After a disappointing experience with the ’90 Ciera, I was on the hunt for a new vehicle. I had my new job for a while, and was able to get a small loan for a good vehicle. Mom had a 1990 S-10 Blazer that I liked, so I was looking for something kind of tall. While passing a Chrysler dealer on my trip home, I spotted something with a roof rack in a back row.
I wasn’t specifically looking for a van, but something about this one caught my eye. I stopped and had a look, and took it for a test drive. I loved the visibility and driving position, and it seemed to pull along good with its 3-liter V6 and 3-speed Torqueflite. Numbers were discussed, and we settled on a price. I think it was $4000 and tax. I finalized the loan, and the van was mine.
I must have just bought the van. No plates.
I had a problem the first week I had it. The throttle pedal stuck down. I had a look, and the throttle cable was frayed and had stuck in the sheath. I pulled off the extra cabling, and called the dealer. They initially said that the van was sold as-is, and it was my problem. I pointed out it didn’t actually say that on the bill of sale, and they agreed to repair it. Not impressive. 
Plain but functional.
It didn’t have a whole lot of features. Crank windows, non-functional A/C, AM/FM cassette (which I replaced with a GM CD player), and cruise. It was pleasant enough to drive, with enough power to haul around a full load of people or a small trailer. The transmission developed a shudder around 170,000 KM, which worried me a bit. I found Allpar to be an excellent resource over the years, and it suggested it was a torque converter lockup shudder, and some new ATF+3 fluid would cure it. I picked up the supplies at the local dealer, and performed the deed. It took care of the shudder in no time. The V6 also gave no trouble either – smooth, revvy, and a good match for the Torqueflite.
I did just get the van – there’s the temporary permit in the window.
I put a hitch on the van, and occasionally pulled a trailer with it. I moved a friend home to Cape Breton from the Annapolis Valley once, with a U-haul trailer and the van fully loaded. It didn’t give a minute’s trouble at all. There were a few small issues. It had a tendency to throw the serpentine belt when driven in deep snow. I carried a 15 MM wrench under the seat for that problem – a new tensioner didn’t even fix it, so one had to be prepared. A more serious issue reared its ugly head when had to make a panic stop – the rear wheels locked up and the van started to slide. I was a lot more cautious after that.
On a fall ritual – looking at the leaves changing.
Being 23 at the time, I got some ribbing about buying a van. Being single and a young guy, I was told I should have something sporty – more suitable for my age. I didn’t really care what they thought – or even still do for that matter. I drove the van for a year and a half, till I had paid my loan off – and had grown tired of it. I wanted something smaller and better on fuel as fuel prices were kind of high in 2003. My experience with this Chrysler was excellent – and is still my favourite Caravan variant. They’re pretty thin on the ground now, though. I had a few more Chryslers over the years, and they were all good. I was able to sell it, and bank some of the money sold – and bought another, smaller Dodge. I do wish I could be satisfied with a car over the long term, but there are very few that I have kept longer than a year and a half. Does anyone else have this affliction?
I think your “affliction” affects young men from the time they buy their 1st car (USUALLY in their late teens) until they hit their late 40s. If that young man marries, well, a wife a children act as a vaccine.
Between my teens and my 40s I owned 20-25 cars and/or trucks. The one that I owned the longest? An 89 Honda Civic sedan. The one owned the shortest time? A 66 Impala station wagon, owned for 2-3 weeks.
I think I have the opposite affliction.
I develop emotional attachment to my vehicles and keep them too long.
I am receiving counseling from jim Klein and am happy to announce we just bought a 2015 grand caravan
Actually our old van is a lot like yours, short caravan with no options.
Congratulations Doug! I’m looking forward to the post. I myself am using you for my own counseling. Perhaps we shall eventually meet in the middle with our afflictions.
Marc – that’s a good looking honest little van. I like those stamped metal hubcaps too, that was an attractive design. Your “condition” will take a long time and much money to cure, if ever. It’s kind of like alopecia, better to just embrace it and go with it.
I started my driving life like Jim Klein and morphed into DougD at some point. I need to find that happy medium.
Yeah…still own the $625 71 2dr Maverick I bought in November 83! Even though it’s no longer road worthy. Just can’t get rid of it. My current daily, a $900 79 Thunderbird I’ve owned since March 02. Can’t seem to walk away from it either.
Probably wouldn’t have gone for one in my early-mid 20s (although I did like the Tercel 4WD wagon, similar roomy boxy unsexy concept), but the last 30 years the SWB van concept is highly desirable. Today’s minivans are too big. I bet VW’s upcoming vanagon EV sells very well….
It became a tradition of mine for way too many years that the last loan payment on the vehicle I was driving was usually made while trading it for the next vehicle I was going to drive.
