(first posted 8/23/2013) This Toyota is officially called the 1988 Chevrolet Nova Twin Cam. While Chevy built many Nova’s over the years, this is one of only 3,300 cars offered with dual overhead cams, and the only Chevy with Toyota engineering. Built for a single year, this car provides the backdrop for many different tales, including unusual partnerships, changing car markets, and model miscalculations.
For those unfamiliar with the Chevy Nova, it was the result of a unusual partnership between Toyota and General Motors. The story goes something like this- In the early eighties, US car manufacturers found themselves losing the market share battle. Poor quality and a model mix emphasizing larger cars combined to place the domestics behind the eight ball in a market dominated by high fuel prices. To help protect the home team, Washington legislators discussed import restrictions. To control the situaiton, in 1981 Japanese manufacturers agreed to voluntary trade restraints. This avoided unwanted regulations, and allowed the Japanese to write in a loop hole that allowed greater sales volumes- US manufactured cars with a Japanese nameplate did not count against the voluntary restraints.
With the restraints in place, Japanese manufacturers immediately explored US production options. Most chose to build their own plant, but Toyota picked a different option- A joint production plant with General Motors. To accomplish this, the two organizations formed a new company called New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated (NUMMI). General Motors anted up a recently shuttered plant in Fremont California, while Toyota provided the product and production expertise.
NUMMI began production in 1984. The plant built a version of the fifth generation Corolla called the Sprinter in other markets, but marketed by GM as the Chevy Nova. A basic front wheel drive economy car, the first NUMMI Nova included a low output eight valve engine, and competed in the low price subcompact market.
More information on the Nova and NUMMI plant can be found in Jeff Nelson’s article linked here.
The initial Chevy Nova did not meet sales expectations for several reasons. After the voluntary import restrictions kicked in, American and Japanese compact cars had swapped places in the marketplace. While Japanese models had started out as low priced alternatives to US models, Japanese manufacturers had moved their cars up market since 1981, to increase the per car markup and maintain profits. At the same time, US manufacturers allowed the prices of their small cars to drop below the competition, in order to maintain production levels and spread profits over more units.
Because of this, the 1984 Chevy Nova was neither fish nor fowl- Its Japanese features and high quality components made it expensive to build, while its Chevy nameplate lacked the cachet required to justify a higher price.
To remedy this problem, GM rolled out this Twin Cam model. By building a car with the best features available on the Corolla platform, GM hoped to charge a premium price for a premium car.
In addition to the 4A-GE twin-cam motor, the Twin Cam Nova offered a standard five-speed manual transmission or optional four-speed automatic. Features included fuel injection, sport suspension, power steering, leather-covered steering wheel, tachometer, four-wheel disc brakes, and wider tires on aluminum wheels. There were no color choices; all Nova Twin-Cams came with black metallic paint and a grey interior.
Note- These floral seat covers were NOT part if the Twin Cam package.
I should also note the wheels on this Twin Cam are not the original Chevy wheels. Somewhere along the line, someone substituted Toyota alloys. It’s a bit of a shame, given that the rest of the car is very original, but the fact that these wheels bolt on does help to confirm this Nova’s Toyota pedigree.
Speaking of pedigrees, this Chevy is also one of the last cars manufactured in California. In the nineteen fifties, California ran a close second to Michigan in auto manufacturing, but by the mid eighties only NUMMI and GM’s Van Nuys assembly plant remained. In 1992, Van Nuys closed, leaving NUMMI as the remaining California auto plant (Hino maintained a small truck assembly operation in Long Beach up until the last year or so). Yes, you can count on me to cover the California connection whenever possible.
Anyway, back to the market battles. In 1988 (the only year Chevy offered the Twin Cam), the base Nova listed at about $8,800, but the Twin-Cam went for $11,395. At the start of the year, Chevy planned to sell about 10% of their Nova production as Twin Cams. However, the $2,600 price premium over the base model limited Twin Cam sales to 3,300 cars, or about 3% of the production. Clearly, the premium car at a premium price strategy did not work.
