Suddenly, a Chevette!

[WhoIsTheLeader]

What's this? A Chevrolet Chevette in excellent overall condition? How could this example of the crudest compact of the 70s have lived long enough to become a genuinely interesting artifact of a bygone time and way of thinking?

What we're looking at here is a super barebones Chevette three door hatchback from the 1979-1982 facelift in excellent overall condition but with telltale signs of age and use.

Despite 7 million cars being made on GM's infamously crude RWD T-Car platform, this is just the second of those cars I have seen in the flesh. Previously I had spotted this rusty derelict Isuzu I-Mark on the side of the road. It's remarkable to see any T-Car on the road today because, though durable and fuel efficient, they developed a well deserved reputation for being miserable and unrefined.

Chevettes were cheap. And I do mean cheap. The larger four door hatchback started at $3,914 in 1979, about $15,586 in 2022 inflato-bucks. While this example is missing the back seat, I do not think it is the ultra stripped down Scooter trim that had the back seat as an option because of the presence of chrome window trim and bumpers.

Ultimately, their excessive cheapness made them supremely undesirable and gave them a complete lack of prestige. Chevettes tended to live short, difficult lives because of their disposable nature. When the last new one was built in 1986, the early ones from 1975 had been clogging junkyards for some time. Absolutely no one wanted to deal with the punishing ownership and driving experience.

I have no idea how this low spec Chevette managed to survive in such excellent overall shape for 40 years. I suppose the owner is using this driver condition Chevette as intended but unless you have some nostalgia for T-Cars, it's not likely to be the most interesting classic to own.

Still, they were incredibly successful, if somewhat cynically designed. It's an important part of our common automotive heritage so I'm happy someone is preserving one.

Do any of you have any personal Chevette experiences? It's difficult for me to understand them for what they are as they were long gone by the time I entered the picture.

[ranwhenparked]

@WhoIsTheLeader they were still around when I was younger, but I don't recall any close relatives or acquaintances having one, and, by the time I started driving, they were all pretty much gone.

The first job I got out of college, one of my older coworkers mentioned that they used to provide company cars instead of mileage reimbursement, and that the last cars they had had been Chevettes. Supposedly, they had kept them into the mid '90s and just kept fixing them and passing them around as new employees came on board,then decided to line them up in a field and sell them off in a sealed bid auction and just pay IRS mileage rate

[ibRAD]

@WhoIsTheLeader I can attest that they are slow and boring on the road, but 2nd gear on forest roads and ATV trails is a hoot!

[Roadkilled]

@WhoIsTheLeader

My experience with the Chevette is from the late 80s, early 90s. I remember them as uncomfortable, unreliable, underpowered, poorly performing and years behind the competition. The Chevette gave a big boost to Honda and Toyota. Anybody who switched from a Chevette to a Japanese car of the era felt like moving forward 20 years.

[Roundbadge]

@WhoIsTheLeader GF's first car was a Chevette of unknown vintage (because I never asked). That's about all I've got on that.

[ttyymmnn]

@WhoIsTheLeader

[KITT222]

@WhoIsTheLeader Allegedly, my dad had two buddies known to the local police as 'Zebra 1' and 'Zebra 2.' They would get into car chases with their Chevettes, and somehow get away.

I dig the little cars. It was succeeded by the J-body cars, so it's an inflection point in the transition from RWD to FWD in mainstream cars.

[ranwhenparked]

@ttyymmnn I like that non-frayed carpeting and a properly installed headliner are noteworthy upgrades. It's like GM looked at the Soviet auto industry and just decided to do that

[Chariotoflove]

@WhoIsTheLeader
It rattled relentlessly over 60 mph. When you put on the A/C, speed dropped immediately by 15 mph (yes, we had the fancy 4 door with A/C and I convinced Mom to get a cheap aftermarket tape deck to replace the stock AM radio). Still, the A/C blew cold and the heater blew hot, because no matter what the shitbox, GM has always done that well. Cheap cloth upholstery hid stains well and didn't get too hot in the summer. The cheap plastic dash was blue instead of black, and that helped.

The alternator went out one night while my buddy and I were out visiting some girls. There had been some drinking in the group (not getting more detailed than that) and so no one wanted to call a parent or get stopped. Still, I thought it would be a good solution to drive across town on battery power and keep the headlights off so it would last that long. I did navigate home that way without accident or incident. Thanks guardian angel.

The back bench seat did fold down flat, leaving a good amount of cargo space for a car that size. There was enough room that your date could lie down and rest if she was tired. It's amazing how exhausted teenagers can get with a Friday night agenda.

You may have noticed this, but these cars only had driver's side mirrors. That's all you were required to have, and so that's what base cars got, along with hand crank windows. Let's see, what else? Well, you could actually get it up to 80 and maintain, if you weren't put off by the car threatening to rattle apart (caveat: only on the flat or downhill).

The rear quarter panel got crunched one night when I was driving my little brother to a lesson for something. Some guy thought he would pass me on the right shoulder just as I was turning right. I got the wrecker to help pull the fender out of the tire so I could drive it home. Mom replaced it with the FC RX-7. That was in '86.

[Mark Tucker]

@WhoIsTheLeader Some people just buy stuff and take care of it. I'm sure it's nothing special to them; they probably have a 40 year old lawnmower and vacuum cleaner, too.

