A driving experience that should get you comp time in purgatory for some sins big enough to be really fun. In its defense, though, when this car came out, a lot of companies were betting on diesels for the US market (even BMW got in on the act, albeit with a turbo that spiced things up a bit) as people looked apprehensively to a future of expensive and at times hard-to-get fuel.
Then OPEC decided to bicker among themselves in various ways (most notably, Iraq decided to conquer Iran and neither side achieved much except a lengthy blood-soaked stalemate) rather than continue hoovering our wallets, so in the mid-80s, oil prices descended to a long low plateau. Car makers then mostly hung up this particular hairshirt.
Here's a modern story on driving a Chevette diesel (tl;dr: like driving a regular Chevette, only with more time to savor the experience). The upside of anhedonia: even with automatic transmission, they saw high-thirties MPG in thick city traffic, and an easy 40+ with some hope of hypermiling well into the 50s at illegal-when-new modern freeway speeds (which, yes, it will eventually reach and sustain).