So ends the story of the Twin Cam Nova. Because the 4A-GE motor is one of the most popular Toyota powerplants, many Twin Cams have been sent to the salvage yard after providing a “real” Toyota with a fresh engine transplant. The cars themselves are certainly as good as any other Corolla, and provide the best driving dynamics of any NUMMI Nova. But in their day Chevy owners could not justify the purchase price, and Toyota owners preferred the real thing. That leaves this Curbside Classic parked alone on a Narbonne Avenue curb, just north of PCH.
An unloved and unknown model, the Twin Cam represents another example of General Motor’s search for relevance in the mid eighties. The next year, GM tried yet another approached, marketing their NUMMI Corolla as the Geo Prizm. Based on the next generation Corolla Sprinter, GM hoped the Geo namplate could stand with the imported namplates, and give them higher transaction prices. You can debate the virtues of this approach, but I’ll simply note that GM has since abandoned the Geo nameplate…
Part of the sales problem was simply calling it a Nova. Don’t recall HOW many times I heard people say “thats NOT a Nova” back in the day…
The best appeal of these was that you could get Toyota quality at Chevy prices.
The standing joke at the time was that this Nova was a Toyota Chevrolet and should be called a Toylet.
Yeah, if you took someone from the late 1960s and time traveled them forward to the late 80s, they would look at a 1988 Nova and be convinced the communists had won at some point in the last 20 years.
The thing is, it is EXACTLY what a Nova should be, well made, cheap, solid, no frills compact transportation.
I am actually having one of these dropped off for free on Sunday 1/19/2014.
My best friends friend inherited it from his Grandmother and as I was in desperate need for a 2nd car, was nice enough to give it to me. I doubt it is the Twin Cam, but hopeful.
I have always had mixed feelings about these cars. I don’t think that the Nova name was a great choice, as older Novas remained popular with a more traditional and conservative buyer base. As you note, they appealed neither to Chevy buyers nor to Toyota buyers.
I did know one person who bought a Nova (not the twin cam model) and liked it a lot. I never cared for the styling of the car, but that was true for a lot of smaller sedans/hatchbacks of that time. She was a single young woman from Anderson, Indiana, which was a smaller city with a longtime GM factory presence, so if anyone would be inclined to go into a GM dealer for a small car, it would have been her.
The NUMMI experiment was a huge failure. It built good cars there, but I had always thought that lessons learned there would organically ooze out through GM’s other plants. Apparently not.
You’re right, there is no difference between a new GM car and one from 1980, they are exactly the same….
I have to agree; GM undoubtedly learned quite a lot from the NUMMI JV. It wasn’t just the quality, but also just-in-time production methods. It was a much smarter move than than the whole Saturn debacle, which cost GM many billions. NUMMI undoubtedly operated in the black, and the lessons learned did get applied, if not as quickly and consistently as ideally.
The failure of NUMMI was actually covered on “This American Life.” http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/nummi
First thing I thought of. Love that show and that is a particularly great episode. Ed Niedermeyer even gets a shout-out, along with TTAC.
It was a failure for GM, as all of their ideas are. Toyota made out pretty well, until GM pulled out and simply left Toyota hanging, as they do their customers with their POSs.
Someone needs a hug, and a banning……
I had an ’88 base model with a 5 spd. It was trouble free for 160K, fun to drive, good mileage, $8800. It was the buy of a lifetime. AC went out and I decided to upgrade rather than put $1200 into the car. Big mistake
I saw a Chevrolet Prism (post-Geo) in the parking lot at work yesterday – should have grabbed a shot.
Back in the 1980’s the average Toyota dealer was pushing $1200.00 over sticker for a Corolla in the DC area, so the Johnstown dealer’s were selling cars to the DC crowd (less than 200 miles away) because they were only doing $400.00 over sticker.
Meanwhile, the Chevrolet dealers were having a hard time selling the Nova – to the point that Consumer Reports went on repeated rants to their readership questioning their determination to buy the car at the Toyota dealership.