[Highlander]

@WhoIsTheLeader my only experience was some dood in a silver chevette with a loud exhaust tried to race me in my Z and needles to say this went in my favor very quickly.

[fintail]

@WhoIsTheLeader I think this is a 79, 80+ had updated rear lights.

[FTTOHG]

@WhoIsTheLeader said in Suddenly, a Chevette!:

Do any of you have any personal Chevette experiences?

So I actually owned one for a while. It was my first car when I was 16 in 2000. It was a blue on blue 5-door automatic that my grandmother bought it new in 1984. She handed it down to me, because she hardly ever drove. I had some fun with it putting in a huge sound system, covering the blue vinyl seats with cow print fake fur from the fabric store and painting it flat black with rattle cans of primer. A neutral drop into drive at full throttle could get the rear tires loose. Mainly because they were something like 155 section tires. That was about the extent of the fun to be had. It overheated a lot. When I was putting the second coat of primer on it I sprayed "FUCK" on the side of it and when it dried you could still see it there. The neighbors complained and my parents sold it to a junkyard while I was at summer camp in 2001. I ended up with a 1992 Cavalier that was nothing great but sure felt a more than 8 years newer than the Chevette. My overall take on these boils down to save one for a museum and crush the rest.

[Manwich]

@WhoIsTheLeader said in Suddenly, a Chevette!:

Do any of you have any personal Chevette experiences?

Yes I do... My older brother owned one and my sister owned 3 in a row... and they were all SHIT. When my sister was on her 3rd Chevette, I used to say/joke to her "Don't count your Chevettes until they're dead!"

I wrote this summary on my thoughts about Chevettes years ago:
http://www.carsurvey.org/reviews/chevrolet/chevette/1987/page-2/

And the thing that gets me is how some will say they were awesome cars.

Compared to what?

A Trabant??? Something they bought off of David Tracey???

For the people who thought Chevettes were awesome, I have wondered what other cars they owned that makes the POS Chevette look so good

[WilliamsSW]

@WhoIsTheLeader Yup. In HS drivers Ed, we had a “range” which was a parking lot with cones where we practiced low speed stuff, parking etc. That fleet was all Chevettes - so a Chevette was actually the first car I ever drove solo.
Also, a friend in college had one with a 4-speed.

Total shitboxes. No sound deadener, no power, no power steering, blah.

However, because they’re RWD, plenty of people have stuffed big V8s into them for the lulz.

[Chariotoflove]

@Manwich

I remember as a kid watching The Price is Right one day. The car in one of the showcase showdowns was a 6-pack of Chevettes. It wasn't until much later I learned that you would need all of them if you were going to rely on them as transportation.

What a lovely parting gift in the same way as is syphilis from a blind date.

[Chariotoflove]

@WilliamsSW said in Suddenly, a Chevette!:

plenty of people have stuffed big V8s into them for the lulz.

That's a Darwin Award moment, if you ask me. The body could barely handle the stock engine.

[RacinBob]

@WhoIsTheLeader I was a coop student for GM in Saginaw michigan in 78/79 and our plant car was a baby blue Chevette.

Not much in the way of speed and its interior was exactly like what you would expect a small American car to be if there wasn't small foreign cars. The Chevette was as if someone shrunk a Chevy Nova. Designed for American/GM tastes but not very inspiring, '79 VW Rabbit's and Honda Civics might as well have been from other planets. We kind of know who won that race....

My wife's first car 67 Buick Skylark. When she got out of college, she bought a used 77 Chevette. It was a practical reliable car that needed no repair for the 5 years she owned it. The odd thing that failed was the seat covers was a coarse woven fabric. They must of used different threads because but some but not all threads would disintegrate leaving an open weave exposing foam.

Her next car was a '87 CRX Dx, That was a whole lot better car. Since then it has been 35 years of continuous Honda ownership.

[RacinBob]

@Chariotoflove said in Suddenly, a Chevette!:

syphilis from a blind date

BTW, Being blind is a pretty good clue your date has syphilis.....

[Chariotoflove]

@RacinBob Touche

[WhoIsTheLeader]

@ibRAD said in Suddenly, a Chevette!:

@WhoIsTheLeader I can attest that they are slow and boring on the road, but 2nd gear on forest roads and ATV trails is a hoot!

Given their propensity to rust, that sounds like a great way to break one in half too. I imagine that once they weren't roadworthy, many were sent to Valhalla that way.

[WhoIsTheLeader]

@ranwhenparked said in Suddenly, a Chevette!:

passing them around as new employees came on board

As in, those with seniority were able to move on so they became increasingly decrepit as they acquired new "owners?"

[WhoIsTheLeader]

@Roadkilled said in Suddenly, a Chevette!:

The Chevette gave a big boost to Honda and Toyota

I think the problem was that they sold so well that they couldn't be considered anything other than a penny pinching success. It convinced GM the strategy could work while its customers were increasingly hesitant about the idea of a small American car.

[ranwhenparked]

@WhoIsTheLeader no, I think more as in the ones they had stayed in the fleet for like 15-20 years, so when someone left, the car got cleaned up and reassigned to the next person, instead of buying a new car

[WilliamsSW]

@Chariotoflove

This seems safe?