(first posted 2/21/2018) If one were to hold a competition for cars that get little respect, Chevette might win the grand prize. It was cheap, no-frills transportation that sold in the millions. It was sparsely equipped, nearly antiquated even when new, and slow. It broke no new ground, excelled at nothing other than low price, and was seemingly everywhere. And when the economic crisis that spawned it faded into memory, Chevettes became beater cars and were then scrapped. But beneath its utilitarian facade lies a fascinating corporate tale of panic, strategy, disappointment, success and obsolescence, all contained in one 2,000-lb. package.
For years it seemed as if Chevettes were everywhere. Now, though, they are almost gone, particularly early examples like this one – which makes this car a perfect lens through which to examine the Chevette’s meandering history.
Chevette’s origins lie with the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo – that immense geopolitical event that sent shockwaves through world economies and brought gasoline lines to Main Street. Between the fall of 1973 and the spring of 1974, global oil prices quadrupled, and suddenly Detroit’s bloated cars seemed archaic. Panicky customers clamored for efficient cars, import sales surged, and experts proclaimed the era of cheap oil was over.
For the auto industry, this demanded swift, strategic action, which was not a core competency of General Motors. In this case, however, the often-musclebound giant responded to the need for a small, inexpensive car with uncharacteristic alacrity. In December 1973 – at the gas crisis’s peak, and a month after President Nixon urged Americans to sacrifice unnecessary indulgences to conserve energy – GM fast-tracked a new “minicompact” for North America
Specifically, the Board of Directors instructed Chevrolet to produce a version of the T-car, a vehicle then under development on other continents (including the German Opel Kadett and the Brazilian Chevette). In choosing this route, GM prioritized timing. Its other option – to develop an all-new car for North America – would have put the new model in production by 1978. That was too far in the future. A modified T-car could be ready in a mere 19 months, half the development time of a typical new car.
The task to create a North American T-car variant fell to 31-year-old John Mowrey, the Chevette project’s chief engineer. He had quite a task ahead of him, which started with GM sending his team blueprints (and translators) for the German and Brazilian T-car plans. Mowrey, an excellent choice for the project, was rare among GM’s staff in that he was quite enthusiastic about small cars… and predicted that “in 20 years, big cars will be a social crime.”
Chevette was far from simply a badge-engineered Kadett. Most obviously was that while other T-cars came in multiple body styles, Chevette was developed only as a hatchback. Mowrey’s team, in fact, created all new body panels. They also used a modified engine, redesigned the underbody (for greater corrosion resistance), designed a new interior, and accommodated various US safety standards.
Over half a million T-cars had been made worldwide by the time North America’s Chevette debuted. They included: Opel Kadett (Germany); Holden Gemini (Australia); Chevrolet Chevette (Brazil); Isuzu Gemini (Japan); Vauxhall Chevette (Great Britain); and Opel K 180 (Argentina)
The GM Directors’ choice to modify a T-car for this project was far from unanimous. Some product planners advocated FWD for a more modern layout, rather than the RWD T-car. However, the Directors thought that having a more traditional car ready for 1976 would be better than having a FWD model for 1978. Though controversial, this was a defensible strategy – after all, the decision was made at the height of the oil embargo when it seemed that demand for minicompacts would only go up, and RWD was hardly a deal-killer for most customers in the 1970s.
From the outset, the 1976 model year was GM’s goal, and that goal was met. Chevette’s US introduction was held in September 1975 on the US Capitol Grounds, a symbolic location because with ever-increasing federal regulations, Washington rivaled Detroit as the nation’s most important city for automotive news. Just months earlier, Congress enacted its Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, and at Chevette’s introduction, Congressmen received a sneak peek at what was then the highest-mileage US-built car.
The Capitol Hill debut also attempted to stir up patriotism among consumers, as GM had import buyers in its crosshairs. Expecting the majority of Chevette sales to be “import conquests,” GM anticipated its strongest sales to be in import-heavy coastal markets. Company strategists were ecstatic about having the first domestic car in the minicompact class.
General Motors developed its North American Chevette quickly and on target, and the car generated significant press coverage. All that was left by 1976 was to see how customers reacted. Unenthusiastically, as it turned out. After an initial flurry of interest, first-year sales simply tanked.
Several factors caused this early sales disappointment. Most importantly, the crisis that spawned the Chevette had faded away. By 1976, gas prices had stabilized, and big land yachts came back into vogue after a brief hiatus. Small car sales, while still significant, ceased their rapid growth. This, of course, was unfortunate timing for the Chevette, and something over which GM had no control.
But not all of Chevette’s initial struggles resulted from external events. One internal problem, for instance, was that GM overestimated consumers’ appetite for frugality. Chevette was cheap, but not necessarily a good value compared to its imported competition. With standard equipment that was sparse even for its class, Chevette offered few advantages over the Rabbit, B-210, Corolla or Civic.
GM kept Chevette’s base price as low as possible, assuming that customers would appreciate the stripped-down content. They estimated, for example, that the bargain-basement Scooter model in the above ad (equipped with rubber flooring and without a rear seat), would account for 25% of total Chevette production. But for 1976 that figure was just 5%. It turned out that even economy car customers wanted a certain amount of creature comforts – and Honda, Toyota and VW were more responsive to this desire. GM addressed the value issue in later model years, but for 1976-77 value-for-money was a noteworthy drawback for Chevette vs. its competition.
Another early stumbling block was dealer apathy. Chevy dealers were often indifferent about Chevette sales, and overtly steered prospective customers to larger (more profitable) models. This was widespread enough to alarm GM, which responded by bringing sales personnel from across the nation to the Wilmington, Del. plant where Chevettes were made, hoping to instill more pride among the sales force in this little car. GM stressed in these sessions that small car buyers are sophisticated people who know what they want, and that “trying to bait-and-switch… is not necessarily a good idea.”
GM Chairman Thomas Murphy (left) and President Pete Estes (right)
Little could disguise the fact, though, that the 1976-77 Chevette was a huge disappointment. Before its release, Chevrolet General Manager Robert D. Lund predicted 300,000 annual sales, but within a few months he halved that prediction. Given this harsh letdown, it’s interesting to see how GM executives publicly reacted:
- Lund himself dubiously declared that although Chevette was not capturing as many import sales as predicted, the model’s primary goal had really been to keep existing Chevy customers who wanted a smaller car.
- GM Treasurer John R. Edman was probably less than forthright when he claimed that “despite some indications to the contrary, we consider the Chevette a success.”
- Chevrolet’s Marketing Director, Tom Staudt, put a holistically positive spin on the Chevette, pointing out the car’s “across-the-board impact” on the industry, and claiming that it provided GM with a “halo” for its efficiency efforts.
- But the most revealing comment came from Chairman Thomas A. Murphy, who said that while he was pleased that GM executed its Chevette program quickly and with great agility, “There’s no way you can sell something to a man who doesn’t want it.” “Garden-variety Americans,” he added, “don’t want small cars.”
Murphy’s comment wasn’t an isolated remark. Former GM Design Studio Chief David North told Automotive News in 2008 that the prevailing mantra inside GM during his 1959-1991 tenure was to “let the Japanese have” the small car market.
These types of comments explain much about General Motors’ difficulty producing successful small cars. Many in GM’s upper hierarchy simply didn’t see the appeal, and Chevette’s early flop appeared to confirm this for them. Such complacency, however, was fraught with danger. It validated the naysayers’ opinion that small cars were a losing proposition, and blinded the company to market trends that suggested otherwise.
With that background, let’s examine our featured car from Chevette’s second production year. Chevette’s general appearance presented an uncluttered, upright design that bore a mild resemblance to VW’s Rabbit, one of its chief competitors.
Chevette was narrow (3” narrower than a Rabbit), with an interior somewhat hampered by the RWD configuration, but GM made several accommodations for greater comfort. The car’s relatively high roofline led to adequate headroom, and GM ensured that the seats were mounted high off the floor so passengers wouldn’t sit with their knees uncomfortably high.
Overall, Chevette’s interior was a composite of crude and comfortable (higher-trim levels received fake wood trim and nicer upholstery), and also between international and Detroit aesthetics. The bare metal door trim, however, served as a constant reminder of the car’s cheapness.
The rear seat offered a bare minimum of room and comfort for the day. The seat could fold down, which provided ample room for two people and their luggage.
Four adults could theoretically fit in Chevette, but in such a circumstance, the driver’s 6’3” friends probably wouldn’t be friends for long. And under such a load, Chevette’s 88 mph top speed would have been a good bit lower.
Once underway, drivers found Chevette’s suspension to be very competent, with unequal-length control arms in front and a solid axle in back, similar to GM’s other T-cars. The car’s springs provided for generous suspension travel, and delivered minimal wheel hop (a common complaint with leaf-sprung small cars of its day). Overall, Chevette’s handling was agile, its steering taut, and the ride comfortable and stable. In fact, the suspension was this car’s most endearing driving attribute.
Power was its least endearing attribute. Early Chevettes came with either 1.4- or 1.6-liter versions of the same engine, sourced largely from the Brazilian Chevette. Either engine made for a slow car. Our featured car came equipped with the optional 1.6, which put out 63 horsepower. Though no 1970s subcompact was fast, Chevettes were downright lethargic – particularly when things like an automatic, air conditioning and extra passengers were added. Chevette’s iron-block engine, though, did prove to be reliable.
As for comfort, noise, roominess, etc. – these were largely mid-pack for its day. A 1978 Car and Driver comparison of seven econoboxes summed up the early Chevette by describing it as “the median car in both Fun and Utility.” Road & Track echoed this mediocrity: its 1978 long-term Chevette report was insipidly titled “It Did The Job.” No more, and no less.
There were some small innovations, though. Showing its international roots, Chevette was the first US-built metric car. It was also the first American car to feature a multi-purpose turn signal stalk, called “Smart Switch,” which included wiper/washer controls and a (probably rarely used) headlight flasher. The front seats featured a novelty as well – inertia-type locking mechanisms that enabled passengers to move the front seatbacks freely to access the rear seat without needing to push down a separate lever.
While largely similar to the introductory year, 1977 Chevettes such as our featured car benefited from a few driveability refinements, such as revised cam timing, taller axle ratios, and a modified braking system. Importantly, both engines gained a few sorely-needed horsepower. Trim versions were shuffled too – with the odd Woody model being replaced by the Sandpiper (above), which came replete with graphics of the eponymous shorebirds on the car’s rocker panel.
Our featured car is a standard Chevette (not the budget Scooter, or one of the special models), with the 1.6 and automatic, but otherwise containing few options. Such a car would have listed for about $3,500 in 1977. Though the list price was low, the imports still outflanked Chevette in terms of value.
