Back in September 2013, I launched the Great CC Vega Hunt. The goal was to find a Vega 2300 with its original engine and in running condition. Now clearly the intent was to find a genuine curbside CC that met those conditions. There have been a number of comment and pictures left over the years, and we’ve even featured one, but it really wasn’t all that original.
But here—thanks to CC reader Sam who tipped me off to this ad—we have something very special indeed, even if it’s not exactly curbside in the preferred sense. It’s ’72 sedan, and very much original, with only 8433 miles on it. That means you can buy it and experience an inevitable engine failure! How’s that for reliving the early 70s? The next best thing to a genuine time capsule.
This is a base sedan, with that very base interior. Yuck. I like how the carpet has turned from green to orange. or is it the other way around?
Of course the big question is if this engine was ever opened up. As in repaired. Or did it escape that fate in its first 8433 miles?
I never tire of seeing this side of the Vega engine block and thinking to myself “WTF were they thinking?” A cast iron head (still sporting its aluminum paint) on an aluminum block, and a very strangely-shaped head at that. No one’s ever done one like that before, or since. Did it pop into an engineer’s head after one of those vaunted three-martini lunches? More likely a three beer lunch, but the same effect.
The poor little Vega; it’s so button-cute, and it deserved better in life than to end up as an icon of GM’s blunders, or a Deadly Sin, in other words.
Well, strictly speaking, that’s subject to debate, as a DS has to have materially contributed to GM’s long slide, or not done anything to help arrest it. Although GM did get a black eye from the Vega, and undoubtedly turned off many customers looking for a domestic small car, and did Toyota and other Japanese imports a huge favor, GM didn’t yet show it in terms of market share, which actually went back up to a last peak in 1978. But I’m not going to change the DS status I gave it way back, the second one to be so honored. GM would have been stronger if this had been a better car.
A somewhat older friend in Towson bought a 1971 coupe in 1971, equipped like this one with the base 90 hp (gross) engine teamed up to the Powerglide. When I came back to visit, I insisted on a drive, as the Vega was still very new at the time.
His hatchback was green outside, and the same green inside as this one. I turned the key, and couldn’t believe how rough the big four idled. I was spoiled, having steeped myself in several friends’ new Toyotas in Iowa City. This sounded more like a Model A engine.
Needless to say, it was anything but peppy with the two speed Powerglide and a low (numerical) axle. It was sad to hear it slowly churning away, like a Buick Dynaflow straight eight from the early 50s with half its plugs pulled. But it did handle quite nicely, it’s one redeeming feature, along with its looks.
Here’s the proof. At least Chevy wasn’t unrealistically optimistic about the speedometer, what with it topping out at 100. Not that it would ever get there.
Did you use to think as a little kid that cars could go as fast as their speedometers read to?
And now, to the grand finale: this gem of a Vega can be yours for a mere $9,900. Come on; one of you has to spring for it, and make it the official mascot car of CC. You know you want it. And what a story it will make when you document that first blown engine.
More Vega goodness:
CC 1971 Vega: GM’s Deadly Sin #2
Either US dollar depreciates so much or the Vega becomes more valuable, or maybe both.
The dollar depreciates?!? You must be kidding; it’s near record highs compared to other currencies. And inflation has been low for ages.
Of course the Vega becomes more valuable. It’s an investment grade piece of fine art. 🙂 But then they still have to find a buyer…
$9900 is just unthinkable. I wouldn’t consider taking ownership unless the current owner is willing to pay me at least $10,000 even.
Now, now..Just drop a SBC in it and enjoy! ,Really though, I grew up in western PA. Hard on the Ohio state line probably 30 miles from
Lordstown Oh. Where these beer can quality cars where concieved, and regardless of the name of the plant…The only “Lord” in Lordstown must have been the one of the darkness! A lot of guys from my neck of the woods worked there. Build quality? WTF is that? You don’t like my work? See my shop steward! Very bad relationships between union and GM. Back then the mentality was us versus them. No pride in workmanship from workees no common sense with GM to insure that the Vega coming off the line is ready to go. Their focus was MOVE METAL! Let the dealer’s fix the flaws! Lots of marijuana and beer involved too! Early 70’s you know! Drug testing unknown at the time.. I know, personally :-)..Had a lot to do with it as well. Sad era in USA car building.