It only got a better when the Geo nameplate came out. Because it was the only way to get a Toyota/Honda/Nissan/Mitsubishi customer to even look at something in a Chevrolet dealership. At least they could buy an excellent car at a very good price and not have to admit that they’d just bought a Chevrolet – even though that’s what it said on the (Pennsylvania, at least) title.
Yep, Geo (like Scion) wasn’t an actual brand. Their respective cars were either titled Chevrolet or Toyota. At least the ones I’ve owned have been.
Never saw a twin cam. That must have had California only distribution.
I was living back in Northern Cal at the time these were new and I do remember these at the Chevy Dealers. They were marketed as more of a “premium sport version” if I recall. I always thought it was along those lines the Twin-Cam made it’s debut and/or as a gapfiller for the Prizm (which was marketed as a ’90 model in ’89 . . . . I bought one. The LXi Prizm was a little more luxurious than it’s Toyota Corolla cousin, but the Toyotas had a bigger engine (DOHC 1.8 vs. Prizm’s 1.6 DOHC). Three speed automatic in ours. Decent scoot. Buried the needle once on I-680 on the Solano County side one early Sunday morn’ . . . .
Only saw a few Twin Cams in IL, but were national.
Two reason didn’t sell.
1. “That’s no Nova, I had a V8 one and this wrong wheel drive car is…..”
2. “No way am I buying any Chevy, I had a new Vega and ……”
If this was “the only Chevy with Toyota engineering,” why did our NUMMI-built ’99 Chevy Prizm (5-speed) have “Toyota” labels all over the engine? It was as much a Chevy as the Nova.
Perhaps if GM hadn’t thought Geo was a good idea (which it wasn’t), the Chevy Prizm name might have premiered with generation 2 and may have been more of a success than it was; a lot of energy was wasted in trying to create the Geo brand.
One problem is that all during the 4-generation run of the Nova/Prizm, the Cavalier sedan in the same showroom beat it on price (and perhaps rear-seat legroom) and sold better, even though by comparison it was badly designed and indifferently built.
It shouldn’t be too hard to find all the other NUMMI products for future columns (you’ve already covered the Corolla FX16). CC-wise, I still see a first-gen FWD Corolla/Nova a few times a year – that is, more often than other 1980s domestic cars of any sort.
You’re right- I forgot they took the Geo badges off the Prizm at the end of the model cycle. Still, it’s the same car, just a different generation… D/S
I don’t I under the mindset that perhaps Geo was not as a big failure as it was made out to be. True GEO sales might not have set the world alight but there might be other reasons to create a car division. In the 1970’s and 1980’s the US Govt had created CAFE rules that forced car makers to make X amount of cars fuel efficient or face fines on each car. Must of the cars that were still profitable for GM could not be slimmed down or made to be less gas hungry without killing demand for them. Because GM fuel efficiency was judged by GM as a whole and not by division as sure way to boost flagging MPG’s would have been to create a division that only sold small fuel friendly vehicles. It would boost MPG average and not cause any damage to any of GM’s other division’s image. So in GM’s mindset, they would create a new division. Even if it did not become a success and sell cars GM was still ahead because CAFE fines cost more to pay then starting a new division. For instance if GEO required $3 million to start up and they lost $1million a year every year it was better then having to pony up $3 million a year on CAFE fines
In the 70s to mid-80s the imports had a price advantage over the domestics and that was starting to hurt. You had VRA (and very rich Toyota dealers) as a result.
As fuel prices started to drop and demand for larger, better performing cars increased, domestic makers had to discount their smaller cars to meet CAFE. At the same time the yen was strengthening causing the price of Japanese cars to go up, even the ones made in the states due to, at the time, many foreign parts.
When the price advantage swung in favor of the domestics… the import brands still sold better. It was around that time that the domestics started building better cars (see Taurus) but then trucks took off and it was business as usual until it all came crumbling down.
See my above post . . . . our Prizm had the 1.6L TWIN CAM labels on the engine; sans the name “Toyota” – however, little things like the voltage regulator, etc. had “Toyota” stamped on them or other items were Japanese (Nippondenso) . . .
Geo was not a failure. I did ok for itself, and the cars were decent.