I usually keep a car for 8 to 10 years. The longest was a used ’83 Cutlass Supreme (1st car purchased after starting my career). Kept it till August of 1996 when the A/C stopped and I was showing up at work with a drenched dress shirt.
My inclination is to keep a car till it’s wrecked or the “tin worm” has the final say🤨🤨🤨
My college roommate bought a 72 Polara wagon in the summer of 1981 as we were going into senior year. I always had a bit of a thing for it but never bought anything like it then.
I never really had any experience with this generation of ChryCo minivan other than a test drive of a new GC in 1995. It is funny how obsolete these seemed when the new generation arrived the next year. 4 doors really did change everything.
They were night and day in styling – but what I found funny was how similar the then-new Chevy Venture was to the old van in styling. Dad had a lend of a new one from the Chevy dealer while his truck was in for repairs. It was in my opinion close – but not as good – it seemed a lot smaller inside.
I had my 1997 Sable when I was 23, and I bought it four years earlier when my friend at the time ditched it because he thought it was too much of an “old ladies” car. Like you, I also got ribbed for having a non-traditional car for the young male demographic. They stopped laughing when my car outlasted all the beaters they thought were cool.
You can’t worry about what others think, life is too short to be concerned with trivialities. I have always tended to keep my cars for a reasonably long time. Even when I first started driving and was limited to cheap, well used vehicles I tried to keep them a couple of years or so, or until it was no longer economically feasible to keep them on the road. As I got older and had real jobs and more money, I tended to buy cars I really liked and then keep them for a good while. The shortest period I can remember keeping an adult car was the nine months I drove a Camaro; the car was great but back issues made getting in and out of the thing nearly impossible. My current driver is a 2014 Mustang convertible that I plan on keeping forever, or until I have to quit driving, whichever comes first.
With the buying of the Caravan, I quit caring what everyone else thought about what I drove. Nowadays, so long as my wife’s on board, everything’s good. She’s not too fussy – but no standard shift cars.
I would have figured that the Mustang would have been just as bad for your back as the Camaro.
Fortunately physical therapy and stretching exercises have done wonders for my back, that and switching from running to walking for aerobic exercise. The only awkwardness entering/leaving the Mustang is if it is parked too close to another vehicle and I can’t open the door all the way. As long as I’m careful where I park I’m in good shape.
I can concur with the Camaro. I had a 1999 Firebird for 2 years and put less then 6000 miles on the thing. The seat was fine but that damn seatbelt killed the interest for me. No matter what i wore or if i had a seatbelt pad on it or adjusted the seat, it still dug into my collar bone.
The final straw came when around the 20th mile into a 70 mile trip the seatbelt rubbed my collar bone so raw that I took the damn thing off for the last fifty miles risking a ticket or going through the windshield in an accident. 2 days later the took the car to carmax and dumped it.
I have the same affliction – Been driving for less than 20 years and on my 11th car. Average time for me to have one is 2.5 years. The grass is just always greener….
34 cars so far – 25 years driving – about a year and a half average. I just either get tired of them, or my needs change.
Amen to that. I am 41 and started driving at 16 and have had about 50 cars so far. I get tired of them mostly. To be fair, I have owned and still own 2 or more cars at a time.
It’s a form of Mad Car Disease. Either it’ll go away or it won’t; as far as I know there’s no one-shot cure or treatment.
You did a lot better with that ’93 for its 3-speed Torqueflite transaxle; especially with towing, odds are you’d’ve faced costly transmission problems if this van had been equipped with the 4-speed ProbleMatic (er, UltraDrive) A604.
Was the A604 really that bad? I thought most of the problems were a direct result of some bonehead recommending the wrong transmission fluid (in the official Chrysler repair manual, yet).
The A604 really was that bad—even if the correct fluid were used. It singlehandedly* trashed Chrysler’s longstanding reputation for engineering and making some of the global auto industry’s finest automatic transmissions.
*if a transmission can be said to have hands
It is so sad how the maker of what was widely regarded as the most reliable and bulletproof automatic transmission ever made, pissed that reputation away in an instant with the UltraDrive.
I wonder how much that contributed to the switch to the SUV as the most popular people mover. I can certainly see anyone who had to experience a troublesome UltraDrive in a Chrysler minivan, when it came time to move on to something else, went to an SUV with a different transmission.
I was hanging around Allpar at the time, and knew enough to stay away from the A604.
I had the impression the A604 was released before it was really ready i.e. letting the poor customers do the beta testing – and using anything but ATF+3 made it worse.
I know Dan would know more about it than I do.
My ’92 Plymouth came with a much better way to avoid the A904, and it also vastly improved fuel economy!
