Since we’ve got boxes on the brain, how about this one, with a bad paint job? Certain GM vehicles of this vintage just can’t keep the paint on their bodies, and the results are not pretty. I saw a pickup the other day in traffic that truly had maybe some 25% of its paint still attached. It looked really bad; much worse than this.
I believe it was a symptom of switching over to more environmentally-friendly water-based paint.
Although the primer seems to survive in our climate on the sides, it’s no match for the summer sun. Hence the bad sunburn.
If it was doing that surface rust on the sides too, this might be considered to be cool patina. Maybe in a few more years.
Despite the bad complexion, these Astro vans have become genuine Cockroaches of the Road™, thanks to their simple truck underpinnings and utility. It’s about as attractive as a cockroach too.
Jim Cavanaugh’s full CC on the Astro is here: How Hard Can It Be To Make a Minivan, Part 1
Recently read a book called “Paint It Red” about GM’s paint tech switchover, written by a former employee. Interesting stuff.
Oh, c’mon – at least give us the executive summary!
Typical GM, really- management overreach and hubris followed by dubious engineering, cost overruns and disappointing results.
IIRC, Roger Smith’s robots tended to paint each other rather than the cars.
That’s mentioned in the book too, along with the ELPO process issues and the bizarrely overbuilt Smith era assembly plants.
Those kids…
GM’s paint woes would make a great CC article.
Anyone else know any good first-hand sources besides that book?
That’ll be this book. It looks to contain enough juicy retelling to make it well worth reading—along the lines of On a Clear Day…—even if you’re not studying or assigning case studies as part of an MBA program.
Shhhh . Don’t give Paul any more ammunition to criticize GM 😉
GM was not the only one with this problem, as there were quite a few Chrysler vehicles afflicted in a similar way. For some reason the white ones gave the most trouble.
I seem to notice it on 2 door Honda Civics,
Honda’s in general
I’ve seen less outright flaking on the Hondas of this era, but the paint seemed to go from metallic to chalky.
Mazda was not immune either, with early Miatas in Chaste White peeling so badly that they call it “mange”. Apparently it was due on the primer and white BASF paint, and it was cheaper to pay for repaints under warranty (which did not often occur as the paint peeled after a few years, not months) rather than recall. I don’t know if that is the case with the other manufacturers, but it does seem to be an issue that more affected white paint than other colors.
Where I live I see a lot of aging Ford products with this white peeling paint. Crown Vics and Grand Marquis that are now about 8 or 9 years old, including a couple of old cop cars that are still in service.
I had an ’89 Beretta in the mid 90s through the early ’00s. I was spraying it down with a garden hose one day and blew a strip of paint right off the hood about 8″ long and 2″ wide. I’d had the car less than a year at that point and knew nothing of GM paint issues. I was so shocked I almost fell over.
That’s why metallic paint is better than the plain white paint. Plain white paint peels off most easily among the paints.
There are quite several Mercedes sprint vans around Michigan with even worse paint, but then considering the road salt it’s not too surprising.
I’ve noticed lots of surface rust on first-gen Sprinters around NYC lately. It’s kind of shocking, because you really don’t see that anymore, at least not in these parts, and we salt our roads.
Anecdotally, out of any vehicle produced in the last 10 years or so, the Sprinter vans I see are the worst for rust.
With metallic paint you lose the clearcoat first, which just gives you the matte look. Then the sun quickly burns through the colour (which was never designed to be exposed to the elements) to the primer, which burns through to surface rust. A lot of metallic light blue and light purple Commodores from that era wound up like this.
Agree with J.P.C. that vehicles painted white from any of the American manufacturers seem to “suffer” from this condition more so than other colors.
The 1979 Cadillac Eldorado Diesel I got from my Dad did that. It had the expensive silver Firemist paint. First spot was on the trunk lid, a spot in the size and shape of a man’s hand. You could even see fingertips and thumb. You don’t suppose…a true GM/UAW workmanship hand? Nah…! 🙂
Later the paint started to flake all over. By 1994 I got rid of the car for a few hundred dollars toward a Taurus wagon. The paint was all gone, the car was all grey primer. But after a change of the expensive fuel filter, the Diesel outlasted the paint and the headliner, still running in its accustomed slow, smoky way. I’d see the Eldorado around town occasionally after that. It ran for a new owner for at least some years that way, but never got a respray that I saw (would’t recognize it anyway).
Yes it was due to the new environmentally safer paint formulations.
My brother’s first job in the auto body industry was at a Chevy dealer and it was right around the time GM finally started repainting these trucks. So day in and day out he would strip the remaining paint and do the rest of the prep on them. They had some sort of chemical stripper that would take off the top coat and leave the primer.