Geo’s big job was to get the foreign car buyer in the door of a Chevrolet dealership. By this point in time, even GM understood that you had no hope in hell of selling a Chevrolet to a Honda or Toyota (or any other Japanese marque) customer – even if the car was better, the name on the hood was off-putting.
After a few years, enough customers owned the cars for word to get around that they were good. Very good. Very good, even if it did say Chevrolet on the hood.
The problem with Geo was just like Chrysler’s problem with Eagle several years later. It was a hash. Some cars were great (like these Toyotas), some were good (like the Isuzu I-Mark) and some were less so (like some of the Suzukis). Geo turned into a dumping ground for all of GM’s asian import sources, with no real commonality among them.
With Domestic Bias this car and the Geo/Chevy Prizm and Pontiac Vibe that came after it at NUMMI sold at a significant discount on the used market.
Never saw a Twin Cam Nova, saw plenty of plain ones since the Jesuit priests at my school had a fleet of them, they were either white, silver or blue, all base models with automatic and a/c.
Could you get the Twin Cam in the hatchback too, or was it sedan only?
I’ll bet that everyone forgot that there was a Prizm GSi successor to the Twin Cam Nova?
The Twin Cam was sedan only, the Prizm GSi could be had as a sedan or hatch in a variety of colors.
Aloha, Carmine! ALL the Prizms were DOHC, but the GSi was the “hotter” version of the Corolla 1.8 DOHC. Value added little cruisers. The ex kept the Prizm and it was the primary machine that hauled our boys around when they were born/were little. It went from California to Guam, Hawaii and Virginia where I suspect it may still be . . . . and might still be running . . .
I’m surprised people were already nostalgic for the ’62-79 Nova in the mid ’80s. Then again, considering what GM replaced it with for 1980…
I can remember seeing decent numbers of regular Novas back in the day, but the Twin Cam only registered in my memory since I collected brochures back then and it rated a 2-page splash. The Prizm GSi was more common, and stands out in my mind in hatchback form as the car I would’ve chosen if I could’ve bought a new car circa 1990.
There was a lot of 60’s nostalgia on TV/movies in the 80’s, with Boomers and yuppies pushing 40.
Mostly the 66-72 Novas were popular with Hot Rodders, and there were still plenty of used ones then, to pick up for a project car.
I had a chance to get a Toyota Nova for a cheap price a few years back and i kick myself all the time for not doing it. Toyota quality for a cheaper price(yes the Corolla was selling for less then GM’s MSRP price on Nova but Chevy dealers marked those Nova’s down so much to move them that they were a bargain.
The first gen Geo Prizm was to me a more attractive car then the same gen of Corolla because of the way the car looked with its rounded doors and trunk and hood. It allowed the 89-92 Prizm to look a bit different then the 88-92 Corolla due to the Corolla looking a bit more blocky. Interesting enough the Prizm was offered with a hatchback which was a rebadged Toyota Sprinter which was offered in Europe at the time as a Corolla hatch but never offered here in the USA except as a Geo
If you look closely at a ’90-’92 Prizm, the trunklid and quarters are the same as on the concurrent ’88-’82 Toyota Corolla coupe . . .
I’ll never understand why the Big Three take these risks with name recycling. Inevitably, prospective customers will claim the new car doesn’t live up to the expectations created by its namesake or they have had a first or second-hand bad experience with the namesake. Dodge seems to have made it work with the Charger/Challenger/Magnum but not so much with the Dart. GM called a Calais a 442 so they probably win the desecration of a beloved classic contest. Ford screwed up in the equal and opposite way by causing people to ask “why don’t they call this 500 thing the new Taurus?”
Arguably, Ford should have promoted the Five Hundred as the successor to the retail Crown Victoria and the Taurus name should have landed on the new Fusion. It would have been a cleaner transition to new models that would compete with the Avalon and Camry, and the Crown Vic probably did need a new name at the retail level. 500 was supposed to hark back to the Galaxie days. Maybe it should have been Galaxie with an LTD top trim line!