The lack of outstanding qualities in a crowded subcompact field made for another unhappy year (sales fell by 29% to just 133,000), and at the close of 1977 it appeared that Chevette would be an utter failure.
Such pessimism was premature. For 1978, GM added a 4-door model, and prices/equipment were adjusted to offer better value. This was the key to success. It took three years, but Chevette finally approached the 300,000 mark that its makers had hoped for from the beginning.
Source: Standard Catalog of Chevrolet, 1912-2003
Buffeting this popularity was the 1979-80 oil crisis and subsequent recession, which brought market impacts once again favoring inexpensive, efficient small cars. Chevette’s high-sales mark came in 1980, when the then-5-year-old model sold nearly 450,000 units, making the stodgy, slow Chevette one of America’s best-selling cars.
At that point, GM had momentum in the competitive small car field. If it had replaced Chevette then with a more modern FWD model, the company could have carried that momentum forward. However, that did not happen. From Chevette’s 1980 sales peak, GM began a steady descent into irrelevancy in North America’s economy car market.
Chevette production continued with minimal updates until the 1987 model year, by which time it was thoroughly obsolete. Ultimately, Chevette developed a reputation as a rather conservative choice for an econobox – it was domestic, RWD, and as Consumer Guide put it, “unimaginative to an extreme.” This was far from the import-fighting car targeting young coastal buyers that GM imagined in the mid-1970s, but it was a niche nonetheless, and 2.7 million customers bought Chevettes over the 12-year model run. One might say that Chevette was the economy car of choice for the “Garden-variety Americans” that GM’s chairman contended did not want small cars.
Ironically, when Chevette production ended, GM was left only with small hatchbacks produced by its Asian partners. The anointed import-fighter that first failed, then thrived, and eventually sold nearly 3 million copies – was succeeded by the very imports it was created to battle.
Was Chevette a success for General Motors? Yes and no. It’s hard to call a car that topped the sales charts a failure, and GM’s quick, focused effort to get the car to market in just 19 months was a splendid example of corporate agility. Chevette’s failure lies with GM’s inability to follow up on its success. If GM had put as much vim and vigor into improving Chevette as it had into developing the car in the first place, then the history of North America’s small car market might have been much different.
Photographed in Arlington, Virginia in August 2017.
Related Reading:
Curbside Classic: 1980 Chevrolet Chevette Scooter: A New Category Of Vehicle Paul N
When I was 16, we had a 15 year old Datsun 510 and a 18 year old Volvo 122. The Volvo was the “good” car so I wasn’t allowed to drive it as learned for my driver’s license. After practicing in the Datsun, I got to take the school Drivers Ed class which had a brand new Chevette in 1986 or ’87. I would have been happy to drive a poop-scented car with one reverse gear, I was so eager to drive ANYTHING, but that Chevette honestly, shocked me. It was phenominally raw, gutless, crude, actrocious- even terrifying to drive- and this is with my only other car experience being a 15 year older car. No thanks. At least they tried.
I get that you don’t dig the Chevette, but I don’t believe for a minute you’d rather have driven a car that reeked of human ‘leavings’ for any period of time. Bit melodramatic.
I like the ‘Antique Vehicle’ tag this ’77 is sporting. It may be a mega-cheap car, but it’s a Survivor! I wish it had a lil’ carport to nestle itself into.
I’m far from an expert, but isn’t “one reverse gear” a standard feature of most cars?
Yes, but there also are forward gears to go with it. The OP would have been OK if a car only went in reverse.
As much as I hated these because of their cheapness, I was a passenger a few times as a teenager in friends’ cars and I have to admit, that although I was right about them being crude and cheap, they did provide basic transportation getting from point a to point b. No more, no less.
Oh sure, the “basic transportation doesn’t need be anything but crude and cheap” sell job. Lets put it this way, a chamber pot may be simpler, and arguably less trouble prone than a toilet, but one can easily see the appeal of progress. The Chevette was like that, a chamber pot of the auto world. Yes, it functioned, and arguably the thing got more stylish after the mid cycle restyle that it kept till the (bitter) end, but you NEVER heard someone pine for a Chevette. EVER. Its like someone swooning about how they have been dreaming of that cheap 99 cent/sq. foot laminate flooring, or formica countertops. Never, ever. I had lots of wheel time with these crapboxes, and they always made me grimace. For the love of god, they couldn’t even make the steering wheel and column align with the driver, it was always offset and off-putting. If I could draw PTSD benefits for the combo of driving these cars and living thru the disco era, I would.
Yes, but it ~is~ a correct sell job. That’s all the Chevette had to do and that’s all it did. I’ve never heard of anyone pine for a Chevette, either, and probably never will but if all a person could afford was this Econobox at least you HAD transportation.
The bare metal on the top of the Chevette’s inner doors remind me of my Falcon which also has bare metal in the same places.
I remember those sandpiper decals appearing on the Australian Gemini. Even then wading birds seemed odd. The early T cars were well received but are rare these days. The 2 door wagon was pretty neat.
IIRC there was a limited edition Gemini Sandpiper, painted “Sandpiper Beige”. I was vaguely aware of the name having come from an American model.
Eric, thanks for an absolutely stellar, well-researched article!
While North America wasn’t the only market that held onto the RWD T-Car for slightly too long, GM really missed the opportunity – as you said – to keep the momentum. A Chevy version of the Kadett/Astra would have paired well with the larger FWD X-Body and, ironically, if they’d rushed it to market it probably would’ve been a good car—they wouldn’t have had time to mess it up like the Vega and Citation!
Chevy’s small car strategy in the 1980s really was “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks”, wasn’t it? Nova, Spectrum, Sprint, Cavalier, Chevette…
It really took until the Cruze for GM to show they finally “got it” with small cars in North America. Astounding. It always seemed like a case of GM having so many different overseas divisions/partners that knew how to make a good small car but a stubborn refusal to accept they knew better. After all, US small car tastes have proved to be scarcely different from Asian and European tastes, as the global Focus, Corolla etc show.
Thanks for the article, Eric. CC effect? Perhaps, I’m building a model of the ’78 version
ATM.
Well done, Eric!
+1
+2
+3. My dad had a tan ’77 EXACTLY like this one, new. You did it justice…
A terrific article about a car I have never experienced first-hand. You’ve got me wondering what might have happened had the car been a better value proposition at introduction and had it been updated around 1980 or 1981 – fortunes could have been much different.
Years ago, a very politically active high school acquaintance of my father had one of these early Chevettes in this same color. His wife was a secretary where I went to school and she was the primary driver.
Anyway, I remember one night long ago when Brud (a nickname of undisclosed origin) pulled into the driveway in his Chevette. As he was in the house giving my father a sale-job on why he should run for the school board, I remember giving his Chevette the once over. It was a stick and equipped marginally better than this example. They had that car until the late 1980s when it went away for a Type 10 Cavalier.
And Brud was successful, with my father serving like four or five terms. I even watched him sign my high school diploma as he was president of the board at that time.
Even given its own failings, that Cavalier must have felt like a MAJOR step up compared to the Chevette!
Yeah, Ok
Guaranteed with that FWD torque steer, that RWD Chevette would leave the Cavalier in the dust on a windy road…Uh, in handling, not in speed. Lol
The 1982 J cars’ engines were so gutless, they had to revamp them in 1983.
Good article, good memories!
One disagreement though–in terms of value, the Chevette wasn’t as good as the Toyota corolla and (ugly) Datsun B-210, both of which were rear drive.
However, the VW Rabbit, while a better car, was very sparse in creature comforts. Base Rabbits came with rubber floor mats and drum brakes. $3499 in 1976. MSRP for a Chevette Scooter was $2999
The lesser ‘Vette was slow, noisy, and cramped, but it had great ride and handling, was versatile, reliable, and inexpensive to operate.
Had GM gone with plan B, a ‘state if the art FWD car for 1978’., it would probably have been late and not met performance and cost targets.
American car makers for many reasons, several in this article, don’t do small cars well.
Instead of slightly modifying the excellent Opel, GM gave us the Vega.
Then the X-car.
So, viewed in terms of potential opportunity cost (aka GM’s opportunity to mess up) Chevette was a hit!
Thanks for the article Eric!!! as well as the memories it rekindled of my brown 4 door 1978 chevette. i loved that little car never let me down and i liked it for what it was,,,,a simple automobile. for those claiming it to be a cheap pos this car was right in line with what was out there at the time. for a lot of us youngsters at the time it really was the model t of cars. reliable simple frugal and not bad looking.
I have nothing but negative memories over the shiny, new ’76 Chevette 1.6L stick I traded my-no/0 problems-’71 Pinto 1.6L HB for. The car, from literally day 2, had problem after problem. The Chevy dealer in Ca. was, shall we say, quite reticent to address.
When we moved back to the Midwest a new problem surfaced: the stick shift would detach from below in cold Winter weather. That was it; purchased a new ’79 Nova 6….engine was replaced within 3 months!! Started buying Honda cars in 1988…wonder why? DFO
And yet Dennis, my Moms 74 Montego was a great car she drove until 2000 with little issue and in 2018 I’m still driving a 79 Thunderbird I bought in April 02 for $900 with (so far) zero breakdowns. Everyone has a different experience.
Dennis my wife’s female co-worker last year bought a new Accord. This 40 something single lady wanted something “reliable”. Twice in the 1st 6 months, the car was dead sitting in her garage. So just a reminder, Honda (and all the rest of the foreign is better crowd) hasn’t closed their service departments. And my wife’s co-worker is glad of that.
Hope you stopped buying Hondas in 1996, Dennis. With their grenading automatic transmissions in the Accords, Civics, Odysseys, Acura TL and TSXs, you’d be walking.
Honda automatics were garbage from 1996-2005…Even after that, I’d think they’re a lil iffy.
A good article that conveys well the sense of urgency of the times to move away from the bloated designs of the early 1970s.
My parents replaced their disintegrating Vega with a Chevette 4-door at the height of the 1979 energy crisis. While the Vega did feel more substantial, the Chevette was far better suited to its task as a commuter car for my father’s 70 mile round trip daily commute. It handled well and the higher seating position was more comfortable for all four passengers. With the automatic and an AM radio as the only options, the car was very Spartan even compared to rivals such as the Toyota Corolla and Datsun 210, which also offered rubber floormat base versions similar to the Scooter (only with a back seat). The auto made this car an absolute slug and it struggled to get up to highway speeds, no matter my hamhanded teenage efforts to go drive fast.
