1988 Eagle Premier ES: A Nice Shock

From the April 1988 issue of Car and Driver.

Lee Iacocca leads a charmed life. After all the good fortune that has lit up his ca­reer, he finds himself hawking the all-new Eagle. The new Eagle bears no relation to the old American Motors four-wheel­-drive Eagle. This Eagle, in fact, may prove one of Lido’s luckiest strikes.

Chrysler, under Iacocca’s guidance, re­cently snapped up American Motors and renamed it Jeep/Eagle. Iacocca has hit such highs several times over the two and a half decades since he bred the original Mustang during his tumultuous times at Ford. When he rode in to Chrysler to save the day, he did so armed with an enor­mous government loan; the corporation quickly harvested massive profits from its new K-car line and paid us taxpayers back. The K-car, however, was not Iacocca’s baby: it was created before Lido hit High­land Park. The wildly successful Caravan/Voyager minivans were in the works, too, before Iacocca arrived. Iacocca has since overseen the births of several other mod­els, but all of them have sprung from the K-car platform—broadenings of its po­tential, but hardly the results of fresh thinking. And now here comes Lido again to fill the picture tubes of the nation, this time enjoying the rub-off from the Eagle Premier—another timely machine with which America’s automotive stepfather had little to do until he walked it down the aisle.

The Eagle Premier may prove to be Iacocca’s savviest career move yet. This capable, roomy new sedan was developed by the American Motors Corporation and Renault, AMC’s parental French connec­tion at the time. Renault attempted to bail AMC out of trouble but fell into troubles of its own. Chrysler, by then rolling in dough, stepped in and bailed out Renault by buying AMC. AMC’s on-line assets were pretty much limited to the perennial­ly successful Jeeps. The tinny Renault Alli­ance econobox and the derivative GTA hotbox, though built in America, did not rank as assets of note. The thoughtfully developed Premier, however, undoubted­ly looked to Iacocca and his cohorts like a boon.

Imagine Chrysler’s pleasure in discov­ering that the engaging, modestly priced Franco-American Eagle stood ready to fight for nesting rights with every mid-size family sedan on the market. Such worthy birds as the Ford Taurus, the Mercury Sa­ble, the Pontiac 6000, the Buick Century, the Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, the Toyota Cressida, the Nissan Maxima, and the nif­ty new Audi 80 and 90 are in for a feather-ruffling. Like many sedans today, the Eagle lifts off on thermals of Audi-like ideas. It even competes with the graceful 5000, which showed the world how high a sleek sedan could soar.

As pleased as Chrysler must have been to find its adopted Eagle fully feathered, imagine its shock at learning that AMC and Renault’s handiwork tears the tail feathers out of Chrysler’s own all-Ameri­can family sedans.

The Premier was conceived in 1982, when José J. Dedeurwaerder ascended to the throne, such as it was, of AMC. He wanted AMC to broaden its line by devel­oping an upmarket, Euro-flavor sedan, and he wanted Renault to come through with a high-technology plant on this side of the Atlantic.

Dedeurwaerder ordered a head-to­-head design runoff that included Giorgetto Giugiaro, the finest head in the business. Italdesign’s Michelangelo of motorware pitted his Turin-based imagi­nation against those of AMC’s Michigan stylists and an independent studio in California. Not surprisingly, the winning shape wears a pair of subtle “Design Giugiaro” badges.

AMC and Renault engineers hustled to package a front-drive layout into that shape, allowing room for either a new Jeep-developed four-cylinder or an exist­ing V-6 from the Continent. An all-independent suspension fell nicely into place, plucked with little modification from the then-upcoming Renault Medallion.

AMC settled on Canada as its plant site. Dedeurwaerder’s band zeroed in on Bramalea, Ontario, and knocked together a $600 million, 1.8-million-square-foot fa­cility capable of building 150,000 cars per year. The pilot production of the Premier began in December 1986. We received our test car from the regular production line exactly one year later and set off hot for the holidays through a thousand miles of dead winter.