But, Ford was stuck in their alliteration era, and only the Mustang was sacred enough to escape that. The resulting Ford Freestyle wagon version of the 500 was a pretty competent car, I bought one new and still own it, but I’ve always been borderline embarrassed by the name.
Throw in some stupid advertising (the vehicle of marital and familial discord), that didn’t show up until the Freestyle’s second year, and Ford managed to kill their investment with some detail execution problems on the car, a dumb name, and weak and pathetic marketing.
As stupid as Ford can be about their cars sometimes, Ford at least learned in the 1980’s about screwing with the Mustang too much. In the late 1980’s Ford decided to make the Mustang a FWD car based upon the Mazda MX-6/626 and they got their ass handed to them when folks heard about it. The Mustang was saved as conventional RWD car while the FWD replacement was called Probe and did not sell really well
The best Freestyle ad I ever saw was for the Canadian market, that zoomed in on a kid in the wayback of an old Country Squire, did the whole “animated blueprint drawing” of a new Freestyle going down the road that finally morphed solid as the kid morphed into an adult driving the Freestyle.
I don’t know why they didn’t run with that in the US, rather than the “dad turns out to be divorced” one that strikes me as the sort of thing now, post-Mad Men, that was made to earn headlines in the ad trade press rather than sell the product.
Ok, I have a question. I owned a 2009 NUMMI Corolla and the coolant was Toyota Red. Did GM branded NUMMI cars, like the Chevrolet Prism and the Pontiac Vibe leave the factory with Toyota Red because the drivetrain was engineered by Toyota, or did they have DexCool because that is what the Chevy/Pontiac dealer was going to have on hand. I wonder if there was enough coordination and care at the GM dealers to make sure DexCool was not combined with Toyota Red (If they had Toyota Red)
Curbside Classic isn’t really the forum for this type of question, but since you brought it up, let me warn you that the internet will respond to you with the following choices-
1) Educated (and wrong) guesses
2) Anecdotal stories that may or may not be true.
3) Information related to other products in that manufacturer’s line.
4) Incorrect answers that do apply to a different model year of the same car.
Regardless of make or model, THE ONE source for vehicle service information is the Owner’s Manual.
If your car no longer has a copy, do an online search for a pdf version, or call the manufacturer’s customer service line and order a new one.
Thanks for your reply, but don’t sell Curbside Classic short. Commentators on this website are some of the most knowledgeable on the net. A search of “pontiac vibe coolant” produces threads with information like you described. I do not have a Vibe or I would know what kind of coolant it would have. I suspect that it would come with Toyota Red coolant, as it is a Toyota. What I was getting at is how a Toyota is treated at a GM dealer. I wonder if they end up getting DexCool mixed in regularly, or do they take special care when a Toyota made Chevrolet or Pontiac comes in for service.
My 2009 Pontiac Vibe had Toyota pink extra long life coolant in it.
One needs to remember that Toyota didn’t need to do the NUMMI joint venture with GM; they could have gone on their own. But Toyota was seriously concerned that the precipitous rise in their market share and the corresponding drop of GM’s might result in some truly draconian legislation. (presumably based on what Japan would likely have done if the reverse were true in their domestic market).
Everyone knew at the time that Toyota’s ability to build better cars cheaper was a huge step ahead of the domestics. There was a genuine sense that Toyota’s offer to GM to “open its kimono” and share all the kanban secrets was altruistic. Toyota made the calculation that sharing kanban production knowledge with GM was better than the alternative, and it mostly turned out that way.
NUMMI was excellent PR for Toyota, and it certainly didn’t hurt them, as GM was not able to fully implement kanban methods quickly enough to make a material difference in the short-term, yet GM did learn from the experience.
NUMMI was a pivotal point in US automotive history. It rather surprised me at the time that Toyota would hop into bed with GM in this way. It was a calculated gamble on Toyota’s part, and one that worked out well enough for both partners.
In theory, I was the demographic for this car, and it didn’t make a sale. I was finishing college in 1988, my latter day college wheels were attached to a 1972 Pontiac Grandville (still in pretty good shape), I was a Midwestern American car guy, but should have been educated enough to look for something more practical. I looked at an ’88 Nova, and was impressed by how space efficient a car could be, even if it was small. Impressive, fuel mileage compared to what I was getting, I knew enough to know it came from an American plant, but provided Toyota quality, and having the American name meant some profits were flowing to a U.S. corporation. Perfect for a buy American guy, right?