Though hardly state of the art, as Eric notes, the Chevette proved reliable and was adequate to its task, making it the very definition of a disposable car. Few tears were shed when it was unceremoniously traded a five years later.
The Chevette seemed like the anti-Vega. It wasn’t really a good car but, unlike the Vega, it wasn’t a particularly bad car, either, as evidenced by its long run with relatively few changes. It was a simple, basic, two-box design which broke no new engineering or design ground and, unusual for a GM car, had its highest sales midway through its decade-long production.
If it had been the Chevette introduced in 1971 instead of the troubled Vega, things might have turned out far differently. Of particular note is the 2.8L V6 engine swap which actually made the Chevette an acceptable performer.
I did not see your comment before posting mine, so you got to the point first. An alternate “what-if” was what if GM had decided to wait until 1978 for a whiz-bang car with fresh FWD engineering. There is a serious possibility that it would have been as fouled up as the Vega and the Citation were. Perhaps the time crunch which necessitated a re-work of the T car was the only thing that kept the Chevette from completing a Disaster Trifecta.
What, no pictures of the T-car convertible?
As others have pointed out, if the GM “brass” had realized that folks wanted small cars…just not this one, perhaps we might have had a replacement built in the US that folks might have bought. The higher-ups at GM and to an extent Ford seemed (?) to operate on the idea that a better small car was as simple as scaling down a bigger car. Want a low priced car? We will build a smaller Chevy Bel Air.
A co-worker bought one of the earliest Chevettes produced, and was so proud of the idea he was about to buy a car so cheaply. Even though we were in Florida, a few dealers had REALLY cheap, “stripper”/price leader models….as in no A/C. And he bought one of the base models and had air conditioning added by the dealer. Same look/color as the one here.
IMHO, this car and all it’s competition (at least the base/bare bones models) were intolerable.
When you mention the T-car convertible, do you mean the Kadett Aero? I’m not aware of any other variant.
Great piece on the Chevette! I remember them as being driven by a female demographic in the majority. Two female acquaintances of mine had Chevettes (one called hers a Shove-it after stalling problems). Driving one of those cars, I was taken at how light everything felt – the steering, the acceleration, and the handling all gave me an impression that you wouldn’t want to be met with a stiff cross wind, lest you be forced into an unplanned lane change. Taking Jane’s to a drive-in movie, my back was not the same for days after from the stiff seating.
I will say this about these cars – they were a successful replacement in Chevy’s lineup for the Vega/Astre, and gave some better reliability. I’m sure that the tires were no more than 13 inches in diameter, and even with snows on the back Marie got hers stuck in the snow. At the time, I think buyers may have been wiser to purchase a 1st gen Honda Civic than a Chevette/Acadian. It was more solid, of similar size, and higher on the dependability scale. Another friend had a 74 Toyota Celica, which was higher in the price bracket at its time, but was a much better car than these Chevvies.
The photo below was an attempt to capture one of the largest, and one of the smallest cars on the road at the time.
My 2 cents
Re female demographic, my wife’s first new car was a Chevette (following her father’s recommendation); she told me it was such a lemon (and poor performer besides), that she would not even consider buying American again. It’s been Toyota ever since.
Too bad your wife won’t try to be a good patriotic American, because the quality difference today, (if ever) is nil, maybe even better for some of the home team. I know 2 different families that drove chevettes over 200 K, so maybe your wife if someone who can tear up a ball bearing?
Your photo comparing the largest and smallest cars at the time brings to mind this picture, which was the 1979 equivalent of a viral publicity stunt.
These cars both belonged to US Congressmen – the Lincoln was House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s while the Chevette belonged to newly-elected Representative Ron Paul. The two politicians were as different as their cars were. Rep. Paul took this photo and published it in his constituent newsletter in 1979 in order to highlight what he saw as hypocrisy among his fellow politicians. Specifically, O’Neill at the time (during the oil crisis) was advocating for a gas rationing law for US consumers, but Rep. Paul pointed out that he drove an 8 mpg Lincoln and fueled it up at the Congressional gas pumps, so he was immune from the hardships that his proposal would bring to others.
The picture was quickly picked up by news organizations, and the idea of gas rationing was dropped for good (not just because of this photo, or course). In any event, Speaker O’Neill was enraged at Rep. Paul’s contempt for him, and evidently held a grudge against Paul for many years as a result of this photo.
Incidentally, Rep. Paul kept the Chevette until about 5 years ago, when he auctioned it off to benefit one of his advocacy groups. The car’s role in this spat with O’Neill was one it its main selling points.
To be fair, the difference in size between Tip O’Neil and Ron Paul is represented by the cars that they drove.
And my 79 Lincoln gets better than 8 mpg, even in town.
TBH, both cars belonged to friends who were over visiting. But in retrospect, it was large and small, even if unintended at the time.
I owned two of these while in college and a total of five in the family over the late seventies. We found them to be pretty damn reliable and when not, inexpensive to fix. Father and I got very good at fixing them.
The original “cam” rear brake set-up sucked and I was delighted that my ’82 had Bendix-style rear drum brakes.
“redesigned the underbody (for greater corrosion resistance)” Oh, lord, what would it have been like had they not redesigned it? In the great lakes land of salt I saw many nice looking Chevettes – until you looked under them.
Original rear hatch style would accept a 4×8 sheet of plywood – of course it stuck out, but you could easily fit it in there. I found out the hard way with my ’82 that the restyled rear end had narrowed the hatch opening just a smidge.
Drove mine all over the country – nothing like climbing the continental divide in January in an un-altitude adjusted under-powered Chevette. Watch the scenery slowly roll by.
After coming from recirculating ball steering in my ’67 Chevelle the rack-and-pinion was wonderful and compared to my Malibu the Chevette could handle (I know, the Malibu set that bar pretty low.)
I even enjoyed the strategic game of planning to pass on winding two-lane rural highways. You couldn’t just pull out and hit passing gear – it was more like chess watching speed, terrain, oncoming traffic….not a game for everyone I am sure.
Ah memories! When I worked for the phone company, one of the pool cars we had was a Chevette Scooter. I know pool cars weren’t exactly pampered, but this thing was as bad as it could possibly be! The cardboard door panels(yes!)were warping after a month or so of use.
And then we got a Monza…………..
The only redeeming quality for the so-called Sh**vette was that because it was RWD you could actually stuff a small-block V8 into it… after my friend totaled his Chevelle he transplanted the 327 into one. That was a scary fast car but don’t try to turn!
Another acquaintance with one kept trying to pick up girls by offering rides in his ‘Vette…. you can guess how that worked out for him!
I’d say Chevy finally hit the target with this one. Corvair and Vega both answered a question nobody was asking. Nobody wanted a technically advanced car that breaks down when you try to drive it. The Chevette answered the right question. A small car that doesn’t cost much to buy and run, and drives when you want to drive it.
I remember seeing and hearing a LOT of broken Vegas. I never heard a bad Chevette.
Excellent piece, Eric! I think it is hard to consider the Chevette without reference to the Vega. It appears that GM learned at least one lesson and let Chevrolet develop this car instead of GM central engineering which had been mostly responsible for the Vega.
This car turned out to be everything the Vega was not, both good and bad. Where the Vega was fun to drive and beautiful, the Chevette was not. But where the Vega was fragile of both body and engine, the Chevette was not either. I have always wondered what the Chevette could have been with some more power and a more sporting suspension being considered during engineering. A Chevette GT or SS might have sold fairly well in 1976-77 when fuel economy wasn’t everyone’s driving metric.
I spent time in two of these. Both automatics. I worked at a place where I drove one of the earlier ones and I rented one of the later ones on a weekend trip to Connecticut (they had nothing else – I asked). Both suffered from a nasty front end vibration/shimmy at highway speed and both were frighteningly slow when trying to get up to speed on a highway. So all in all, the Chevette’s most memorable quality is that it could have been better but certainly could have been worse.
It appears that GM learned at least one lesson and let Chevrolet develop this car instead of GM central engineering which had been mostly responsible for the Vega.
Let me fix that for you:
It appears that GM learned at least one lesson and let Opel develop this car instead of GM central engineering which had been mostly responsible for the Vega.
Don’t forget, this car (the T car) was never intended originally for the US. It was the Opel Kadett, and to be shared with Vauxhall and Isuzu. The only thing Chevrolet did is adapt it for US standards and production, which involved some compromises to meet cost/price targets.
Ford did the same thing with the Escort, with equally mediocre results. Of the Big Three’s attempts at “platform immigration,” I think the “Omnirizon” turned out best at the time.
Agreed. Interestingly, the US Omni/Horizon had far less in common with the Talbot-Simca Horizon than the US T-cars and Escorts had with their European counterparts. They also actually came to market before the cars that shared their name and sheet metal in Europe.
Which leads to my complete lack of understanding how a company that had a division (albeit “overseas”) that made good small cars, why did GM (and Ford) NOT use european products here in the North American market more? I understand shipping cost can ruin profitability, but it seems that they could have more easily shipped tooling for a factory from europe for less than the cost of spinning up their own design. Really, they could have shipped the past model’s tooling to an underutilized plant in the US and sold the hell out of whatever they built on the cheap and still called it a domestic. The “garden variety” American of the 70s really did not understand small cars, so they would have never thought that the small car on their Chevy dealer’s lot was really an American-built version of an old Opel model. We still see that now with US built Hondas, Toyotas, Subarus, Hyundais, Kias, BMWs, and Mercedes being called “foreign” while the Mexican and Chinese built GM, Ford, and Chrysler cars and trucks being called “domestics”.
They all did bring their European small cars over. Ford with the Cortina and Capri, GM with the Opel Kadett, 1900 (Ascona A) and Manta, Chrysler with the Plymouth Cricket (Rootes) and Simca 1100. Simca, of course, developed the Horizon which stayed in production after Chrysler Europe was sold to Peugeot-Citroen.
Then the dollar tanked versus the mark and yen. A dollar bought four marks in 1969, 1.7 in 1980. It bought 357 yen in 1971, 179 in 1978. German imports in particular went from cheap to expensive.
As for the Chevette, the mistake of not updating small cars was repeated with the Chevy Cavalier and Ford Focus. While the first-generation Cavalier was similar to the Vauxhall Cavalier and Opel Ascona C, the European platforms were redesigned twice before the US Cavalier was finally retired. The rest of the world got the MkII Focus, we kept the MkI in production and eventually got the MkIII.
“It appears that GM learned at least one lesson and let Opel develop this car instead of GM central engineering which had been mostly responsible for the Vega.”
A most excellent point! I will continue to maintain that had it been given the opportunity, Chevrolet engineering would have screwed the car up less than GM central engineering would have. 🙂
I bought an 87 Chevette my senior year of high school. It was a solid little car. The seats were comfortable and it was decent on gas.
