Junkyard Find: 1983 Dodge Ramcharger Royal SE
In the final year of the Malaise Era, truck shoppers could still get a Chrysler SUV that wasn’t trying to be a tall New Yorker. Because the echoes of the vans-and- Quaaludes ethos of the 1970s were still quite loud in 1983, this Ramcharger came equipped with groovy earth-tone stripes.
The Royal SE package came with all sorts of options that seem fairly primitive by 21st-century SUV standards: cigarette lighter, bucket seats, and so on. I am unable to determine whether the stripes were factory-installed or applied by a custom-minded owner with vivid memories of steamboating Acapulco Gold through a toilet-paper tube.
Power came courtesy of the same 318 or 360 engine that motivated variations of just about every rear-drive Chrysler product from the late 1960s until well into the present century.
It is a disappointment that no Royal SE Brougham Edition was ever sold.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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People swap magnums into old mopars and get good performance and mileage out of them. Rick Ehrenberg at Mopar Action swapped a 360 magnum into a 62 Savoy bolted to the car's original 727 trans. He added bigger injectors, headers with dual exhausts and played around with the software, no internal mods to the engine. It runs 13's and gets over 20 mpg. He has more things planned for the future including a 518 trans swap.
BTW, the Ram Charger lived on until 2001 - in Mexico - as a 2-door Durango model. Someone should go pick one up.