Even though I should have been too young to have much feeling for a “real Nova,” I still had some of that pang. I was still addicted to a car with some kind of road “presence,” and still wanted more space then a subcompact would offer.
I ended up buying a cherry ’87 Grand Marquis LS, still managed to date, marry, and reproduce in spite of it, and didn’t finally face the death of RWD and V-8 power as the standard American car until I bought a new 1995 Chrysler Concorde. But, the Grand Marquis was a heck of a road cruiser and my sister, on her second Accord, was suddenly jealous of my trunk space after she began to have kids. She ended up in a Plymouth Voyager in short order.
Proof that the demographic for this car probably skewed educated, young, low on children, unemotional about cars and those folks wanted TOYOTA on the grill.
I have one of these with the Chevy wheels. It has 236,000 miles and barely any rust. I am the third owner. It is my daily driver. I love it.
Ah, another Rodney Dangerfield car, one that got no respect when new, yet many continue to soldier on to this day with hundreds of thousands of miles on nothing but routine maintenance.
Or, put another way, a car for the automotive cognoscenti. Those who did their homework knew the NUMMI Nova was a cost-effective way to get reliable Toyota quality. It’s rather poetic justice that GM’s miserable reputation at the time actually worked for those few clever folks who knew they weren’t buying an old POS GM product, but a low-priced, solid Toyota on the cheap.
I never knew this exterior package revolved around the twin cam motor until now. That’s pretty neat. I always thought this was yet another, but even more ridiculous, application of the Euro-Sport lol
I’m surprised they didn’t call it a Nova Eurosport…..
LOL- Some friends saw the pictures on my monitor, and called it a “Nova SS.”
My wife and I owned two Novas of this vintage at the same time, a 1987 purchased new and a 1988 purchased used a few years later. They were great cars, not very exciting but very functional, very reliable, and also affordable. Which is exactly why I and most of the other Nova buyers never would have spent an extra $2500 on the twin-cam model.
“I should also note the wheels on this Twin Cam are not the original Chevy wheels. Somewhere along the line, someone substituted Toyota alloys. It’s a bit of a shame, given that the rest of the car is very original, but the fact that these wheels bolt on does help to confirm this Nova’s Toyota pedigree.”
I am pretty sure the rim replacement was due to the owner wanting alloy rims and while ally rims were an option 99% of the 1980’s Toyota Novas had the 13 inch steel rims with metal or plastic wheel covers and a Nova alloy rim would have been hard to find. The bolt patten and hub bore size would have been the same as other Toyota products of the time and a GM wheel would not work
Or perhaps it is just a case of Hipster Ironic?
Unique alloy wheels (with a Chevy Bowtie center cap) were standard on the Nova Twin Cam. Somewhere along the line, our Twin Cam lost track of them…
One minor correction: This was not the only Chevrolet with Toyota engineering, since toward the end of the run of the Geo Prizm, it was marketed as a Chevrolet Prizm, although it was still the same Corolla-based car. There is a rather battered example parked down the street from me right now.
Here in Australia Holden sold a badge engineered Corolla in the early 90’s as a Holden Nova. They were built in this country by Toyota (who have been building cars here for close on 50 years). Holden also sold the Camry as an Apollo. These cars were identical to their Toyota siblings, and the buyers stayed away in droves. By this time Toyota had built an enviable reputation for quality and reliability, and people buying a Toyota wanted that badge on their car, not Holden. Conversely, Toyota sold the Commodore as a Toyota Lexcen at the same time (named after Ben Lexcen, the designer of the yacht which won the America’s Cup in 1983 and was a national hero as a result). This also completely failed in the marketplace.
“…this Chevy is also one of the last cars manufactured in California.” One of the last manufactured by GM, but not one of the last cars period. The NUMMI plant in Fremont is now the Tesla Factory.