Being in high school I was kinda stupid. I got rid of the car because my friends kept saying I needed a bigger car. I ended up with 2 horrible cars after.
I know you said the top speed was 88 mph for these, but I got mine up to 105 mph,on a back road. My friend was following me in his Buick with a digital dash. He told me how fast when I stopped, it did take 5 miles of flat road to get it that fast.
They might be a car most people hate but I really would love another one.
Good documentary on a parts bin crapster. In a moment of insanity, I bought a 1980 model and suffered with it for three long years.
As for the claim of the “Chevette’s iron-block engine, though, did prove to be reliable”, true except for all of the $hi! attached to it like the water pump, alternator, carburetor et al – continual fail.
Lots of these everywhere when I was starting high school in the late ’70s. A lot of the kids had used ones as their first cars. They were pretty bare-bones and needed a lot of dressing up to be liveable. It’s interesting to note that as GM was working on these from 1973 onwards, they were also doing a crash program to bring out the smaller Caddy called Seville.
Thank you for this wonderful synopsis of the development and production life of the Chevette. I particularly appreciated the insights regarding GM management thinking about the project. This helps me to understand all the “just enough” features in my sister’s little red Chevette-the seat was “just enough” to keep our small frames from falling on the floor, the steering wheel was “just enough” to give you something to turn the wheels with, the wipers were “just enough” to let you see out the windshield enough to not run into someone else, the dash had just enough gauges to get you to the next gas station. And the motor was “just enough” to get you where you were going, throughout the entire model run. Opel Kadettes could be furnished with some really nice engines and suspension options, but that would not have fit the “just enough” mentality of GM America. But many of us really prefer small cars! Really big missed opportunity, there, GM.
What surprises me is that the US version has leaf springs at the back in place of the trailing arms, coil springs, torque tube and Panhard rod of the European version; also we got disc brakes up front. Sure, we had painted door tops too, but that wasn’t that unusual, the standard and deluxe Vivas were the same (the more expensive SLs got a vinyl covering).
Does it have leaf springs? Re-read it and one of the photos seems to have coil springs – my apologies, I believe I’ve misunderstood the paragraph on suspension and handling.
Sorry for the confusion — the North American Chevette did not have leaf springs. The suspension was very similar to the European T-cars.
Thanks Eric. Nice to see a decent piece on the Chevette in the US.
I would have edited my original comment, but I’m afraid a ‘503’ error stopped me!
A firm I worked for had a ’77 Chevette as a company car which I drove on occasion plus I rented a few (strict corporate travel budgets) in the early 1980s. Crude but tough as cockroaches. I remember when Patrick Bedard at Car and Driver caused a bit of a stink with GM when he called the Chevette the “American Skoda”.
And Brock Yates too, by calling it a shitbox.
This was a wonderful article, Eric!
I’ve ridden in several Chevettes but have never driven one. But from that I can say that they were perfectly adequate city cars for their time. Great for just driving around town to work and errands and such.
I rode in one from Terre Haute to Muncie in Indiana once. The driver would not put it on the Interstate and it was a good call because of the pokey acceleration. We drove US 40 and a couple state highways, all lightly traveled. It wasn’t a highly comfortable trip, but it wasn’t painful either, and we got there in one piece.
I believe that Chevettes were driven on highways at the time, as they were comparable to VW bugs and other subcompacts that were also highway driven.
I drove two different Chevettes belonging to girlfriends, and they felt as light as a feather. It was as if a brisk wind would have been capable of moving them over a lane or two, or lifting them completely airborne.
Acceleration was very much an afterthought, as was comfort. I sat in one through a drive in movie double feature, and felt the after effects for days.
Colloquially, drivers at the time called them “Shove-its.”
I seem to notice a generational divide – Silents and early Boomers who owned other cars before buying their Chevettes new hated them, late Boomers and Xers who owned them as cheap beater first cars loved them. A matter of expectations I guess.
Exactly. I learned to drive in 1977, using a 65 Belvedere with a slant 6, then a 69 Caprice, then a 77 Monte Carlo, but what I really wanted in 1981 was a new Ford Escort, the first “world car” from Ford. I got a base model one with dealer AC that never worked right, and was totally thrilled to drive it in all of its glory. It was a model aimed at my generation, and my expectations of it were met if not exceeded.
We see this repeated in generations of cars. In the 20s, cars were new and anything was better than nothing. In the 30s, you either had money and a Duesenberg or not much money and bought a Model A. Suddenly, post WWII, you wanted something flashy, then in the 60s something low and wide and fast, and the 70s required a brougham something.
A Cheapy Cheapette was anti-brougham and a lot of people liked them for being just that. Add to that the love one has for your first car, and voila, the Chevette can be loved just as much as it was hated by others.
Having traveled in Europe, where I was blown away by the Fords and Opels I saw, I too got on the Escort bandwagon; BTW the A/C worked on mine. But later I ended up kicking myself for not buying the better-engineered Mazda GLC, or even a Corolla, instead.
For some reason, foreign-owned carmakers didn’t need to work as hard to Federalize their designs as Detroit did with those from their Europe divisions.
That’s a great point. Moving to a new Chevette after having owned/driven something else of a larger, more traditional level would inevitably be a huge let-down, and the comments of those who went that route reflect that.
But getting a used one for cheap as a rudimentary point-A to point-B beater, the expectations would be altogether different, entirely. For many years, old Chevettes were superb examples of ‘cockroaches of the road’ that simply refused to die, no matter how much abuse was laid upon them. In that scenario, they excelled.
As a Boomer, I think our distaste comes from knowing what GM had been capable of in the 60’s… and thus viewing the Chevette as an embarrassment. Think of the company that produced the 63 Rivera, the 68 Olds Toronado, the 69 Chevelle, the 66 Bonneville …. and then think of the Chevette.
Where the Vega was a disaster, it was at least a disaster born of hubris, where the Chevette was born of resignation and cynicism. The newest piece of technology in the Chevette was the emergency flasher relay required of all cars after 1968. Where the Vega had a (less than fully realized) entirely new engine design, GM couldn’t even be assed to go the the trouble of making the steering wheel sit straight in front of the driver. It seemed that, having been burned by the Vega, GM had given up all pretense of engineering cars and had taken to assembling cars from available parts, very much in the British fashion.
The only reasons (IMHO) that the Chevette had any success in the late 70’s were that the demand for quality small cars drove the price of Japanese and German cars up at the same time currency costs were hitting them, along with the horrendous economy which put car loans as high as 20% interest. People bought the absolute cheapest car on the market because that was all they could afford. Further, the general decline in quality, drivability, and interior fitments made the Chevette less of a contrast, even if it DID have cardboard door panels.
My speculation is that by the 80’s all kids had ever known were the malaise era cars and they grew up with lowered expectations.
Bias alert: in college, I had 75 Civic while my friend had a 76 Chevette. The Civic was tiny, and tinny, but it was a Swiss watch compared that Turnip Truck Chevette.
In 1985, I bought a 1980 Chevette with 60,000 miles for $500. Such a deal! Yeah, right. It was the biggest steaming pile that I have ever owned. Unreliable, unsafely slow, and gas mileage only in the mid teens. I sold it and bought a 1972 Plymouth Valiant with 170,000 miles on it for $300 that was better in every way. After that Chevette, it would be 31 years before I would own another GM vehicle again.
Another interesting contrast with the Chevette was the Buick Opel, the Isuzu-built replacement for the German-built Manta and 1900 models. Also a T-car design based on the Isuzu Gemini (pictured above), the awkwardly named Buick Opel by Isuzu was introduced in 1976 to give Buick dealers a small car replacement for the German cars, which became too expensive to sell in the U.S. due to the deflation of the dollar against the Deutsche Mark.
I rode in a friend’s 1977 Buick Opel coupe and found it to be harsh riding relative to the Chevette but better finished inside, with no bare painted metal showing. Eventually, a 4-door sedan was added to the lineup, providing further contrast with the Chevette’s hatchback designs. Buick dealers’ pointed lack of interest in the car meant that it was never a threat to the Chevette and the models were dropper after 1979.
This neglect led Isuzu to set up its own U.S. dealer network and sell a refreshed version of the Gemini known as the I-Mark in the early 1980s, meeting with greater success.
Wow,3500 $ in today’s money is like15k in USA,Not Sure If You Can Buy A New Car Over there For 15 grand but probably A Clean Low mile Car Which is still Much Safer& More Reliable than Chevette.
6 months ago I bought a new 2017 Toyota Corolla LE (very well equipped, automatic, a/c, and full safety and convenience suite) for just under $15k. It can’t be compared to the Chevette by any real metric; it’s a very comfortable 4-5 seater and would compare more to like a 1980 Buick Skylark.
MSRP prices on American cars are not a good indicator as to what they actually sell for.
Did you have to scour the country to find that deal? Please give details. I need a new car soon, on the cheap, and don’t want to step foot in a dealership.
Nope. Walked into the local Toyota dealer one morning, and the nearest salesman was a very nice guy. I told him I wanted to buy a Corolla LE for no more than $14,999, to be used by the non-profit group home my daughter lives in. I based that price on a bit of research I did online to help me determine what I thought was the best deal possible.
He knew that he and the dealer wouldn’t make any money on the deal, as it was a cash deal, and no additional dealer doo-dads. But he got approval from the Sales Manager, and I came back the next morning with a cashier’s check for $15,308, which covered title and four years of registration. That was the total paid to drive it off the lot.
I just remembered: I did go to the other Toyota dealer (in Springfield) first, and they were total jerks. They wanted that much for 2-3 year old Corollas.
I suspect that what I said about it being for a non-profit may have helped a bit, but let’s face it: Corollas (and other small sedans) aren’t exactly flying out the door. I suspect you probably won’t be easily able to replicate it, but shoot for $15,999. I think that’s doable. Just tell them what’s your maximum price (and be real clear about whether you’re going to need financing or not), and leave your name and number. Go near the end of the month, when they need to push harder to make sales targets. Be nice but firm. Figure out what you want to pay, and just start calling dealers and tell them what you want for how much. Someone will likely bite.
But you might have to step inside a dealer. In Eugene, many of the dealers have really nice salespeople. Some not so much so.
Ok thanks for the reply. I remember your van story and you having to go some distance for it so thought maybe same for this. Good to know deals can be made. I might look at 2018 Elantra SEL (rims and a few other basic options over the base model) for $14999. I’d still like to get it a bit cheaper since car sales have slowed. Live in very rural area so haven’t made the time to drive the 75 miles. Thanks again..I like real-world examples.
