblance to the magnificent dreadnoughts that came before them. Would it have saved the company? Of course not but still. GM did a great job of making a downsized Cadillac still be a Cadillac, they stubbed their bumper on just about everything else they shrunk, but Chrysler either didn't have the designers on staff anymore who had the ability to pull off better designs or...I honestly don't know. Surely the same staff that came out with this car could not have been the same staff that crafted some of the most memorable designs of the twenty five or so years prior to this car. Lincoln's downsized for 1980 "Panther" based line up suffered from much of the same proportion and balance issues our New Yorker does but for some odd reason those designs "worked". At least through my eyes.
No surprise that these cars sold terribly - didn't help that Chrysler priced them against Cadillac and Lincoln rather than say Oldsmobile or Mercury. Oh, who's kidding who. Even at a discount these cars would have sold like ice tea to Eskimos. Chrysler pulled the plug on them half way through the 1981 model year making our subject here, ironically from New York (like me), quite rare.
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