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/coal-1992-plymouth-voyager-they-made-those-with-manual-transmissions/
I don’t fit your description, as I’m frugal (a cheapskate?) and tend to keep vehicles until their wheels are ready to fall off, speaking metaphorically.
But my experience with Chrysler products is similar. I’d never owned one until I bought an ’83 Omni in 1988. It turned out to be one of the most trouble-free cars I’ve ever owned. And so was the ’87 New Yorker, then the ’99 Stratus after that.
The ’93 Plymouth Acclaim (fondly known by me as the Plymouth From Hell) was an exception. Although it RAN well (other than the smoking from the Mitsubishi V-6), it had all sorts of other issues.
Love it! I still have my 95 SWB Voyager with the 3.3L and at 140,000 miles it has not given me any trouble.
When I was young I went through quite a few cars, though I kept my ’70 C10 from age 20 until age 50. But since 1991 when I bought my ’86 Jetta I’ve only bought one more vehicle, a new 2004 Titan to replace the old Chevy. I’m not counting the ’87 Jetta I bought for a family member in 2015. She decided to buy a Cobalt instead. Decided she didn’t want to learn how to shift a manual trans. Soon after she bought the Cobalt the timing chain broke.
Yes, I have that affliction. It started late in life, around age 40. Now I’m 58. Average length of time I keep a vehicle is 1 year.
12 cars since I stated driving in 1991. Shortest kept was probably 2 months, longest was 8 years, a ’96 Ford Escort wagon, best car I ever had. My current ride is an ’07 Focus wagon that I’ve had just over 2 yrs and plan to keep as long as possible.
Loved this generation of Chrysler minivans; I didn’t much like the rounded things that replaced them.
That is my second favorite generation of Mopar van. I like the 84-90 better.
I still don’t like the jelly bean 3rd and 4th generations
I have never had an issue driving or owning a mini van. I bought it so who cares what other think.
“Being 23 at the time, I got some ribbing about buying a van. Being single and a young guy, I was told I should have something sporty – more suitable for my age. I didn’t really care what they thought – or even still do for that matter.” I was 18 when I found my Aerostar at Honda Cars of Aiken, not long after I graduated high school & had plans for how I wanted to live in the future. Given what I did to it & how I drove it, it was sort of a “hybrid” of several different vehicle types: minivan, cargo/crew van, custom van, & with the 4.0L V6 even a bit of a sports sedan. One time I ALMOST did a burnout when getting on the entry ramp to the Interstate–I could hear the tires squealing when going around the curve! Who needs a sports car when a van can be just as exciting but a lot more versatile at the same time? Not too long ago I found out that my van had been originally bought as a rental vehicle, and that could explain why the transmission crapped out within such a seemingly short life (the van had 157k miles when it was hauled away). You were VERY lucky to find a Chrysler minivan that had the Torqueflite transmission & NOT the UltraDrive, especially when towing that U-Haul trailer. Going slow & steady beats blowing up the transmission when trying to go faster any day. I’m actually starting to ADMIRE the Chryslers of that vintage (’91-’95), particularly the SWB Caravans & Voyagers; in my mind they look the best out of any of the pre-2001 models (after which they begin to look too “bloated”). As for trailer towing, well, I’ve got a Ranger for that purpose now (provided the total trailer weight stays under a ton most of the time). I FINALLY found a matching camper shell with a roof rack from another Ranger for only $500 at Best Auto Sales in North, SC, and with a (fairly) new Wells Cargo MW6 enclosed trailer I’ve got a size-able fraction of the Aerostar’s utility back. I plan on keeping my Ranger for quite a while.
Good for you that you found a matching topper for your truck bed. I never did find one in the short time i had my Ranger.
On my Colorado, I ended up getting an almost brand new demo model topper for $700 plus tax. It was never mounted and a shop in PA which is located behind my aunt and uncle’s home(some 250 miles away) It was not the same color as my truck(I have a white truck) but it was about $900 less then one my color so I jumped on it. I saved $900 on it and it was to keep items dry so who cared if it matched.
I have a fond memories of this Chrysler van. I had 92 Plymouth Grand Voyager back in 07 while participating at work and travel program from foreign students. Purchased for 1200USD and sold after good extra 15000 miles travelled in western part of USA few days before leaving back home with total 198k miles for 1400 USD to German student.
Give me almost trouble free service (cv axle and tires exchangead beside regular oil service and adding oils). It had comfy 4 captain chairs, strong rear AC and just kept eating mile after mile. Sometimes tend to overheate on summits, but easy to deal with. And I’m quite sure I had the problematic 4 speed transmisson. But the car worked very well, I think partially because previous owner was Japanese who took very good care of it. It was great summer 🙂
I wonder if there is still market for such a cheap cars after cash for clunkers program you had few years ago? It’s definetelly my best car in terms of cost per mile ownership.