Look, I’m as big a fan of the Plymouth Horizon/Dodge Omni as any healthy, green-bile’d American, but I can’t sit by and just let severely sub-par book-packing like what we see here just get by without comment. Actually, not comment as such, but more of a stern, even angry admonition. I mean, look how these chumps are loading books into that hatch! It’s a travesty! It’s going to end in severe and immediate book slippage, and from there, disaster!
They’re just stacking books in there, without any boxes or anything? And, even worse, they’re just sloppily stacking them up? How do they think those foolhardy Jenga towers of books are going to stay upright as soon as that car goes into motion? The first time that Horizon brakes the whole upper tier of books are going to launch themselves forward, a series of hard, sharp-cornered, rectangular bricks of knowledge that will happily pummel the heads of the people in the front seats.
Oh, you literate fools! Besides, what the hell are they going to do with all those books? They’re not all that! And they’re at a library – those books are being checked out – so they have a time crunch, too! Ugh, these idiots, these don’t-know-how-to-pack-books fools! Fools!
Alright, enough about them – they’re doomed as it is. Let’s briefly just talk about the Horizon, and two other cars, the Volkswagen Golf/Rabbit and the Ford Fiesta.
These cars fascinate me because of how remarkably similar they all are, design-wise. The Giugiaro/ItalDesign Rabbit is the one I always think of as the “original” here, being introduced first, but all of these cars are clearly swimming in the same design pool.
I included the Rabbit in its original, round headlight form, and then in its 1984 facelift version, which used rectangular headlamps and wraparound turn indicators. I did this because I thought it was interesting how much the Rabbit ended up looking more like the Omni/Horizon after the facelift.
These were all such tidy, appealing little two-box, simple cars. And there’s still a way to fill them full of books in non-idiotic ways.
In fairness, the Omni/Horizon was the descendent of the Simca 1100, the Ur-transverse engined hatchback.
Dad traded in the ’69 Mercedes (another story) for a first-year VW Rabbit. It was a pile-o-crap. Two years in I went with dad to the dealer parts desk. As we were standing waiting for the part, I heard someone behind the wall exclaim, “Hey, they got a ’74 Rabbit, and it’s still running!”.
Here’s a true story:
My mom was a librarian in the 80’s. Her library basement flooded and they had to rapidly move out the books and it was all hands running books. And as a Plymouth Horizon owner in the 80’s…
What I think they are saying in this photo:
If your local library floods you can rapidly move them to the waiting Plymouth Horizon in the front lot.
I’m sure it just stalled there and nobody really intended to actually drive the thing. But it would’ve worked great for keeping the books dry during the flood.
Yeah, that’s much more likely.
Lightly-related anecdote:
My buddy was driving a 4 door Chevette when we were in high school and attended a baseball double-header. We tried to leave before the end of the second game, and found a flat tire. Unfortunately, the tire iron in the car did not fit the lug nuts!
Not sure how that came about, but I wasn’t fond of being a kid downtown in a major city known for its crime, trying to bum a tire iron!
Thankfully, he was able to borrow his dad’s V6 Fiero for the concert we attended. That went better.
Back in the mid 1980s I worked for USA Today. And had an Omni 024 hatchback.
I would haul literally over a ton of papers to a distribution point. With the hatch open like this picture, and papers stacked so high that they held it open.
The fun part was trying to steer safely with the front tires barley on the pavement.
Good times.
What I’d REALLY like is a Harlequin. On that note, I must be doing SOMETHING right, because when asked, my daughter (who cares MOT about anything car related) stated that the Harlequin is the one car that she would actually care about having.
There used to be one that bopped around Dayton when we lived there…
They also appear to not be actually on the load floor of the hatch.
If you stack all of one authors work in a Dodge Omni is it an omnibus?