Quote:

Louvers were a 71 only thing, 70s had a whole different body line. And from what I've been told only black and white cars got black louvers. I've seen a orange car with orange louvers, so the black trim would stick out like a sore thumb. It would be nice to know when the holes were added to the roof and 1/4 panel, were they drilled after the fact or stamped during the panel mfg. process.We found evidence that my car was taken off the line and had some more paint work done, but don't know what or why.



To clarify, '70-'71 E-bodies, '71 B-bodies

As far as I'm concerned Chrysler was fairly sloppy with how they handled louver-equipped cars, particularly E-bodies.

Theoretically, E-bodies should have Rivnuts in the roof where the louver hinges would mount (much like the ones used for outside mirrors).

However, I had an original J68 '71 Challenger coded for and equipped with louvers (and backed up by the original fender tag & build sheet), yet there were no Rivnuts in the roof - just some small, crudely punched holes to hold a sheetmetal screw.

Oddly enough, another Moparts member across the country wound up with the car built immediately after mine (1 VIN number off), identically equipped and with the same deficiency with respect to the mounting of the louvers.

Ditto for Challenger rubber bumpers - they generally don't show up on the tag, just the build sheet.

So it's not implausible that the same kind of sloppiness carried over to the B-body lines. Did the EL5 car come with louvers from the factory? Maybe - but we'll never know for sure...