In the three books I have read about John Delorean, all have claimed that he had implemented significant quality control measures.
Once production started the bean counters eliminated the quality control managers and measures Delorean had started and upped the speed of the line.
The Vega was the child of a star athlete that got drafted into the major leagues and then showcased his overall lack of real talent. To it’s credit, the Vega was a good idea, just not well executed. As was GM’s way, they over-engineered things that should have stayed simple, and they oversimplified things that should have been better engineered. If they would have spent as much on an aluminum head and sleeves for the engine as they did on the freight cars for shipping these cars, it may have worked. Had they turned to Opel for an engine or at least for advice, it may have worked. So many ifs, but in the end, another DS.
Engineers from the other side, have a habit of scolding. It was tried on Saturn L-series and many people didn’t appreciate that, then it became the case study in the classroom about the importance of communication.
Assuming that the car is in excellent shape all the way around and has no rust/bondo issues then $9900 is not a bad price and it would certainly be car show worthy. I would love to see it in a car show. These are the cars that I got to car shows to see. A car show with 50 hopped up 1965 Mustangs or other muscle cars is boring, but throw in some old Ford Model A or Chrysler cars (such as that 1937 Chrysler that was posted on) or some old Buick and I am in.
But back to the car at hand, The Vega is still an attractive looking car 40 some years later.
GM Design was enamored of the Pininfarina coupe style, such as the Lancia Florida, Fiat 124, et al. You see it through the 70s, to the 1977 Pontiac Catalina and 1978 Malibu.
GM did get former Chrysler owners in ’78 timeframe, after Lean Burn and rusted Volares. But then slid later …
You beat me to it, Paul! I have saved searches on eBay, CL and Hemmings, and notchbacks are very rare to pop up. I’m *very* tempted, and if it only had the 4-speed Saginaw, I probably would have already contacted the seller. The big question would be whether to immediately sleeve the engine or not!
I suspect an oil cooler, meticulous maintenance, and a steady diet of nothing but modern full synthetic oil might allow the engine to live.
I like how instead of having a separate scale for km/h, they just converted the mph markings to their metric equivalents. Really helpful for places where the speed limit is 97km/h!
You’re misinterpreting this. In the early 70s, there was a very serious effort to convert the US to metric. A number of gas stations actually sold gas in liters for a while. It really looked like it was going to happen there for a while. The purpose of that speedometer was to give Americans a sense of what the equivalent speed was in kmh, to get them used to making the conversion in their heads. Export GM cars had a genuine kmh speedometer.
FWIW, it’s too bad the US didn’t change over to metric. It’s a much better system. But logic is not the prevailing power most times.
Having said that, it was still pretty dumb. 🙂
I suspect this may likely have been one of the very first years that speedometers also showed kmh. Maybe it shows just how resistant folks were to it, by doing this?
Southern Arizona has a stretch of Interstate signed in metric. It’s probably the only such stretch remaining. It’s I-19, from Tucson to Nogales, Arizona. Speed limit signs are in MPH, but distances are all in kilometers.
I forget where it is, but there’s still at least one sign I pass on my way back and forth to Georgia from the Middle West that has the dual systems.
How’s Marty Ed? I darn near know this is you. Boge Rodent lives. I liked the Black one ,caged pro street. Lee S.
When Australia went metric, gas stations sold conversion scales to stick on your speedo for many popular cars. Or you could buy a gearbox to insert in the speedo cable to make it read metric. Many older drivers like my dad knew that 60km/h was 37mph, and 100 was 62mph so kept driving the speeds they’d been used to doing.
What was fun here was all the corner advisory signs turned metric but us younguns in our old bombs would hurtle around those turns at the posted speed in mph,
how did you think we discovered American cars dont handle very well, by reading about it?
I remember those years. I’ll agree with you that metric is a better, easier and more logical system than the English system.
But for some things, metric still doesn’t “feel” right for me. I have a better feel for 1 mile than I do for 0.621 km. And 15 km/l doesn’t sound impressive until I realize that it’s 35 miles/gal.
FWIW, I remember test driving a first generation Toyota Prius and the salesman tried to impress me with how fast it reached 60. Then as we reached 100 he remarked how “it doesn’t feel like we’re going that fast, does it?” He wasn’t fooling me, I noticed the speedometer was set to km/hr and called him on it.