Our Premier went through snow and ice as if they were tea and cookies. By the time we’d run a hundred miles, we knew José and Giorgetto had hatched a golden Eagle that promised to lay a golden egg for Lido.

Giugiaro’s basic trim job comes in two cuts, one an LX luxury version with slim rub strips, the second our ES sport ver­sion with wide bands of protective clad­ding visually connecting the wheel wells. The ES’s suspension settings are firmer than the LX’s, with 20-percent-stiffer springs up front and sport valving in the front struts’ integral shock absorbers. Gas-pressure Fichtel & Sachs shocks cush­ion the trailing-arm, torsion-bar-sprung rear suspension, providing snugger control than you’ll feel in the LX. Working away between suspension and road are 6.0-by-14-inch alloy wheels and 205/70, HR-rated Goodyear Eagle GT+4 all­-weather performance tires. The slimmer stance of the LX, thanks to 5.5-inch-wide steel wheels and 185/75R-14 tires, presents a smaller frontal area, for a Cd of 0.30. The more sporting ES, not yet tun­neled, would probably produce a less out­standing result. The Eagle’s steering winds and unwinds with reassuring sensi­tivity, especially for a package with 63.4 percent of its 3052 pounds on its nose. The front tires feel anything but overburdened. Not so the brakes, however: though normally firm of pedal, the vented front discs and the small rear drums re­quire 218 feet to stop the ES from 70 mph.

The chassis package also produces modest, 0.75-g skidpad cornering. Driven semi-sanely, though, the ES tracks around the trickery of real roads like a pleasantly compliant leech. Its inspiring predictabili­ty goads you to embarrass luckless dozoids wheeling demonstrably grippier hardware.

The LX’s standard 2.5-liter four-bang­er is good, but its optional 3.0-liter six is better. Fittingly, the ES gets the V-6 only. Jointly developed in Sweden and France by Volvo, Peugeot, and Renault, the six owns a heritage of hundreds of millions of miles in 760s, 505s, and R25s. It features single overhead cams, all-aluminum con­struction, Bendix fuel injection refined by Eagle, tuned intake runners, semi-hemi combustion chambers, a one-piece main-­bearing “girdle” for improved rigidity, a forged crank and forged connecting rods, and an air-conditioning compressor fitted directly to the engine, without any intervening brackets. The results: all-around smoothness, 150 hp at 5000 rpm, and 17 mpg on the EPA city cycle. Happily, our ES delivered 21 mpg under combined caning and cruising. Caned long enough, it stretched out to 126 mph.

The overdrive top gear of the ES’s four­-speed automatic makes a direct contribu­tion to its top speed. The V-6 arrives in ei­ther model exclusively with a German-­built ZF automatic; the LX’s standard four-cylinder comes with a French-built four-speed automatic of Renault-Volks­wagen origins. Although a middling per­former, with a 10.2-second 0-to-60 time, the ES moves down the highway with little fuss. Giugiaro’s wedgy shape and wind­-soothing particulars, unlike those of many aero cars, mesh with smooth and linear rack-and-pinion power steering to make the ES all but imperturbable in blustery winds. At city speeds, however, the ZF hunts gears; it also downshifts noticeably when you slow. The Premier’s column-­mounted plastic shifter, curled like a nine-­iron that got caught in a revolving door, pokes up just beyond normal reach, re­quiring a few practice grasps.

The ES’s standard analog instruments are easy to read. The optional electronic layout can’t compare. Two Subaru-esque control pods straddle the steering col­umn, with soft-touch, electronic-contact buttons and sliders. The climate-control readout fits neatly into the lower right cor­ner of the dash pod. The turn signals don’t always readily engage, and it takes a while to get used to their spacey, electron­ic beeps.

The ES’s cabin squelches most outside noise, though the suspension sends up regular drumbeats from the asphalt jun­gle when the native potholes grow rest­less. Luckily, such warlike sounds can’t compete with the worthy output of the standard Renault/Jensen AM/FM/cas­sette stereo’s eight speakers.

