Originally posted by pupik
I had a '95 Flame Red Highline 4-door which didn't have gray bumpers, but red-colored plastic bumpers. The top-of-line sedans and Coupes had the painted bumpers.
You are correct here. Flame Red molded bumpers appeared as a running change at the tail end of the '95 m/y production run for the Highline. Black too; the other colors appeared at the beginning of the '96 m/y. My guess is your car has a build date of somwhere around 06/1995? Earlier Highlines had painted bumpers for all colors, and regardless, Strawberry
never had molded bumpers; none of the metallic colors did. There were no '95 m/y Base Coupes, and the grey bumpers were discontinued for '96 m/y, so you will never see any Coupe with buggy bumpers.
The Base model had 13" 80-series tires with rims, while the Highline had 14" 65-series tires with the "5-leaf-petal" wheel covers, and the rest had the 15" tires and I-don't-remember-which type of rims.
Up until build dates of around 11/1994, Sports had 14" steel wheels with ugly wheelcovers left over from the Shadow. The Highline wheelcovers, patterned after the wheels on the original Neon show car, were much more attractive. After 11/94, the Sports got a kind of flat 5-spoke alloy wheel, which is decently attractive. No first gen Neon ever shipped with 15" wheels; those didn't appear until the split-5-spoke Impulse wheels found on the 2000 LX.
Shortly afterward, the bumpers became painted all editions of the Neon, including the forthcoming Expressos and such.
Correct. The molded bumpers disappeared with the Base model for the '97 m/y.
So maybe I'm half wrong, if the Neon in the pic was after '95. But if it's a Highline in the picture, it can't be a 1994 or '95, right?
No, it can be a Highline or a Sport for the '95 (1994 and 1995 are both considered '95) or '96 m/ys. In fact, though, it
has to be a Highline, because the rub rail on the bumper below the driver's left hand is body colored, not metallic grey like it would be on a Sport of those years.
One thing's for sure, the Strawberry Red color always looked dirty, for whatever reason.
Yeah, people who really like it really like it, but I was never fond of it. Lapis Blue and Nitro Yellow Green are my favorite colors. I almost bought a NYG Sport in 1995 when we bought our first Neon new, but they couldn't find one for me to look at in person. If I had seen it for real I would have held out and ordered one if necessary. Then, when I was looking for my ACR, I ran across a fairly sad Plymouth NYG ACR sedan in Tennessee, which I passed on. I wish I had bought it, also, in retrospect, because there are only 16 of them. So I missed my opportunity to own not one but TWO of these (no comments about fat Neon owners... )
[edit] OMG - I've become Doug, but only about Neons...