As a former automotive coatings industry insider, the issue was mostly due to the incorrect reliance on adhesion being maintained from the electrodeposition primer ( elpo ) to the topcoat without anything between. When new, no big deal, but with the thin mil thickness of topcoats, regardless of coating technology, some colours in particular were very susceptible over time to the UV rays breaking down that tenuous bond. White, light blue metallic, silvers and greys, and gm, Ford and Chrysler all were affected. My fathers ’76 Monaco in silver blew off in sheets within a few years for example. Call it cost cutting, call it whatever you like, but if there was no intermediate primer coating between, lookout! Single stage, or basecoat cloearcoat, waterborne or solvent borne all were affected. Notable fails were in the GM camp, but even so, on the same car, note the flexible filler panels and bumper covers held on like new, while the steel and aluminum panels failed, due to different processes with the plastic feeder industry that supplied them. A real great GM win in this regard was the Saturn, using SMC (sheet molded compound) panels. Junk yard Saturns still look great after damn close to thirty years. You could go on and on with this one, but the failures did produce some repaint recalls ( Ford F series, GM sedans of various ilk etc.
It’s too bad that GM didn’t use red primer under the white. If they did, when the white started to peel, the owner could add some cattle horns onto the hood to complete the devine bovine look.
An Earl Scheib special for $299.99 might add another 2K to its value.
A gallon of $30 house paint and a $3 roller might have the same effect….
One of my mum’s friends in Freiburg, Germany had the same approach to repainting his Peugeot 504 estate. He chose a dark brown as to hide the rust blemishes from the evil eyes of TÜV inspection.
When I saw his estate, I could see lot of brush marks, excessive paint drips, and lot of unknown objects stuck to the body like flies on flypaper.
Whether his car passed TÜV inspection or not, I had no idea…
I find it amusing that even in the Willamette Valley vehicle paint gets trashed, but at least my Camry is still Black after 24 years in Beaverton. Out in Tualatin I mostly see GM Trucks and Vans as well as Chrysler Minivans and Vans with this issue since everything else is either extinct or not in the correct color to peel. Sure is dark tint on that Astro, wonder what the current owner uses it for?
The Japanese have a bit more reverence for the breed
I have read that there is a huge cult following in Japan for Astrovans. Wild!
Astrovans, yes. But the other day I was watching a Japanese TV series with my daughter (Kamen Rider W) with subtitles, and the bad guy had a 2000-ish Blazer which wound up getting totalled and burned. No love for those! Which was interesting, as most of the cars in that series are debadged/generic.
The Japanese are the most serious motorheads in the world. And they LOVE American vans.
Note “Dajiban” a crude Japanese rendition of “Dodge Van”
….although they’ve been used as workhorses over there too, just kept more tidy than ours generally
Whoops, here’s what I’m talking about
US- and Canada-built Chrysler products of the late ’80s–mid ’90s had the same skin disease. Mexican-built ones didn’t. Obviously the paint processes and materials were different in countries with vs. without toothy antipollution and workplace safety regulations. Here’s just one of many pre-sale views of my ’92 US-built Spirit, looking very much like the Astro van heading this article (though with less surface rust). ’91 and ’92 Mexican-built Spirits I owned had no such skin disease, and my ’91 US-built Spirit, being dark red and not white—and having not languished in the Southern California sun for years on end—also didn’t suffer. The peeling white car pictured here did find a new home and has had a grand new repaint in metallic blue, but that’s a story I’ll eventually tell in the COAL mines.
Complaints ran thick and heavy at the time. One chucklehead put up a web board…which automatically spammed the Usenet group rec.autos.makers.chrysler with each and every vanboard post. Usenet was still a going concern at that time, and eventually the said chucklehead got it through his skull that what he had done was not okeh.
I understand that this was not -entirely- the fault of the manufacturers as that the change in their paint processes was driven by changes in regulation. However, I really viewed this at the time as an American Auto Industry Deadly Sin © . I remember seeing dozens of GM cars of all models and nearly as many Chrysler products (although only mostly Neons caught my attention, I guess). Further, the cars that were peeling sheets of paint weren’t very old.
I guess that GM did finally agree to respray a lot of the affected cars, but I seem to remember one of my friends in a big fight with his dealer about it. Regardless of the facts, the impression made was that the American manufacturers weren’t very concerned about problems with their quality and weren’t very eager to try and make things right for their buyers. I don’t know if this problem cost the Big Three many sales, but I am positive it greatly decreased conquest sales from buyers who had already moved to foreign makes and who might have considered returning to the fold.
It very much was the American automakers’ fault, 100 per cent. They chose to comply with the regs the cheap way instead of the right way—as they have done many, many times before with safety and pollution regs. There were plenty of other-than-US-brand vehicles being built in America at that time, under the same regs, and without the paint faults.
Exactly. “Blame the government” has been a too frequent cop-out by Detroit over the years. The fact is U.S. automakers showed little interest in safety, economy and the environment until prodded by the government. Then, the response was often poor, under engineered efforts designed to meet the bare minimum requirements. The attitude was that automakers knew what’s best and Americans would just unquestionably buy whatever they sold. This worked for a
long time, but not forever. The arrogance of Detroit gave the Japanese an opening and things were never the same again.
I had 1984 and 1989 Pontiacs which both had paint delamination issues requiring several repaints. For me this was the tipping point and were the last American brands I ever owned.