Our ES arrived with simple manual seats that kept us calm and comfortable, even on longer-than-day-long drives. These mild buckets offer only fore-and-aft and backrest adjustments, but their gentle contour and velour upholstery are just fine. (Six-way power seats are optional.) The standard tilt steering wheel’s low-­slung dual spokes (which contain the cruise controls if you select that option) clear a visual path to the gauges and con­trols. Normally we detest having only low-­slung spokes for leverage, but the ES’s leather wheel provides enough grip to compensate.

Compensating is what many Premier competitors may now have to do. The Ea­gle’s space utilization leaves former trend­setters elbowing for room. Compared with interiors whose shortcomings have become more apparent as time has gone by—the big Audi’s, for instance, which of­fers only 97 cubic feet of space—the Pre­mier is substantially airier and leggier, of­fering 105 cubic feet. Eagle back-seaters are even free to stretch their feet fully forward beneath the front seats.

Considering such benefits, Premier prices run low to moderate, varying from a base of about $11,500 for the not-too-­basic LX to an opening bid of $14,079 for the genuinely juicy ES. Squeeze in A/C, a rear defroster, power windows and locks, remote fuel-filler and trunk-lid releases, and an infrared system that locks or un­locks the doors when you press a button on your key ring, and you wing away with a $16,149 Eagle.

Our Premier, except for an ashtray buzz, felt as if it were ready to take on the devil himself. And it’s a sure bet to scare hell out of its competition.

Counterpoint

When Chrysler swallowed AMC, we flinty-eyed industry observers won­dered if Lee Iacocca would end up with a bellyache. The Jeep franchise was wholesome enough, but the passenger­-car side dish smelled rotten. AMC’s plate was piled high with Alliance left­overs, Medallions of Renault, and more than a few Eagle carcasses. Something named the Premier was still in the oven.

Now Uncle Lido is sitting back and patting his belly contentedly. The moldy AMC sedans have been tossed into the garbage, and the Premier makes a fine main course.

The Premier, in fact, is much tastier than any of Chrysler’s home-cooked se­dans. It’s roomy and comfortable, and its looks are passable. If you’re planning on dropping twelve grand on a sedan, the Premier is well worth a look—and that’s not something I’d say about Chrysler’s other sedans. To this report­er, the Premier sounds suspiciously like a case of just desserts. —Rich Ceppos

For a while after Renault departed from these shores, it looked as if all you weird-car buyers would have to go cold turkey. Either that or switch to Subaru. But now the weirdness is back. Eagle has picked up the franchise.

The way the Premier’s shift lever snakes up from behind the heater con­trols, like a cobra in a crosswind, is pret­ty weird. The turn-signal lever, pivoting on an east-west axis, is wonderfully cockeyed, too. And the pod-mounted heater controls will stump any Ph.D. in Aristotelian logic.

Still, weird as this stuff undeniably is, can it carry the whole car? The Giugiaro shape is generic four-door and perfectly forgettable. The rear suspension incor­porates a record number of torsion bars, but you won’t notice that when you’re driving. The longitudinal engine orientation is rare for front-drivers, but it probably won’t start any fights.

Mostly, we’re talking minor-league oddities here. I’m wondering if the French cashed out because the Premier came up short of weirdness specs. —Patrick Bedard

This fledgling Eagle should go a long way toward improving Chrysler’s im­age. Chryslers have been known as hon­est cars that offer a good blend of value, efficiency, and reasonable performance. Unfortunately, they’ve also been known for lacking the refinement and the driv­ing finesse to rank with the world’s best. The new Eagle Premier isn’t going to change that reputation in one miracu­lous swoop, but it’s already soaring far above the corporation’s other products.

The Premier has that hard-to-pin­-down subjective “feel” that’s so essen­tial to overall driving satisfaction. Its controls, though not up to Honda stan­dards, are smooth, responsive, and for the most part well placed. On the road, the Premier follows your lead easily, arcing through bends with a grace not found in other Chrysler offerings. The ride is equally pleasing, possessing the firm yet well-damped feel of a well-sort­ed European sedan.

To fly with the best, Chrysler need only follow this Eagle’s lead. —Arthur St. Antoine