JP’s A to Z Challenge – O is for Omni

Well, I must confess that I nearly went into a panic over the letter “O” after I burned up an Oldsmobile last week. However, a dive into my photo stash turned up one that I had forgotten all about. And who hasn’t forgotten about the Omni?

If you ask most people what saved the Chrysler Corporation (in the 80’s, if we must narrow down which time the Chrysler Corporation needed saving) they would reply with either the K-Car or the minivans. I would argue that it was actually this car, the Dodge Omni and it’s twin the Plymouth Horizon.

Badge from a 1980’s Dodge Omni as offered for sale online.

These cars came out in 1978, and were probably the freshest designs out of that troubled company in the previous 20 years. Chrysler had taken a controlling interest in the French company Simca in the early 1960’s, and that association finally paid dividends when Chrysler U.S. used that company’s design as the starting point for a new American subcompact car.

The Omni/Horizon was far and away the most advanced U.S. model in that segment in 1978, when GM and Ford were still hawking Chevettes and Pintos. When fuel prices skyrocketed in the second half of 1979, Chrysler was there with exactly the right car at the right moment. For a change.

When things got so bad that Chrysler had to go begging for government aid, it was the fact that Chrysler was selling every one of these cars it could make that convinced people that the K-cars, then about a year away from launch, were more than a pipe dream. Chrysler got its loan guarantees, and the Omni/Horizon (known internally as the L body) was soon joined by its more famous K body sibling, which then begat the minivan, and the rest is history.

But this is not your garden variety Omni. Once Lee Iacocca had things well under control, he went looking for ways to spice things up in dealer showrooms. Enter Carroll Shelby, the former race driver who had built the Cobras that became the most famous examples of the “Total Performance” era from Iacocca’s days running Ford in the 1960’s. Shelby worked his magic on several Chrysler offerings, and one of them was the 1986 Omni GLH-S. It was Shelby, the plainspoken Texas native, who claimed that “GLH” stood for “Goes Like Hell”. The “S” was added for the special Shelby edition.

Trivia note: This car is not actually a Dodge (so it could not have come under “D”), but is branded as a Shelby Omni GLH-S. This was one of 500 regular production Omni GLHs that were shuttled off to the Shelby Automobiles, Inc. in Whittier, California for final assembly and massage, before being shipped to Dodge dealers for sale. These things were real rockets, with 175 horsepower coming from its Shelby-specific turbo 4 cylinder engine, and were said to be good for a top speed of 135 mph!

Fortunately, I caught this one sitting still.  Which is why I have pictures of a black Omni and not a black blur.

Photos by the author at the Mecum classic car auction, Indianapolis, Indiana, May 17, 2019

23 thoughts on “JP’s A to Z Challenge – O is for Omni”

  1. All I can say is Wow! That is one clean Car. Most ended up incredible rust buckets and falling apart. A good friend of mine owned an Omni, whatever the cheapest version was. It literally rusted apart around him, but had a pretty dependable engine and drive train. He literally needed the hatchback welded back on after it rusted off near the hinges. Actually his last American car, he couldn’t take it anymore and it was Toyotas for him from then on.

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    • My mother bought one of the earlier ones, a 1980 Plymouth Horizon. They were the only thing selling at Chrysler dealers that year. It was a really nice car at the time, but she traded it at 5 years when it started emitting a fuel smell, clearly a leak somewhere. Hers never rusted, but then it was still fairly new when she moved on.

      I remember shooting this one partly because of the condition and partly because I don’t think I had ever seen one of these Shelby versions before.

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  2. The family of my best friend bought the first L-Body (a Plymouth Horizon) in our town in early 1978. It was well-equipped, but it did have a manual transmission. Unfortunately, reliability and build quality were what one would expect from a completely new domestic car in those days. In particular, the exterior door handles kept breaking. It also kept stalling at red lights.

    In the spring of 1979, our next-door neighbor bought a brand-new 1979 Horizon, complete with the woodgrain on the side. My father carpooled to work with him…and that nearly new car died in our driveway and had to be towed away for repairs.

    A GLH-S version will sometimes show up at the Carlisle Chrysler Nationals. I wouldn’t mind having one today.

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    • I think Iacocca taking over at Chrysler was probably responsible for many of the early cars’ issues being pretty well sorted out by 1980 when Mom got hers. Chrysler of the late 70s was a whole different thing.

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  5. I remember the K cars coming out and what a big deal it was and I also seem to remember that Lee Iacocca paid back his loans. I don’t really recall the Omni but the story about Shelby really cracks me up.

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    • Yes, once the K-cars were introduced for 1981, the Omni became old news, and within a couple of years became a bargain basement subcompact. At least before Shelby got his hands on about 500 of them.

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  6. I do not remember the Omni at all. Y&R, the ad agency where I worked from 1978 to 1980 had already lost the Chrysler account and acquired Lincoln-Mercury in 1979, so that was before the K car debuted. I remember the K car which my father bought after the VW Fastback had problems and he still didn’t want to drive the 1972 Chevy Impala to work, lest it get damaged more than the alleged scrape of the whitewall tires done by me necessitating curb feelers.

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      • You helped the Omni shine again with this post. 🙂 My father was a tool-and-diemaker and he took a job in Holland, Ohio (120 miles roundtrip), so he needed a more reliable car … the VW Fastback had its issues. He started work at 7:00 a.m. and commuted daily after getting the K-car, but ultimately decided to get an apartment in Holland and only came home on weekends (Saturday night; left Sunday night again). My neighbor works at the Jeep Assembly Plant in Toledo and commutes daily (90 miles roundtrip) but he is only in his 20s.

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    • As one who experienced them fairly early, it was kind of funny to watch them age. We saw the cheap one (America), the high MPG one (Mizer) and also the performance ones (GLH/Shelby). But the semi-luxury one at introduction disappeared quickly.

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  8. The Omni/Horizon were a remarkably clean design when they were new. Even though Chrysler made them for a good long time, they never looked dated. I always sort of wanted one. I could have bought one new for my first car, and I did think about it, but ultimately I wanted a coupe.

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  10. My Dad completed a one year lease on a Plymouth Horizon as a company car. He exercised a purchase option for $6000, so he sold it to me for $3000. It had only 10,000 miles on it and was a great deal for me until about 50,000 miles when it started falling apart.

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