They could see the writing on the wall for RWD in small cars, certainly

In Response To: The K platform was in the works before Iacocca got there, as was the possibility of an exit from the truck business. The latter accounted for the stagnation of the pickups in the early Eighties... ()

And unlike many other economic swoons, trucks took a hit after "the Shah left town." Normally, the trucks keep rolling along on commercial fleet sales, but '79 was an exception.

FWIW, Ford was experiencing even worse losses than Chrysler, but had cash reserves and strong European operations to pull them through.

That winter was as awful as I can ever recall, everything in Detroit was shut down. For the first time in his career, my father was seriously concerned that his department was on the line.

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I couldn't help noticing something interesting about this Friday's random image posts... Both Bill and I included images of Chrysler K cars in our selections (Bill, a very clean Aries wagon and me, a mockup of my Dogde 600 ragtop project)