It was not the automaker’s fault in most cases. They don’t make paint they purchase it and it was the paint manufacture’s duty to make a paint system that actually stuck to the vehicle.
Uh…no. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
I had a 92 Dakota that was repainted by Chrysler. The Electric Blue color. “Clear coat degradation” they called it.
Here’s an old webpage where the writer seems to give a failrly clear picture of what happened.
http://www.oocities.org/ihategm/
It says that the problems appeared in the mid 80’s but GM didn’t formally acknowledge the problem until 1993.
Not sure what year this Astro is, but I would guess late 80’s/early 90’s. A friend of mine bought a used 87 Astro with the same problem on the roof, not as bad on the sides.
I have considered myself lucky because I have had 84, 85, 87, 94, 95 and 96 GM cars that had no paint problems at all. None of my cars are on the lists on the website above. Perhaps the painting method or materials differed significantly between car lines.
Using Carfax you can figure out the year via the license plates.
The same ‘bot must have painted my white/doeskin Sierra 1500. I’ve posted before here that a weak hailstorm passed through a few years back and now that it’s started, both the clearcoat and white paint are starting to peel like a bad sunburn. Better sell it before it looks like this Astro.
BAD!!11ONE
If my car was peeling like that I’d at least rattle-can some paint over that primer to try to keep the UV rays from burning through that too.
I worked at Buick Customer Relations from 1996-1999. NOTHING ticked off customers more than delaminating paint, and GM’s refusal to do much about it (even though they knew they were at fault for eliminating paint steps).
The Astro is a mechanical win, they are very tough and seem to run and run. Paint, well not so much, GM products are still shedding paint at an alarming rate. We have a few 2010-2011 G vans that have the leprosy. Piss poor quality if it won’t hold up in Southern CA having never seen snow or salt.
Mechanical win it might be, but it’s a complete penalty box to drive.
Cockroach indeed. My home town is flooded with Astros, you see them endlessly. All beat up, but still hauling, the migrant community like them because they just keep on working and are cheap to buy and keep on the road. You rarely see a comparable time period Aerostar or Previa or Windstar out in the wild here, but the Astros will never die out. Often at my school in the morning, dropping off kids, there will be a line of Astros, all dinged up, paint peeling, unloading a full complement of kiddos before taking the parents out to work. These things won by refusing to die.
I hate ‘clear-coat’ finishes too.
I believe we’re in a new ‘malaise-era’, where most vehicles perform well, but are deliberately engineered to self-destruct with a vengeance!
Having seen many cars from the ’60s peeling and turning brown, I’ve avoided buying vehicles with metallic paint. Now I’m amused to find those clever engineers have found a way to make solid colors biodegrade!
Happy Motoring, Mark
Heh, the peeling Astros. Back in 2009, I had this beast of a GMC Safari that did the same thing. Plus, with Michigan salt, the rockers had rotted away to the point where the step up into the passenger seat was dangerously squishy to use.
At least the silver color hid the missing paint…
My family’s 1988 G20 conversion van suffered flaking to its Medium Gray Metallic base coat in less than three years. The Galles Chevrolet body shop repainted it under warranty in 1992, and even did a nice job with the paint stripes that were classier (well, that’s relative) and more understated than the original “GerWin” package.
As a Chevy salesman in the mid 80s, we were told acid rain was a key ingredient in these failures. If you looked closely on the lighter colored vehicles (particularly the Canadian built), you could see millions of tiny specks of rust. Just one of the many times the factory reps had to shrug their shoulders and say “oh well”!
I had a white 1991 Dodge Shadow product in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Being a young man with time on my hands, I was pretty religious about washing and waxing it. The paint started coming off when it was about 9-10 years old, and I remember having to touch it up pretty much every wash, which was about once a week. New spots would emerge and the paint just started peeling very aggressively. I saw the car about a year after I sold it and it looked terrible. Without someone diligently keeping on top of the peeling paint, the paint job didn’t have a chance. I recall several other Chrysler products (and GMs) doing the same thing…the darker blue Chryslers (Acclaim/Spirit, Caravan/Voyager, etc.) and white GMs (Lumina, Astro, etc.) are the cars that stand out, though I remember several others as well.
The Japanese were not immune to this. I bought a Toyota pickup in ’84, non-metallic dark blue. The paint on the cab, but not the bed, started peeling off in about two years. Grey primer, if that was primer, looked fine underneath. Cab was painted in Japan, The bed was fabricated and painted in California to avoid the “chicken tax”.
What impressed me is that Toyota fixed it without any fuss. The paint was warrantied for one year. Didn’t matter. Dealer repainted the entire truck for free.
I came across this treat for sale on Craigslist sort of in my area. .At this point I think I’d call it gray. Still seems to run with 230+k miles on it so what can you say..
https://boulder.craigslist.org/cto/6182713638.html
The panels were SMC (sheet molding compound) fiberglass. They did not prep correctly for painting. Notice the only sheet metal panel the roof.