I recall the media hype about the Chevette when it was introduced. I was all of 14 years old and I still believed every word in Car and Driver.
My sister in law had one, a 1.6 litre manual. I recall two weird things about it: first was the steering wheel jutted out at a weird angle, to the left. I’ve never seen that in any other car. The other was the bucket seats were convex: you sat on top of a hill. Going around corners meant trying to hang one.
I have driven all the small cars of the era and the Chevette is the worst, although not by a huge margin. That’s because Ford’s early Escort models were even worse than the Chevette.
There were loads of these things around on Vancouver Island. I recall Cornell Chev-Olds advertising the five door automatic for $5995, circa 1986.
Thanks, Eric for such an interesting, detailed and well-balanced review of one of my all-time automotive favorites!
Too bad so many Chevettes received so little love an then sold down the pike for cheap. To paraphrase the old real estate saying, a satisfactory Chevette ownership experience was all about “maintenance, maintenance, maintenance!”
My ‘84 Chevette (2-door, 4-speed, power nothing, purchased in ‘86 with 37 K miles) turned out to be an excellent car because it was never left wanting for oil changes or front end lubrication. Additionally, as tires, brakes shocks, etc. wore out, they were replaced with better than OEM equivalents. Those gradual improvements rewarded me with a rather fun to drive car that never left me walking for about 7 years and 100 K additional miles.
250 mile round trips to visit my hometown every weekend? The occasional trip from Columbus Ohio to Atlanta Georgia? No problem! Highway mileage consistently in the low 30’s? Got it covered!
Had Chevy updated the design with a 5-speed transmission, fuel injection, a tad more power, etc. I would’ve been keenly interested.
An excellent find, this early version. There’s still a couple of the later ones around here, but it’s been some time since I’ve seen one of these.
And a most excellent review of the Chevette’s checkered career in the US. It was still just reasonably competitive when it arrived, but the market changed quickly. It’s quite obvious that once gas prices stabilized and Chevette sales drooped, GM had no more interest in that segment and refused to invest in it any further.
One of GM’s major faults, IMO, was having no interest in pursuing a competitive compact/sub-compact car for the American market. I seriously believe it’s because management thought “we wouldn’t own one of these things, we don’t understand why our customers would, but since they are selling, here ya go.” At least the Chevette was durable and reliable, so there’s that.
GM had already been burned with a couple of revolutionary small cars (Corvair and Vega). It also didn’t help that Ford had made a real killing with the completely conventional and much cheaper to develop and produce Falcon.
So, it was no more big, far-reaching domestic R&D for the subcompact class, and thus was born the Chevette. Even today, GM is nearly entirely dependent on their foreign entities for the majority of their smallest cars’ development. While the profit-drivers are no longer big cars, it’s now pickups and SUVs that fill out the balance sheets for GM.
Great article!
I may be wrong, but I believe this was the vehicle that caused Brock Yates to coin the term “shitbox.”
A high school buddy had one of these examples in the early-mid 90s. It actually ran pretty decently still. Its only faults were copious amounts of floorboard rust and a drivers side window that would continually fall into the door.
Nice find, I like the early ones that have a cleaner front and back.
Mrs DougD’s parents had a Chevette when she got her license, so it was the first car she ever drove. Sometime when I am mentioning how good it might be to own a 1939 Dodge or a 1960 Mercury she says “Maybe a Chevette would be fun”
If the price of a Fluid Drive Mopar or a nice Hamilton Studebaker includes a Chevette, well then by all means, buy the Mrs. a Chevette. A really nice one would probably get more admiring looks at the car shows than either of your choices. 🙂
Great article, on a car that was very common in my country as a middle-class machine.
We had several 2 door, notchbak Brazilian Chevettes in the family. The first was a ’78 Rally-striped 1.4, the first brand new car my Dad bought (about 10K at the time). It was a light car, and my Dad after his ’68 Nova 230 was delighted at the rack and pinion, very light steering, the easy changing four-on-the floor, and of course, fuel consumption in a country where gas was even then a dollar a liter (now it’s 1.80). We kept it for just 3 years, as it had almost no corrosion protection and driver’s side floor and front right fender self-destructed. It was a reliable car, though. One of my brothers had two of them, one a ’79 and the other an ’80 model. The ’79 was bought around 2005 with 40.000 km on the clock from a lady in her 80’s who couldn’t drive anymore and was a friend of the family. It was stolen for parts a few months later; it survived all those years with no rust or any other problems; quality control wasn’t very standardized. The last one was bought by my other brother in 1992, same car, much body massaging, a 1.6 with a 5 speed. That was very reliable and well built…All of them were terribly unconfortable in the back seat, and very low. South America was a huge market for Chevettes.
Something that strikes me as funny is that while up to about 1982 all Brazilian Chevettes had red rear directional lights, just as traditional American cars, American Chevettes had orange rear directionals…
The GM ‘T’ car came in two flavours in NZ Vauxhall Chevette and Holden/Isuzu Gemini and thats how they were badged the Holden is just a clone of the Isuzu with no imput from GMH, they sat in the showrooms together in a lot of cases the Vauxhall sold well the Holden car sold poorly,
I never understood why Vauxhall used the Chevette name. Okay, it saved them registering a separate trademark as GM already owned the name, but were they really that hard up? Likewise Holden using the Sunbird (Sub-nerd) moniker.
At around that time the Chevelle name was one of the names being considered for what was to become the Cavalier. Chevrolet was seen in a rather different light I think, perhaps more associated with the Corvette and Camero. In the same vein the van variant of the Chevette was named Bedford Chevanne.
When I was newly married in 1976, we considered a new Chevette. Which is amazing because the new 1972 Vega she had previously was terrible, and she didn’t even have it long enough to experience the engine issues.
Anyway, we rented a new Chevette in the spring, and I rather liked driving it aside from the low power of the engine. Yet, to get a car similar to the one I rented, it got a little expensive – you know, a back seat, radio, automatic.
So we went out and got a new Honda Civic CVCC. It used easily found low-lead gas, was relatively well equipped for the price (cheaper than the Chevette), and quite fun to drive in spite of the Hondamatic. Only, it was about as durable as a paper cup.
A co-worker years later told me he had a new ’76 Chevette for a time, but got rid of it by 40K miles because it, too, was frequently in the shop.
I never considered it then, maybe the best car for us would’ve been a new Corolla. But I thought the model I could afford was boring (and I say this as the very satisfied current owner of a Corolla variant). Maybe a piston-engined Mazda might have worked.
Excellent work Eric…My life long friend drove an 82 two dr. His wife drove the “new one” an 84.. 4 dr. Both were sticks.
I’m shocked that nobody has mentioned what a nightmare it was to replace the starter. After many tries we found ourselves un-bolting the left motor mount and using a bumper jack to “tilt” the motor to get excess to one starter bolt. The alternative involved a unique extension set up, while almost guaranteeing a chunk of meat missing from your right hand.
Eric you mentioned they were assembled in Wilmington. Wilmington took over the “B” chev from us in Oshawa. I’m thinking mid 1984 ??? I know that because we sent a crew down there to help ramp up production. Where did they run the “T” body after that ?
The other Chevette production plant was in Atlanta. Wilmington and Atlanta overlapped by several years, but for the last year or two all Chevettes were built in Atlanta.
When Chevette was first introduced, GM planned to produce them in both Wilmington and California — in an effort to reduce transportation costs to the Coasts, where the company expected most of the car’s sales to be. However, when sales underwhelmed, the plans for California production were shelved. Sometime around 1980 is when Chevette production began in Atlanta.
Years ago I was discussing automotive trends with a friend who owned a scrapyard when he said “There was a time when I thought the world would never run out of chevettes. We were picking up seven or eight of them a day and couldn’t crush them fast enough and all of a sudden it stopped.” I laugh every time I see one. I should say “the one” that still patrols the neighbourhood. Loads of patina, a hole in the exhaust and soldiering on.
“It appears that GM learned at least one lesson and let Opel develop this car instead of GM central engineering which had been mostly responsible for the Vega.”
Many post “why didn’t GM bring over Opel designs”, well they did. Here is one example and while sold well, isn’t remembered fondly. When they did bring Euro built Opels, they ended up costing too much and parts were hard to obtain.
Also, didn’t a late 60’s Opel Kadette wagon get trashed by Car & Driver, taking a picture of it in a junkyard? Said “it belongs here”.
Also, to add to “[Chevette head designer] predicted that “in 20 years, big cars will be a social crime.”
Well, 40-50 years later, buyers couldn’t care less about small cars.
But they don’t care for big cars, either.
Trucks.
SUVs.
CUVs.
Not sedans, not coupes, not convertibles, not sports cars, not luxury cars.
And I have to say the quote from Murphy that “There’s no way you can sell something to a man who doesn’t want it” is, for all intents and purposes, a well meaning lie. Marketing departments tell the public what they want, and then it gets bought. Advertising works, and if you don’t think so, ask yourself why you have so much crap sitting around your house that you don’t really need or use. If GM or anyone really wanted to sell small cars, they could have and would have, but they did not.
When GM added a five-door, increased the horsepower and made more items standard, sales of the Chevette dramatically increased for the 1978 model year. That spurt in sales can’t be attributed to higher gas prices, as gas prices didn’t spike again until the spring of 1979 (due to the revolution in Iran).
There was a definite market for the Chevette. Just not for the Chevette GM introduced in the fall of 1975.
The best comnent I’ve read (as I agree!)
Also, didn’t a late 60’s Opel Kadette wagon get trashed by Car & Driver, taking a picture of it in a junkyard? Said “it belongs here”.
Don’t believe everything you read, especially in C&D. That was the 1968 version of clickbait, or fake news: https://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-histories/the-opel-kadett-asassination-by-car-and-driver/
Only a couple of issues earlier they rather raved about a Kadett Rallye they tested.
Opel was an easy target….. Ask Bob Lutz
Chrysler canned the Dart recently, and at first was ‘are they crazy?’. Now hailed as a ‘smart business decision’ dropping the unprofitable small car.
Honda’s #1 vehicle is the CR-V, much larger than the first Civics. So, even the Asians are selling more and more larger products.
While back in the old days of Energy Crisis, some thought “everyone will drive small cars in the future”, it is now “the future”. And, cars as small as the ’74 Civic are a novelty.
Point is look around, where are all the tiny cars?. Also, the old dead horse trope of “why cant Detroit build good small cars” has been beaten to death. Good small cars are available, but buyers are not that interested.
Honda sold over 23,000 Civics last month, so I wouldn’t say that “good small cars” are completely failing to interest buyers. It’s more like the weaker entries are being slowly weeded out by increasingly conservative buyers.
