For all you MOPAR fans out there this is a great article by Auto Enthusiast. I’m not going to repeat it all here. Grab the link at the bottom of this post.
Mopar is a commonly used word in today’s motorsports and high-performance car scenes, but the origins of the term Mopar had absolutely nothing to do with high horsepower or checkered flags.
Chrysler was a young and growing company in the 1920s. It had bought out the Dodge car company in 1928 and the need for a dedicated parts supplier led to the formation of the Chrysler Motor Parts Division.
As the company continued to grow, Motor Parts Division featured a simple logo with the letters C, D, D and P (Chrysler, Dodge, De Soto and Plymouth) from the years 1933 to 1937.
Nelson L. Farley, a sales promotion manager, decided there had to be a better way of promoting the replacement parts. An “Activities Council” was created. Company records show the results of the Activities Council came to light in the spring of 1937. The group came up with “MoPar,” (a simple contraction of the words MOtor and PARts). The first order of business was coming up with a logo to put the name on cans of antifreeze.
The first MoPar logo was oval and used yellow and red. The new logo and the new name were a big move forward in communicating to the customers. If you needed something for a Chrysler product and got it from the garage that sells the vehicles, it came marked as a MoPar item.
The original brand and trademark logo remained the same from 1937 to 1947. It was slightly changed in 1948. The second logo did not change for six years. MoPar parts were still factory replacement items, nothing more and nothing less.
http://www.amosauto.com/Articles/Mopar/Features/headline-for-web-5
Thanks for Reading.
Tim
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very fond memories..
When I was a young teenage Motor Head, our clan had a ‘rule’ that you could not call a Chrysler Product a ‘MOPAR’ unless it had a 340 CID, or bigger. It used to really piss off my buddies with 318 Dusters and Darts, but it was all fun and games back then.
What is ironic today, is that I’d LOVE to have a 318 Duster, or Dart in my garage.
MOPAR has kind of evolved. Chrysler’s ‘Direct Connection’ program (factory racing parts and sponsership) of the 60s and 70s now is ‘MOPAR PERFORMANCE Group’. In fact, in the late 1980s Chrysler started multiple lawsuits to anyone using the MOPAR name with a license. One of the most published court cases was Chrysler vs ‘MoPerformance’ Magazine. The magazine eventually went bankrupt try to defend it’s title. My car club in California, The Monterey Bay MOPAR Club got a warning letter from Chrysler, but since we were sponsored by dealer Santa Cruz Dodge, we were evenetually granted the use of the name.
All Chrysler accessories are sold under the MOPAR brand, as all replacement parts. There was a brief period under Lee Iacocca that the replacement parts business was spun off into ‘AccuStar Parts’ that was to be a partnership between Mitsubishi and Chrysler, but the UAW balked and the deal reverted back to MOPAR and Chrysler. Lee admitted in his second book that he was trying to get the UAW out of Chrysler’s parts business by creating AccuStar. I have an old box to a replacement gas cap for my old Plymouth Horizon that is labelled ‘AccuStart parts by Chrysler’.
Diamler wanted to spin MOPAR off inot it’s own independant company, such like DELCO did with DELPHI, but thankfully, that did not happen.
So, suggestion for your next blog is the Dayton Engineering and Lighting Company, or Albert Champion.