In fact, in June 2013, Tesla sold more cars in California than Buick, Cadillac, Chrysler, Fiat, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lincoln, Porsche, and Volvo. (link) And they all came from this plant.
I was wondering how long I’d have to scroll down until someone mentioned the 3rd act in the life of this Facility.
Everyday 60-80 truckloads of Tesla parts feed from the Gigafactory and assorted suppliers in Northern NV to Fremont.
I snapped this last Summer waiting for my turn to deliver.
Looks like Hemmings Motor News is jumping on the Nova Twin Cam band wagon,
http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2013/08/26/lost-cars-of-the-1980s-1988-chevrolet-nova-twin-cam/?refer=news
I still have a 1988 just a sedan though. It never gives me problems and is in great shape. The most comfortable seats I have ever sat in strangely enough. I love driving it. It reminds me of my college days. I still feel like I’m in the lap of luxury with the radio and AC on. The sad thing is that they are so few left and no one ever tries to save one.
The Chevy Nova Twin Cam was my 1st Brand new car I had ever bought !!! I was in LOVE with it…From the Leather Covered Steering Wheel down to the Leather Covered Gear Shift..
At that time I worked about 40 miles away from home and I’ll tell you that “little pocket rocket could move'” !!!! I don’t really recall what the gas mileage was at that time because the price of gas itself wasn’t an issue so I didn’t pay much attention (and as sexist as this sounds I am a woman)…
But boy I did love that car I even managed to cut down a live X-mas Tree one year and drug it thru the back seats and the top of the tree was blowing in the wind since I couldn’t put the windows up !!! One thing I didn’t plan on was trying to get the “sap” out of my car for the next couple of years !!! Oh the memories that car brings back…I finally ran it into the ground about at mile 150,000 or so and ended up buying another new car A 2000 Chevy Cavalier !!! That’s another story….
Purchased a 1988 Nova new for $200 over dealer cost when I graduated college. Paid if off in 3 years and drove it for 15 years, putting 206K miles on it before donating it to charity. Loved that car… The radio and tires were the only thing I could find on the car that weren’t Toyota made. Highly recommend the TAL podcast on NUMMI.
Look what I found in MO. LOL Notice the NUMMI tags.
I need to know then name of these Toyota wheels.
I had some on my first Aw11 (1986 model) and these were not a factory option to the Mr2….
Can anybody tell me the name of these Toyota wheels as I can’t find a set anywhere… It was just by luck I saw this nova….
Cheers
Terk
I own one of these beauties, they are sweet little cars for sure, mine is all original, 113k miles I picked it up for 1300 bucks. Great car, peppy, handles well, fun to drive as well.
Haha! I own this very car now. Bought it a couple months ago. Any idea where the wheel center caps went? Would love to track down a set! 🙂 🙂
Spotted one of these the other day in a funeral home parking lot. My fiancee thought I was a nut as I got out and of my truck in a hurry into the pouring rain to snap pics. She didn’t understand why I knew all sorts of details about “that ugly little black car”. This site does strange things to you indeed.
Quite an interesting contrast in design representing the 1980s and the early part of this decade, with the Nova and the Impala in the background. Both designs looking somewhat generic in their respective eras.
I actually tried to buy one of these in 1988. I went into a Chevy dealership and specifically asked the salesman to show me one. My operating theory was that most people were paying a premium for a Toyota badge, while Chevy was struggling and should -at least- sell me one at list or ideally below.
However, the salesman came to a stop in front of a Celebrity. No, no, no Celebrity. Nova. The salesman insisted that the Celebrity was more car for he money. Don’t care: Nova.
“Son”, said the salesman, “There just ain’t no room to move on a Nova. I can’t make you a deal, and I can’t make any money”. I walked away.
My impression was that Chevy was incentivizing both the salesman and the customers to move Celebrities et al, and thus defacto discouraging Nova sales.
And thereby losing customers who had zero interest in the bigger car, but were definitely interested in the smaller one. Same thing happened to my wife last time she went car shopping. Just Plain Stupid.
This problem was a major reason for the creation of Saturn, although we saw how well that went.
