Junkyard Gem: 1995 Eagle Vision TSi

Lee Iacocca's main motivation to have Chrysler buy the American Motors Corporation in 1987 was to grab the Jeep brand, but it turned out that getting all the chassis engineering that went into the Eagle Premier paid off handsomely as well. The Premier's ancestry was Wisconsin-tinged Renault, a mashup of Renault 25 and 21 chassis and suspension design, and Chrysler later based the very successful LH series of sedans on the Premier. The Eagle-badged version of the LH was the Vision, sold for the 1993 through 1997 model years. Here's one of those cars, heavily battered and its once-lurid purple paint now faded, found in a self-service yard south of Denver, Colorado.

The Eagle brand was named after the AMC Eagle, and it was used for both ex-AMC vehicles and Mitsubishi machinery. It got the axe after 1998, when the final Talons were sold.

The first-generation LH cars included the Vision, the Chrysler Concorde, the Chrysler LHS, the Chrysler New Yorker and the Dodge Intrepid. A Plymouth version known as the Accolade was planned but never went into production.

The crash that mangled the front end made it impossible for me to open the hood, but the '95 Vision TSi got a 3.5-liter OHC V6 with 214 horsepower and 221 pound-feet. Every production Vision ever built came with a mandatory four-speed automatic transmission.

This car made it just a bit past 167,000 miles during its life.

All in all, a comfortable Detroit sedan on a French suspension that sold fairly well and then faded into oblivion.

So much cheaper than the Acura Legend!

Virtual reality speculation was all the rage during the first half of the 1990s. And, hey, it still is!

The middle 1990s were a strange time.