I used to have a 1988 Lincoln Town Car with a digital dashboard. On long trips my wife would often doze off so I would set the speedometer to metric. 75 mph just became 120 kph. A quick jab at the brakes would wake her and she’d get a bit high strung about our speed. Fun stuff.
Ugh that reminded me of this:
Frog: Are we really going 110? We’re going 110!
Frog?
I’ve never actually seen a Vega engine bay. That is one bizarre-looking motor.
Yes there’s an old engineering saying, “what looks right – is right.” And the Vega shows the converse is true too.
Nice blank “clock” to the right of the speedo.
Fantastically handsome car IMO. Swapping in any number of less trouble-prone 4 or 6 cylinder engines and a manual transmission would make this a really cool mild resto-mod (no lowering kits or stupidly huge wheels please, it’s perfect as is aesthetically).
The sedans were rare when new, almost as rare as the sedan delivery to my eyes.
Most were the hatchback or Kammback wagon like I had. THAT would be tempting but I’d have to switch the drivetrain for an Ecotec or a V6. Either would give the power the 1970s 283 conversions did.
Not anywhere near as rare as the sedan delivery.
The two door sedan actually outsold the wagon in 1971. And it sold around 60k per year for the years ’71 – ’73. Not all that rare. But yes, the hatchback was the big seller, outselling the sedan by about 3:1 in ’71; and 5:1 in ’72 and ’73.
I don’t have stats for the sedan delivery, but it was undoubtedly much lower than the sedan. I only remember seeing them very rarely.
Panel Delivery production:
1971 – 7,800
1972 – 4,114
1973 – 3,886
I worked at an alarm company that had 2 blown engine 1971 white, drivers seat only powerglide sedan delivery’s covered in dust in the parking lot, One had 35k miles, the other around 60k. This was in 1974. I’m sure they eventually went directly to the junkyard, I remember when the Vega section in the junk yard was huge, more of them than any other model. And they all still had almost all of their parts on them, no one was pulling parts from these cars.
They were replaced by slant six Valiant’s and those had over 200k miles on them and were still going strong.
Door panel appears to be one-piece molded plastic.
Whole interior looks like it belongs inside a 1:1 scale plastic model car.
Indeed, it was (one piece).
Probably the same plastic used on the ’71-’76 full size GM cars across the board and on the Colonnade mid-size cars. Not one of GM’s inspired ideas!
Hmmm, I thought that the GM Flow Through ventilation with the vented trunk lids was a one year only thing on the ’71 full-size cars. But, a little poking around on the web says this vented ’72 Vega trunk-lid is correct.
Wow, when you see this car like this, it is no wonder this was showroom magic before the truth revealed itself. Most of America probably mentally compared this to the Beetle, and this was sex on wheels by comparison.
Hated the Vega when it came out as I was a Gremlin advocate. Now I look at this 2 door sedan and marvel over how good it looks today. Too many “foreign” parts in the Pinto [ my thinking as a 15 year old ] and imports never appealed.
My thoughts have changed over the years.
I suspect this is an early ’72, as the badge on the nose is still the scripted Chevrolet vs. the later block letter VEGA badge.
In the fall of 71 a college dorm friend received from her parents a new 72 Vega hatchback for her birthday. I’ve written about this car before – it literally started to come apart (windshield wipers flew off, trim pieces came loose, interior carpet unglued, etc.) as we took an inaugural drive from Bloomington, IN to Madison, Wisconsin for a week-end visit. I distinctly remember getting into my 69 VW Beetle after riding in the Vega and feeling like I was in the lap of luxury by comparison: smoother engine, much higher quality vinyl seats and interior trim, standard rear window defroster, etc. The Vega was a good-looking car but otherwise junk, at least the early models I experienced through friends.
Buy a rebuilt Iron Duke for when the engine blows and Krown for annual rustproofing if not in the desert.
I like these better than the hatches plus there is more leg & head room in the back seat.
Had one of these as a Driver’s Ed car. With avocado green metallic exterior to match the green interior. Lots of vibration from that automotive media darling 4.
from the hemmings advert taken today at 11;39 central time
Location: SPRINGFIELD, OH 45503
Mileage: 8,433
Trans: Auto
Condition Excellent
Exterior: White
Interior: Green
Price: $9,900
Status: Expired
Removed: Mar 9, 2017
note status is listed as ‘expired’ i wonder if someone bought it or the engine died while sitting?
i do think these are handsome and the suggestion above to put in a competent 4 or 6 cylinder engine and mt is an awesome idea.
