CYBER CRUISING
Zat’s All, Mopar Nuts
The online home of everything that’s Chrysler
Quick Facts
URL: www.allpar.com
Type: Biographical, technical,
design and history
Focus: Chrysler Corporation,
predecessors and partners
Registration: Not required
Family Rating: G
Hemmings Rating: ★★★★
BY JIM DONNELLY
Adisordered mind is a dangerous thing. It hungers for distraction, feeds on it. That’s not always negative. In this case, a website started out
as a yelling podium for fans of a single
Chrysler model, and maybe a few who felt
aggrieved by it. This was a pastime that
did a slingshot around life as a whole.
Today, Allpar.com is a water cooler for
all things emanating from what used to
be the Chrysler Corporation, and what it
might be in the future under its heavily
scrutinized ownership by Fiat.
“Originally, it was all about avoiding
work on my dissertation. I was going for
my PhD from Columbia in organizational
psychology, something that I still haven’t
used very much,” explained David Zatz,
the guy from Hackensack, New Jersey,
who conceptualized, organized and has
constantly fertilized this field of knowledge on all things Mopar.
Let’s suggest, just for example, that
you’re interested in data on the Dodge
Monaco, and not the one from the Sixties,
either. We’re talking about the one introduced around 1990, with front drive, spun
off the Eagle (remember that?) Premier,
which in turn was based on the Renault
R25, which Chrysler inherited when it
bought American Motors. It’s all in here.
If your taste runs to something somewhat
conventionally more Mopar, such as the
polyspherical V-8s, designed with single
rocker-arm shafts for lower-priced Chrysler cars, you’ll find that at Allpar.com, too.
The font runs deep: police cars, trucks,
corporate structure, repair and restoration tips, offshore products. Zatz also pays
strict attention to brands later assimilated
into Chrysler, including AMC and its own
predecessors, Nash and Hudson.
Even better, the individual model locations have cross-referenced collector
information, including specific shows to
that type of car. The police car area has
a technical history of warning lights
and sirens. Another page is a concise,
complete history of the Chrysler Polara
GTX built in Argentina, which bears
a very strong familial resemblance to
the stateside Mopar B-body muscle cars
being produced in the same general
time frame. It’s all remarkably well put
together. You’d think the guy who put it
together had a doctorate or something.
Oh, right, Zatz did ultimately get his.
He also has a background, though nontraditional, in the car business. Before
getting his graduate degree, Zatz worked
as a quality-control temp at Ford’s since-razed assembly plant in Edison, New Jersey, which produced the U.S.-market Ford
Escort at the time. His daily driver was a
Plymouth Valiant. While not a collector
per se, Zatz felt strongly enough about the
car to begin an Internet site for its fans
back in 1994, relatively early in the Web
years for such things. Zatz acquired the
domain name, first The Valiant Pages,
then Valiant.com. There was an inrushing of Mopar data that persuaded Zatz to
give the site its present name in 1998.
As of November 2009, Allpar.com had
averaged 800,000 visits from 525,000
unique addresses in the past 30 days. Zatz
has a broad array of contributors, but as
he told us, “I still do all the coding, editing and most of the writing myself.
“I deliberately chose the letter A, for
Allpar, so I could be one of the first auto
sites listed on Google,” he added. “So I
get many offers from golf companies for
the domain name.”