I wouldn’t call the current Civic “small” either; it’s the equivalent of a ’70s Nova, not a Chevette (as Paul said about the Corolla).
It looks as though with gas cheap and credit easy once again, the subcompact segment is increasingly dominated by two models; the Honda Fit for people who want something nice and not too cramped that casts the smallest shadow possible within those parameters, and the Mitsubishi Mirage for those who just want the cheapest new car.
The Chevy Spark is apparently a better car than the latter, but Mitsu’s dealers are hungry for the sales. A segment up, the Sonic was world-class at launch but recently got a facelift when a full reskin was due, and getting rid of the non-RS hatchbacks can’t have helped sales.
The Honda Fit is not “nice”. It is cleverly designed, super practical, and economical. Also unpleasant to drive or ride in. Poor ride, crap NVH.
The chevy sonic is the best buy on the market for an American made car. All 3 I’ve had have been excellent performers and with a with a light right foot do 10 to 15% better economy than the EPA guide.
Sure, good small cars are available. Just mostly not with American brands on them.
Umm… Cruze, Focus, Spark?
A case could be made that the first-generation Cruze and certain Focus models were competitive.
I’m hardly making excuses for GM when I say the current Spark and Cruze are competitive in their classes (and not just “good for the price”). The Focus is at the end of its lifecycle and is still competitive, too, ditto the Fiesta.
Your statement was that good small cars aren’t available with American brands on them, and that’s rubbish. Had you said “class-leading small cars aren’t available with American brands on them”, I would have agreed with you–the compact segment, in particular, is brutally competitive and the latest Civic and Golf, among others, are excellent. But the Spark and Cruze are solidly good and even the Trax, Encore and Sonic are above average. We’re not talkin’ Pintos and Cavaliers and Chevettes anymore…
…which is one or two small steps above the faintest praise that can be levelled at an automobile.
Take another look up there, please, while I repeat myself down here: good small cars are available. Just mostly not with American brands on them. Emphasis added.
Then we don’t have an argument. It has been reliably pointed out that a well-equipped new Corolla (for example) can be bought for economical money–so why settle for something that is merely “competitive”? Why split semantic hairs over the precise meanings of “competitive”, “good”, and “class-leading”? I don’t see the point.
See, but we’re also not talkin’ 1977 any more. The American makers have loused up in the same way again and again and again. Examples abound—look at the (latter-day) Dodge Dart: the promise of the Neon beautifully fulfilled at last, but it wasn’t 1995 or 2005 any more; the supply and demand sides of the market had moved on considerably. Ditto the Sebring/200: incremental steps better than the Spirit/Acclaim in some ways…20 years after it would’ve mattered. We stopped talkin’ Cavaliers when GM started preferring we call them Cobalts; it’s inexplicable, but the name change didn’t stop it being a relentlessly mediocre penalty box. And have you read Bob Lutz’s description of GM execs and managers being dismayed at the Chev Cruze being unnecessarily good and ordering “correction” in the new model, back to the middle of the competitive pack? Lutz is FOS on some topics, but on this one #Ibelievehim. Ford have behaved similarly enough times to be a consistent pattern with them, too. They sometimes (accidentally?) release a good small car, then discontinue it and hope nobody noticed, or replace it with a substantially inferior model.
Look, I’m not a booster of Toyota, Honda, VW, or any other brand—I used to be a rabid Mopar fanboy til I figured out that brand loyalty is dumb and creepy. Spending my money on a car (or anything else, for that matter) is nothing at all like going to see the Special Olympics: there will be one winner. There will be many losers, and none them gets a prize for being competitive.
Good points. And the pity is, most of the “quality issues” arguments of the past should be there as well. Too bad Americans have turned against the home team to the point of not returning.
Well, yes; respect must be earned, it’s not just handed out like free toothbrushes at the dentist’s office. And the Chevette was such a pathetic noneffort that it’s difficult for me not to view it and its long-repeated ilk—Vega, Pinto, Citation, Cadavalier, etc—as cynically deliberate halfassedness (an insult to fractional asses doing their job every day) designed to demonstrate that Americans don’t want small cars. The American auto industry specialised in this kind of behaviour; see also their reaction to emissions and safety regulations: comply in the cheapest and nastiest possible way; make the cars difficult and unpleasant to live with in hopes of spurring a public backlash against regulation at all.
My wife always refers to the Chevette her family had as “that damn Chevette.” Always.
Eric, thanks to you, I now have a definitive Chevette reference… outstanding piece.
Someone might already have said this, but it’s mind-blowing to me that there was almost a 20% base price difference between the ’76 Scooter and the Woody!
Bad in 1976? Not exactly. Datusn’s B210 saw to that. Nasty by 1982? Nearly anything with wheels saw to that. Underdeveloped was the Achilles heel here, and it makes no sense as GM Europe made quite a decent car at the end of 1979 with the FWD Kadett D.
“Chevette’s high-sales mark came in 1980, when the then-5-year-old model sold nearly 450,000 units, making the stodgy, slow Chevette America’s best-selling car.”
While I have no doubt that the Chevette ranked at or near the top of the U.S. sales chart for all four of the model years when it was Chevrolet’s primary entry in the small car market (1978 through 1981), I’m fairly certain it wasn’t #1 in 1980. The Chevrolet Citation was.
The Citation had an extra-long 1980 model year, starting sometime after the first of the year 1979 and running to the regular ’81 new model introduction in fall 1980. So it could be that more 1980 Citations were made but going by a standardized “model year” (say, October 1-September 30) or calendar year sales the Chevette outsold it.
There seems to be a surprising amount of discrepancies in 1980 production figures — both with the Citation and the Chevette. Regarding the Citation’s long 1980 model year, the Standard Catalog of Chevrolet notes that 187,000 of the 1980 Citations were made during the 1979 model year. I’ve seen both the Chevette and Citation listed as being top-sellers for 1980, but most sources I’ve seen do agree that Chevette was #1 for 1981, even though total production was down from ’80.
But I will change the text here to avoid confusion. Thanks, MCT and nlpnt!
“The Citation had an extra-long 1980 model year…it could be that more 1980 Citations were made but going by a standardized “model year” (say, October 1-September 30) or calendar year sales the Chevette outsold it.”
That’s a good point. 811K Citations were built in that extended 1980 model year. An earlier post of mine in a thread about the Citation states the following: “According to the Standard Catalog, about 279K ’80 Citations were sold during the 1979 model year. That means about 532K were sold during the 1980 model year proper.” If that’s accurate, the Citation should have still beat the Chevette handily in sales during the 1980 model year proper.
In the same article, Paul gives a 1981 Citation model year figure of 413K. Based on that, it’s not implausible that the Chevette could have beat the Citation in 1980 calendar year sales.
Yes, they’re crude. Yes, they’re slow. Yes, they’re ugly.
But how many OTHER cars from the 70’s are still seen (occasionally) on the road NOW? Not that many!
(And then there was the discreetly-customized one I saw in the 90’s with a slight hood bulge, V-6 emblems affixed to each side of said bulge…..)
Imagine a Chevette GT with a 2.8L V-6, wider wheels and so on…
Perhaps something like this?
https://www.pistonheads.com/news/ph-driven/spotted-1981-ex-works-vauxhall-chevette-hsr/24681
Chevettes, along with Chrysler K-cars and a few others, are one of the ways you can tell a modern ’80s-set period piece from a real ’80s movie or TV show. In the latter they were all over the streetscape; in the former the props department would consider themselves lucky to get their hands on *one*.
Reading your comment reminded me of all the now-older cars that I’ve seen watching re-runs of T.J. HOOKER on feTV lately. For the record, T.J. HOOKER ran from 1982-1986; it aired from 1982-85 on ABC and then CBS picked it up for ’85-’86 — minus Adrian Zmed who left to host “Dance Fever”).
I remember one episode where Hooker was chasing a green ’69 Impala or Caprice — it had 3 rectangular taillights on each side in the back bumper — but I couldn’t tell which model. The Chevy ended up wrecked and then . . . BOOM! 😀
There’s all kinds of Econoboxes parked on the streets of those T.J. HOOKER eps.
No mention of Bob Saget in a hard hat behind the wheel of the yellow Chevette in the ad above. I looked online and didn’t find any reference but I think it is him!!
They should’ve had him driving one in Full House, at least a late model early in the series. I wonder now how he could’ve afforded a new Taurus as a single dad with three kids and a San Francisco mortgage to pay (never mind that the equity built up in the latter would make him a very wealthy man, at least on paper, today).
A ’76 Chevette was the worst used car decision I ever made, finding one for my fiance (in 1980) to serve as her first car. By the time it was 6 years old, the floor was completely rusted out. Clutches were weak and didn’t last. The automatic transmissions were very unreliable and expensive to fix. These were primitive cars compared to a VW Rabbit. My fiance didn’t blame me for the lousy car, and we are still married!
Thanks for the memories. Chevettes are pretty rare in my orbit, but I spot one on the road every once in a while, and a crusty specimen moldering away behind a garage will occasionally catch my eye.
The father of one of my friends worked for GM, and had an early Chevette, which, to my 12 year old sensibilities seemed a pretty cool car. The bright yellow paint made it look sporty to me, and the advertising jingle “Chevy Chevette, it’ll drive you happy” seemed appropriate, and still rattles around in my brain from time to time. I don’t remember if it was that one, or whether they replaced it with a newer model, but that friend ended up crashing a parental Chevette soon after he got his license.
A couple years later, my dad, who then sold trucks for a Chevrolet dealer, brought one home a few times, and I recall that it had roof racks, decent upholstery, and felt pretty fancy, perhaps just because it was so new.
As part of a high school economics class I went on a field trip to a Chevette assembly plant in Delaware. We got to walk at floor level, see the cars being built, chat with some workers. The most vivid memory for me was of car bodies being dipped into large containers of primer, and I also recall that the workers didn’t seem very cheerful.
Several years later while I was in college, I picked up a used Scooter model. It was bare-bones, no glove box, cheap interior, but reasonably reliable, and served me well for several years, enduring hard service as a pizza delivery vehicle for a while. Its small size and manual transmission made it easy to get through traffic on crowded streets, and it was easier on fuel than any of my previous vehicles.
My girlfriend at the time, inspired by mine, got a slightly fancier one, with a glove box, slightly nicer upholstery and an automatic transmission. It was a bit like driving a go-kart. My sister had a decrepit one, painted an oddly appropriate ugly green that reminded me of bile, but I still remember it as fun to drive, a natural beater car.