I spotted this one on the road a few years ago. At the time I was just thinking that I hadn’t seen a NUMMI Nova in quite some time. It was only when I came here and read this article that I learned just how rare the twin cam model was.
I do live less than 100 miles from NUMMI. I’ve always wondered if the original owner was someone who worked there.
The Chevy Nova badge didn’t help sales….I had heard stories of people being asked to give their opinions on side by side Toyota Corollas and Chevy Novas and most commented on the higher quality of the Corolla….perception is reality!
Probably explains why the next generation became Geo Prizms.
I think GM did learn a lot from the NUMMI program, but it wasn’t enough to turn the leviathan that was GM around. GM had very entrenched ways and the magnitude of the bureaucracy kept them from implementing anything they had learnt from Toyota quickly, plus the answers they found were not the answers they were looking for. GM thought Toyota had some magical automation secrets, and they didn’t.
I know Saturn is commonly referred to as a debacle, and of course it never made a profit, but on the other hand, Saturn DID bring buyers who never would have considered a Chevrolet or Pontiac into GM. The dealer service and experience was consistently reputed to be amazing, which is not something a customer was going to get from Toyota or Honda circa 1990, and the cars were astonishingly solid (yes, I know, there were exceptions), and you still see a lot of the original S series running around. They weren’t GREAT cars but they were far, far better than any small car GM had ever produced or is likely to produce again, and they didn’t have the typical GM attitude of Let’s launch it now and fix the bugs as our customers discover them. Perhaps GM learnt more from Toyota than is commonly thought.
“Japanese manufacturers had moved their cars up market since 1981, to increase the per car markup and maintain profits. At the same time, US manufacturers allowed the prices of their small cars to drop below the competition, in order to maintain production levels and spread profits over more units.“
This policy, encouraging the Japanese to better amenitize their cars for greater margins per limited units, also greatly helped to create the market perception of Japanese cars being higher quality, inverting the status quo and ultimately delivering a larger share of the US market to imports. So foolish – short term thinking castrating US makers long-term prospects…
It’s true, but it wasn’t exactly the whole picture.
For Toyota and Nissan, the U.S. was still a secondary market. The home market was still very robust and Toyota and Nissan owned something in the realm of two-thirds of it. The Corolla was one of the best-selling cars in Japan, if not the best. The Corolla/Sprinter lines sold well enough there to make them financially worthwhile even if the Corolla hadn’t also been a global export and CKD success.
Also, in the Japanese market and in many non-U.S. export markets, cars like the Corolla, Corona/Carina, and Camry were a couple of notches higher on the food chain than they were in the U.S. There were ultra-strippo penalty box versions for fleet buyers, but something like a Corolla wasn’t an entry-level car in Japan and wasn’t engineered like one. If you got the plusher, better-equipped trim levels (which the VRA incentivized manufacturers to offer in North America), it was a reasonably nice middle-class product.
In contrast, most U.S.-made small cars had very little market outside North America (obviously, there were European Escorts and Horizons, but they were very different in a lot of ways than what we got), and in the States were pitched at buyers who were looking at small cars primarily for low price. So, the cars got nickeled-and-dimed to death at the fundamental engineering level, and the platforms got held over forever to try to eek out some profit despite modest volume and low selling price.
The basic conceptual problem GM, Ford, and Chrysler faced was that even if they could have sold 750,000 or a million units a year of some competent C-segment compact, they didn’t especially want to — they would much rather have sold that many bigger sedans or, ultimately, big trucks. Unlike Toyota, GM did not have a home market where they could reliably churn out 350,000 Corolla-sized cars to buyers who were simply not going to buy something the size of a Celebrity or Lumina no matter how much the salesperson stood on their head.
(Of course, the Big Three whined a lot about Japanese protectionism — which was not untrue, although the validity of their complaints was really undermined by U.S. manufacturers’ stubborn refusal to understand even the basic constraints of the Japanese auto market. The idea that Japan was functionally a closed market was one thing, but whining that they were big meanies for not being willing to buy something like the Chevrolet Cavalier except as a curiosity kind of missed the point.)