A Cruise Down Memory Lane – Plymouth Acclaim Edition
One of my fondest memories as a kid in those formative years had nothing to do with seeing a girl without cloths on, or traveling two days across the Midwest with my pals, camping out in search of a supposed dead body. Nope…around the age of 10 I remember riding in my father’s 1992 Plymouth Acclaim.
Plymouth’s Acclaim and its sister car, Dodge Spirit, began life in 1989 at Chrysler Corps’ Newark, Delaware plant. The successful AA-body was the successor to the Reliant-K – also known as they K-Car. Acclaim kept a 4-door, 4 & 6 cyl sedan styling (with a horrible turning radius, sadly) until 1995. With its pluses and minuses available for review and pretty typical on Chrysler vehicles (transmission being an issue always) – I will always think of my family road trips to the Jersey Shore and even learning to drive behind the Kelley Green Acclaim.
When it was time for driving lessons we mostly all learned in a parent’s vehicle. With my father sitting nervously in the passenger seat I had to slam the steering-column-mounted shifter into drive and took off. Acclaim rode like a tank through the Streets of New Jersey. My dad took me on the Parkway, Turnpike and any other stereotyped road in the Garden State. When friends told me they were “learning to drive in my parent’s (insert SUV here)” it was as if they were bragging. When I told them I learned in an Acclaim they all bowed.
One final, and interesting, bit of information about the Acclaims via Wikipedia: A motorized passenger’s side seat belt was added to US-market Acclaims in 1994, to comply with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 208’s requirement for passive restraints. These motorized belts do not comply with Canada’s safety standards; Canadian-market Acclaims continued to use a manual passenger seat belt, and 1994-1995 Acclaims cannot legally be imported across the US-Canada border in either direction.
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