Though it seems strange to wax nostalgic about such a plebeian vehicle, it is a fact that there have been several Chevettes in my life, and memories of them are associated with happy feelings.
And here we are, 50 years later. GM’s large SUV’s outsold all luxury sedans (priced over $60K) by a margin of over 3:1. All brand were imports except Tesla S, which was the largest seller in that segment. Ford announced they’re bumping production of the new Expedition/Navigator 25% in response to better than expected demand(!). Their F-Series pickup outsold the top three selling passenger cars (Camry, Civic, and Corolla) combined. Meanwhile, sources say Ford is seriously considering pulling the plug on the Fusion (175K sold last year) to free up plant capacity. The Focus is already going to China, and the Fiesta’s probably toast, as is the Taurus.
In other news, GM is trying to figure out how or even if it will bail out it’s Korean small car division. It’s going to take $2.8Billion to keep them solvent… (I’ll spare you the “your taxpayer dollars at work” comments).
My dad was right- the only thing you could really count on was change itself.
Meanwhile the top selling car in the UK is the Ford Fiesta, the least space efficient subcompact, although I think they have the new one now unlike here in the US. Two big reasons: fuel prices being two or three times higher, and a country that is not 3,000 miles across.
I’m late to this, but here’s some information to amuse. In Aus, these were sold as Holden Geminis (one of 40 names the car has had worldwide), and won Car of The Year on release in ’75. They were often something like the third best-selling car for some years after. And – this is true – they raced them in a one-marque series with real race drivers. In the state of Queensland, they still do…
Compared to the Toyota Corolla, the Datsun 180B (610) or 120Y (B210), Mazda 808 (818?), they were a damn sight nicer. The Honda Civic and VW Golf, both much better again, were limited by quotas and tariffs. (Also, FWD VW’s had a justified reputation here for hopeless fragility). They actually WERE an aspirational car here, particularly for females. We also got a wagon and panel van and the coupe, which is still a pretty car. They were tough as nails, solid, great handling, pretty cramped in the back (as were all the RWD competitors mentioned). 0-60mph in about the 13 second range, top around 95, on leaded fuel. In short, they weren’t a bad car at all. But they dated fairly quickly, and it must be said that as automatics (not common) they were horridly slow. I drove one the nuns owned; it needed prayerful occupants for sure. I can’t imagine an auto with a/c, which sounds as if it was a common US spec with the even lower-powered engine.
Beyond pollution stuff and rustproofing, why did Detroit faff about for 19 months to come up with frumpier styling than the existing T-cars, and an interior no more interesting? And why not release it as a four-door sedan from the off? In other words, GM Europe had a perfectly good (or at minimum, adequate, saleable) car to start making, but Detroit said “NIH” and wasted time to get nowhere much.
Your comment about the nuns made me think of a group of “Little Sisters of the Poor” here in Gallup, NM who for a long time had a baby blue metallic Pontiac Astre (twin of the Vega).
Acceleration with auto trans and AC was certainly slow with a elderly nun at the wheel.
Wow, in 1980 Chevy alone (and by extension GM) sold 450,000 Chevettes and (in a extended year) over 800,000 Citations. And to think by the late 80’s all that goodwill and marketshare was a distant memory. Mmm mmm mmm!
A fair amount of that lost goodwill and market share could be attributed to the 800,000 Citations sold.
Although the Chevette was not ambitious or progressive it was relatively reliable, far different than the previous Vega or the later Citation. Therefore it was a car that did not turn off its owners to future Chevys like the Vega and Citation did.
I test drove a 4 speed Chevette in 1977, looking for a possible replacement for my 1975 Opel Manta.
Gotta admit, the Chevette had a darn good air conditioner.
The rest of the car, when compared to the Opel, rather resembled a coal cart in it’s crudeness.
I went to work in the Vancouver Planning Department in late 1990, and the car pool available for site visits was controlled by the much more influential Engineering Department. A lowly Chevette was one of the few cars available to the Planning for regular use, and was always the last to be checked out.
I assume that it was properly maintained, and admittedly it must have been long in the tooth by then, but the experience of driving it in the city was nerve-wracking. My main memory, besides its overall primitiveness, was the apparent feebleness of the brakes, which required a lot of pedal pressure on any significant hill.
Some years after I started, there was a period of labour unrest that ended up in a strike. I remember some idle speculation that the persistence of the Chevette in the motor pool was part of an overall plot to kill off all the Planners :-).
Is that Geraldo Rivera sitting in the backseat behind the driver?
The issue is the car stayed too long at the party with only a facelift and year-to-year revisions when a full redesign was needed in the early 80’s. It started out as a decent subcompact that fell farther and farther behind the times.
A guy I knew in HS had a Chevette…and I had an interesting comparison, since my Honda-worshipping sister had a circa-1979 Civic. I preferred the Chevette. VASTLY cheaper to service, RWD without the Civics weird handling, comparable gas mileage, and much easier to maintain than Honda’s CVCC engine and bizarre carb.
For all of whatever negatives Chevettes had, The cars were cheap to buy,cheap to drive and (importantly) cheap to fix/keep alive. These to me make an economy car. Seeing the repair costs on today’s super fuel mizers, A ’76 Impala might be cheaper to run long term, let alone a. Chevette! – A plus feature: You can tell everyone you drive a ‘Vette. Take THAT Pinto driver,! LOL.
You think you had it bad? In Britain, the Chevette (same body, but smaller 1256cc Vauxhall engine) was considered an average small family car, not really a compact budget vehicle. If you wanted rock bottom motoring in late 70s Britain, you had the likes of the minuscule 650cc Fiat 126-for years the cheapest new car you could buy-the Citroen 2cv, Mini 850 and Reliant Robin, all of which made the Chevette an appealing proposition for many, it was a “proper” car here, not a penance. It was still pretty awful though.
In a way GM execs of the 1970’s got one thing right. Americans don’t want small cars. In 2018 the best selling vehicles are not cars but trucks. The best selling car is the 7th place Toyota Camry and sales of it have gone down almost 30% from last year. There is not a single sub-compact car in the top ten best selling cars. Trucks and SUVs/CUVs have all but taken over. This might change if fuel prices go up, but I don’t see the long term trend of bigger and bigger cars popularity going away.
https://focus2move.com/usa-best-selling-cars/
And irrationally, subcompact CUVs which are nothing more than small hatchbacks lifted a couple inches (to the detriment of their cornering and fuel economy) are among the fastest-growing segments.
I have to admit, I have disliked the Chevette with a passion, almost since its introduction. Mainly because it has always so strongly exuded cheapness.
I’m somewhat surprised at the amount of reaction to this wonderfully written feature. The Chevette and later Pontiac Acadian were certainly basic transportation and the cars certainly redeemed themselves by 1980. It was that year of Acadian my soon to be wife bought a four-door hatch and loved the car. It had a few options and a nice, durable interior. Ran like a charm while she owned it.
GM’s strategy to get the Chevette to market worked, too bad the market had changed by then. In the end, they sold plenty and a few still roam the streets today.
No article or facebook post about any other car seem to get as much reaction as posts about the Chevette, or perhaps the Yugo. People who never owned one, and perhaps never saw one, seem to have violent opinions about them.
I was born in 1976 so these were common when I was growing up. My take on it is that when it debuted, it wasn’t a terrible car and light years ahead of the Vega, Pinto, and Gremlin. The Vega, Pinto, and Gremlin were really not sized for adults, and barely acceptable for small children in the back seat. The Vega also had infamous quality problems, and while the Pinto and Gremlin were better, they weren’t MUCH better. Most people’s definition of a small, economy car was the Beetle, as Japanese imports were not really widespread yet, and the Chevette was certainly better than the Beetle. It was arguably better than the Corolla and certainly better, and much better looking, than the Datsun B210. The civic might have been better in some ways but the Civic was really teensy.
The Chevette was slow, and spartan, but so was everything else small at that time. It was roomy for such a small car, reasonably durable, and attractive. It had a well established dealer network and didn’t run the risk of disappearing back to some foreign land.
GM never bothered to update the car much because it did its job, plus GM had enough woes investing in much more profitable lines. Should it have been better by the mid ’80’s? Possibly, but the point of the Chevette was to sell enough cars to keep the CAFE standards by then, and the oil crises which had led to the Chevette being a hit were gone. The problem with these cars is that it costs just as much to develop and manufacture a $6000 Chevette as it does to develop and manufacture a $15000 Buick. The FWD Kadett was eventually brought here as the Pontiac LeMans, which was a quality disaster, but the only way GM could manage to import the thing and not lose a bundle was to have it made in Korea.
Despite cheap appearances, the Chevette actually wasn’t all that cheap. In the beginning it listed for around $3000, but C/D in an early test managed to put $1000 worth of options on the thing without even putting air or automatic on it, but moldings and upgraded upholstery and what not, making it pretty close to the price of a much more substantial car.
I bet that GM sold these things at a loss by the early ’80’s just to meet CAFE standards and to keep the more profitable lines, like the Oldsmobile Delta 88 and Caprice, running.
Did anyone, personally, buy one of these new by the early ’80’s? I recall they were popular as Avis specials, probably for the Sir-for-$2-more-per-day-I-can-put-you-into-a-Buick incentive, and as phone company/fleet specials, but no one ever says they had a mid ’80’s Chevette new, they always say they had one as a teenage beater.
I suspect everybody who grew up not-rich in the 1970s or 80s has stories to tell about a Chevette. Mine is from the mid-80s, when my dad decided to take a new job, one that brought with it the exciting promise of a company car. His disintegrating 1974 Dodge Dart Sport was sold (we referred to it as the Odge, since the “D” had departed the trunk lid sometime during the Carter administration) shortly before he went off to his first day at the new job.
I waited patiently through the entire afternoon of his first day, imagining what he’d drive home in that evening. It would be domestic (this was the Midwest in the 1980s after all), and it would be something sensible with four doors. But maybe it would be something interesting and a little flashy–a 6000 STE, or maybe a turbo Le Baron GTS? After I waited hours for his return, I finally saw (and heard) him clattering down the street in a brown 1982 Chevette. I’ll never forget the disappointment of that moment.
It was everything you’d expect a well-worn three-year-old Chevette to be. It smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke, it was incredibly slow and loud (saddled with an automatic and air), and it had a dent the size of a serving platter in the driver’s front fender. Dad hated it, but he stuck it out for more than half a year, not wanting to be a whiner at his new job. There was at least one silver lining: it was so small and easy to drive that it became the first car that I was allowed (as a ten-year-old) to steer around an empty parking lot.
