The Chrysler K-Car doesn’t win much love from car enthusiasts, but it saved the company. Here’s a great video from 1980 presenting the automobile that became a part of pop culture.

Hal Sperlich, a top Ford engineer whose many achievements include the Mustang, was a strong proponent of small, efficient, front-drive cars. Such a strong proponent, in fact, that Henry Ford II, a believer in big cars and big profits, became fed up with listening to his pitch and eventually canned him.

Quickly snapped up by Chrysler, a company then in serious trouble, Sperlich discovered a car program there already in development that, with some tweaking, matched his vision. The package, a tidy family sedan based on subcompact Omni/Horizon components, was known internally as the K-car. This, he told chairman John Riccardo, can save the company. Build it, Riccardo told him.

Sperlich was soon joined at Chrysler by his close associate at Ford, Lee Iacocca, also fired by Henry II. With a chance to hog the spotlight he was never permitted at Ford, Iacocca quickly became the public face and voice of Chrysler, selling Congress and the country on federal loan guarantees that allowed the company to survive. To restore consumer confidence, he reinstated the five year/50,000 mile warranty and invaded America’s living rooms with a series of television commercials. Glaring straight into the camera, he issued a challenge: “If you can find a better car, buy it!”

The first Chrysler K-cars, introduced for the 1981 model year, were the Dodge Aries K and Plymouth Reliant K, with more versions to follow (1984 Reliants above). They were a solid success, returning Chrysler to solvency and generating numerous spin-offs, including the game-changing Chrysler minivans, a faux-woodgrain Town & Country convertible, even a compact stretch limo.

While the K-car picked up its share of industry awards, nobody ever really accused it of being a great car. But it was an honest, handsome, and affordable car, resonating with American consumers who were themselves experiencing tight times.  The Canadian rock group Bare Naked Ladies, in their big hit of the ’90s, “If I had $1,000,000,” captured the car’s ethos perfectly: If I had a million dollars…Well, I’d buy you a K-car, a nice Reliant automobile. The unlikely K-car was now enshrined in pop culture.

Naturally, this Chrysler promotional film from 1980, entitled K-car Superstar, doesn’t address the fierce corporate politics that produced the K-car, or the automaker’s dire economic state as it struggled to bring the new vehicle to market. It’s simply a straightforward look at the design and production of the car that, as things turned out, saved the company.  Here’s 1980 auto manufacturing technology at work. Video follows.