What is that Japanese wagon from the eighties, you may wonder. That Japanese wagon from the eighties is a 1987 Renault Medallion, a car so extinct it’s not even really present in the automotive fossil record, also known as a junkyard. This machine was manufactured at the dusk of the AMC-Renault alliance, and then promptly poofed out of existance with barely a photographic record remaining. The Medallion is so extinct that even Alliance-owning Renault club members don’t know anyone who has one. And that’s how you know when a car is rare: when a car club’s members admit to not knowing anyone who has one.
If you thought it was tough to find one of these, slightly less rare is the version that is badged as an Eagle Medallion, which was Chrysler’s transitional effort at getting rid of stuff left over from the Renault/AMC era before they partnered up Eagle with Mitsubishi. The Medallion sold under the Renault badge for an entire year several months before it was rebadged as an Eagle, though “sold” may be too strong a word. Chrysler decided to stop importing them altogether in 1989, after only three years on the market. Based on the Renault 21, the Medallion was built in France and replaced the Renault 18 or the Sportwagon, a car that is equally absent from our roads today.
The good news was that the Medallion had the trusty 2.2 liter inline four engine borrowed from the Renault 25, which we got in the form of the Renault Premier for literally several months, until that car itself was rebadged as an Eagle Premier and later the Dodge Monaco. That 2.2 liter engine was fairly reliable, even though assembly quality of the car itself was reportedly somewhat iffy. A 5-speed manual and a three speed automatic were standard, and the Medallion was one of the few FWD cars that came with a longitudinal setup that helped reduce torque steer.
Admittedly, the Medallion was a victim of tremendously bad timing. Released at a time when AMC was short on cash and Chrysler was looking to take over the company, the Medallion had little chance of success. Chrysler itself had plenty of cars that competed directly with the Medallion. All the K-car based wagons, for instance. And it was painfully obvious that the Renault models weren’t helping them. A French-built sedan and wagon with an Eagle badge, marketed at a time when it was poorly understood what Eagle stood for anyway, was perhaps not the best way to go. But Chrysler gave the Eagle Premier/Dodge Monaco slightly more time on the shelves, and (miraculously) they proved to be pretty solid sellers for a time. Which is not to imply that there are a lot of them left either.
When was the last time you saw a Medallion, if ever?
[Images: Copyright 2013 Hooniverse/Jay Ramey]
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