The Chevette became too great a burden to bear in its first winter with us. Dad was driving home from a work trip in the dark on a snow-covered I-75 when he spun out and slid across the median, almost into oncoming traffic. (Turns out light weight, rear drive, and worn tires are not a good combination for snowy highway driving.) He finally demanded a new car that week, and he came home in a new, bright red 1986 Nova hatchback–quite an improvement.
The Nova didn’t stay with us very long, succeeded by a parade of more substantial Celebrities, 6000s, Bonnevilles, and Sables over the next decade. Though this teenage car nut wished that his company would spring for a 3-series or even an Accord, the memory of the Chevette was enough to make me thankful for all of them.
Owned a 80 Chevette 1.6L automatic 2dr with A/C. Couldn’t kill it. Took one road trip with it to Colorado. Across Nebraska got 31mpg, turned on the air and dropped to 24mpg. Would climb mountain grades in 2nd gear, could not pull 3rd. So engine screaming going up at probably 45mph. Mechanically had a few issues, ate alternators for awhile, broken the timing belt twice, rear springs broke, valve seals failed. Best one was when the engine quit cruising down a city street at 40 mph. Looked into rear view mirror as it sounded like I had run over something. Turns out it was engine parts falling off my car. The crankshaft bolt had failed and the crankshaft pulley and cam drive sprocket fell off. Turns out there was a minor engineering problem that GM knew about but did not want to fix. The cran pulley was held on only buy one bolt. The pulley was sandwiched between the crank bolt and the timing belt sprocket, all of these pieces just s;ipped onto the crank. There were two little holes in the pulley that aligned with two little knobs on the face of the timing belt sprocket. Well it turns out the cycling clutch od the A/C compressor would kind of keep jerking back and forth until the crank bolt fatigued and you were left with patrs falling off your engine. The fix was a new crank and a better bolt. Being a GM employee I got the car fixed for free. Of course the dealer screwed up the fix. The car seemed more gutless than usual. Nothing wrong according to the dealer. Decided to check a few things myself. Ignition timing is way off. Take it back to dealer, Oh no sir can’t possibly be off that far sir, you must have made a mistake. Yea right, I a mechanic for 24 years at the time, working for GMC Truck and Coach Division of General Motors, I believe I know how to check the timing on an engine. Well they fixed it, my mistake was not checking their work. About a year later was doing a spring tune up on it. Plugs, wires, rotor, cap etc. Check timing and it is off a bit. Go to move the distbutor and it is hard up against the A/C compressor mount. On further examination is ses the A/C bracket is torched where the distributor is touching it. What a bunch of hacks! On the 1.6L you have to removed a lot of crap to pull the distributor including the fuel pump, the fuel pump ran off the top side of the distributor gear. The distributor ran off the crankshaft. So anway I did finally get the thing timed correctly no thanks to a crappy dealer service compartment. Only good that ever came was the dealer was closed by GM when GM went bankrupt. Oh yea one other thing, this was my wifes car, she had it when we got married. She had picked up a couple of speeding tickets driving this thing. Turns out she had need new rear tires and the tire shop put on a larger diameter tire putting this speedo of by a good margin. Thanks alot crappy tire shop.
I had ’84 and ’86 Chevettes and I absolutely LOVED them. I could pack my kids and a whole weekend of camping equipment and still have room for me. I drove them both to death and if I could I’d buy another in a heartbeat. They were the coolest little cars ever.
I got a then two year old 1977 4-speed Chevette as my first car. Other than the rust issues (fascinating watching the pavement go by through the holes in the passenger footwell), and a couple of engine rebuilds, mine was a fairly reliable transport. It definitely helped having a manual transmission and putting 70 profile tires on which brought acceleration to tolerable. Drove it for 6 years through high school and a good portion of college.
I remember seeing an issue of Hot Rod Magazine where someone had swapped in a 4.1L Buick V6 and turned it into a 11 second drag car that was still streetable. The 2.8 GM V6 would have been a really nice daily driver engine in it.
I had a 77 Chevette 1.4L / auto and a 1985 Chevette S (1.6L/4-speed).
Both cars were owned in the late 90s/early 2000s. Both were cramped and underpowered. This car was about the same price as the Vega, a more powerful and better handling car which sold nearly half a million its final three years 75-77 and two million total. Chevette’s sales were nowhere near the 300,000 annually Chevrolet had predicted. In 1978 Chevette production was ramped up 50% with the 4-door introduction and the older, larger Vega was discontinued. The Monza took over the Vega’s lower price point and its sales improved but never topped 200,000 units. The Chevette went into the 80s selling as well as the Vega had in the early and mid 70s.
I am the owner of the Chevette pictured in the original story. I had no idea it had been photographed or written about until today. I still own it. It ran regularly until 2011. I loved it! It was very reliable. It still runs and I’m going to get a new paint job in the spring. For all those of you who consider the Chevette a ‘pos’, you might like to know that in ‘78 I had three bosses, one who owned a Fiat, one a TR-6, and another a Mercedes , and I had to drive them all home one night in freezing rain, as the Chevette was the only one that would start! And, yes, I know it was terribly underpowered, as the car I had to trade in for it was a GTO that only started when I didn’t have to go to work.
Elaine, I’m glad you enjoyed the article on your car, and congratulations on keeping your Chevette for so long! I hope when you get it painted that you’ll update us here with a picture.
And going from a GTO to a Chevette must have been quite a change!
My Mother in law owned a Chevette and I found it to be a very cheaply built car. It seemed crude compared to my old,mid 70’s Civics which were also cheap basic cars. However a low priced car has to be built economically to sell at a low price. My MIL’s Chevette broke it’s timing belt in my driveway, and it was easy for me to replace it, a point in it’s favor. My favorite inexpensive car was my ’90 Civic SI. It was practical, roomy, well built, and got great gas mileage. It could satisfy an enthusiast and a tight wad at the same time. Are there new small cars (non hybrid) that can break 40 mpg. and make you happy at the same time?
Since my work commute was only 20 miles round trip for over thirty years, super high fuel economy hasn’t been a real high priority for me. But I do admire a sensible, well built, economical, good performing car. Another favorite car was a ’97 Acura CL coupe with the four cylinder and five speed transmission. It was as economical as an Accord, and as plush as an El Dorado.
It just seemed like the Big Three didn’t give a damn. To smug to figure out that the imports were going to eat their lunch. These clowns could have produced world class products but they refused. The Big Three were always reacting late and with half baked products. Did they think the imports were going to just build sub-compacts and compact cars? Didn’t think that maybe the imports might expand and build a mid-size car? Might explain how we end up here in 2024 and the domestics have pretty much abandoned the car market.
Vega polluted the Chevy image, so Chevette couldn’t overpromise. The car got a nice welcome and whoever handles GMs PR back then, did a superb job. Vegas were infamous and instead of cowering in the ditches with these cars, GM pretended that the Chevette was America’s new savior. The Vega lowered Chevy buyer’s standards to the point where the Chevette was seen as an alternative to foreign imports. Yeah – the Chevette was painfully adequate, but it was adequate.
I always saw the Chevette as a penalty box. They were cars for folks who couldn’t buy a real car. Not a shred of sportiness. You could sport-tape up those cars and they’d still look like a modern Crosley. They reeked of cheapness during their entire run.
To GM’s credit, the Chevette overstayed its welcome. It was produced for years beyond its expiration date. Just to spite us. Just to prove that the car wasn’t a complete piece of crap. Just to have us see Chevettes used by the US Postal Service as rides for staffers emptying blue US Post Office receptacles on America’s corners. Proof that the Federal government wasn’t wasting our tax dollars on real cars. Chevettes were used to deliver pizzas by oily teenagers, deliver pharmaceuticals to a nursing home, and scramble onto expressways to remind us that if we didn’t make that month’s car payment – it was our punishment.
To those who love the Chevette – thank you! But please don’t express any wonderment over your inability to attract a date for Saturday.
In response to the Fuel crisis, Ford did something similar, it turned to Europe and federalized the then new German built Fiesta.
While it didn’t outsell the Chevette, it was a thoroughly modern FWD car and superior to the Chevette. It was economical, nimble, fun to drive, roomy, well built, and quick off the starting line.
We had 2 of them and thoroughly missed them when they were sold (mine in 1988 with 150,000 miles, and sold for more than I paid for it in 1984).
Seeing this again, reminds me again of what a TOTAL PO$ out new ’76 CHOVette was! It made all 3 of the not so gr8 Pintos we had seem like SOLID sub compact automobiles!
Below is a photo with 2 of my Chevy’s: my excellent-for what it was-’56 Chevy 150 “street rod” and the worst junker/clunker GM ever put on USofA roads….our ’76 CHOVette! 🙁 DFO
Let’s not forget that a bit of the sales drop was due to Pontiac offering its version, the T-1000 (I think it may have also been offered earlier with a different name but don’t recall).
Has any automaker ever put less effort into designing a set of tail lights? Good grief, GM.
I miss the days when there was an interest in selling new cars to Americans who don’t have more than the average annual income to spend. I’m sure someone will mention the Versa or Mirage as evidence that you can still buy a relatively inexpensive new car, but that certainly isn’t the same thing as manufacturers developing affordable cars for Americans, nor there being a healthy market for them. Average income as gone nowhere, but new cars are almost all targeted at people with much higher-than-average income, or at least a willingness to destroy their lives with debt. If you want to buy a new sports car, there are more choices if you want to spend at least $400K than if you want to spend $50K or less.
The cheapest new Corolla on Cars.com within 30 miles of my city is $29,034. Did consumers with household incomes near the mean vote with their wallets, or did bad policies that exploded the costs of housing, education, and medicine make the decision for them? These days you can add the cost of food to that list.
I have posted about my 1st car in the past – 1987 Pontiac Acadian, bought brand new when I was 17. It was a 2 door, 2 tone grey/silver paint, automatic, deluxe interior which meant nice cloth seats, am/fm stereo radio, dual sport mirrors and a cargo security cover. Say what you will about these cars, but they were good on gas, very reliable and most importantly to me at the time – cheap to buy, operate, maintain and insure (relatively speaking for an under 25 year old male driver in Toronto. I had that car until 1995 with around 400,000 km’s on the original engine & transmission. It still ran well, but I had to let it go due to underbody rust and oil leaks. These cars served their mandate as a cheap basic A to B transportation.
A friend of mine had a Shove-it, a hand me down from his doting Uncle.
Although, slow, noisy, crude and rude, it always started. But it was our last choice for transportation.
The best feature that I can remember about it was the always excellent GM factory air conditioning. SO very desirable here in Hot & Humid New Orleans, LA, USA.
The owner joked that the A/C compressor had more power than the engine attached to it.