The listing is no longer available, so I’m assuming someone bought it, and I hope they leave it alone. A horrible car in some ways, but I think it should be preserved so that people in the future can see the car in its original configuration; to learn why it was such a disaster. It should lose those beauty rings and white letter tires, too. BTW, didn’t the Turbohydramatic become available in mid-’72? Perhaps this car has it, though it’s not likely.
It wasn’t me, sadly.
Paul said, “I never tire of seeing this side of the Vega engine block and thinking to myself “WTF were they thinking?” A cast iron head (still sporting its aluminum paint) on an aluminum block, and a very strangely-shaped head at that. No one’s ever done one like that before, or since. Did it pop into an engineer’s head after one of those vaunted three-martini lunches? More likely a three beer lunch, but the same effect”
Unfortunately GM did the very same, an aluminum bock with cast iron cylinder heads, for the equally disastrous Cadillac HT4100 engine series. Did the Cadillac/GM engineers frequent the same bar during their lunches? How did they, GM, not learn the right lessons from the Vega 2300 engine?
Cast iron head on aluminum block: See also Chrysler’s aluminum-block Slant-6 engine, 1961-’63. Worked fine; biggest problem was long-term eventual corrosion induced by boneheaded American willful ignorance of the time (“The hell with what the manual says! I don’t need no gol-durn anniefreeze in summer! I’ll drain it out, save it fer next winter, an’ put plain water in fer now, as gawd intended…aHyuck!”).
The problem with the Vega’s “engine” (if we must) was halfassed engineering.
The Rambler aluminum six of the early 1960s also used a cast-iron cylinder head. It suffered from the same corrosion problems you mention and most wound up being replaced with the iron engine early on.
Blargh. What’s second prize, two Vegas?
Ha!
Is that a real ad? It’s kind of like saying, “You can get a real Vega for half the price of this car!”. I wonder how many people saw it, then went out and bought a Vega because it was so cheap.
Maybe they should have ran an ad that explained that a Corvette wasn’t that much more expensive than a Cosworth.
Yep, it was real! The ‘Vette was only ~$900 more expensive.
Surely they could have picked a better slogan than “just like a regular Vega, only twice as expensive”? The comment about the “performance-type” engine is another hoot. A product of mid-70s fears of mentioning “performance”?
My dearly departed aunt Dorothy bought a Vega wagon in 1976, I think it was. And me being the 18 y.o. car geek that I was, she would bring it around for me to look at when it was sounding funny, from time to time. Several times the alternator bracket vibrated loose, and I would tighten up the bolts until next time she visited. After the 3rd or 4th time of doing this, and with the alternator about to drop off, I decided to use some red Loctite on those alternator bracket bolts. They never came loose again… No one probably could ever get them out again. Not that it mattered, the car didn’t last long enough for that to be an issue.
Agreed, nice looking car. I remember thinking that engine was bizarre looking when I was 8 years old, and Dad telling me we couldn’t replace the air filter, you had to replace the entire assembly. Talk about confusing for a kid.
My ’71 hatchback blew its engine in the summer of 1973 with about 7.5 K miles on it. I was on the way to a sailing trip off the coast of Maine, but the real adventure was in So. Portland where I limped into the Chevy dealer. I recovered the supposedly repaired Vega two weeks later, and it died again in mid-Vermont. My new 1973 Plymouth Satellite seemed a gift from heaven in comparison.
I love this well-preserved specimen. It really belongs in a museum, right alongside those musclecars that everyone adores. Imagine a ‘lovable losers’ museum with well-preserved survivors like this Vega, a Citation, Chevette, Cimarron, et al.
As to Mershons, to those who haven’t been, it’s a great place to spot very nice old cars. Although they specialize in Corvettes, they invariably have other, quite interesting rides, which aren’t limited to domestic musclecars, either. What’s even better is there’s pretty much unlimited access to the cars in the showroom. Sure, that means some boneheads get in (once when I was there, someone actually tried to start a car) but the salesmen are nice and definitely low-key. They were even pretty civil to the clown who tried to start the car. They understand their clientele very well and really only make an appearance if asked. The bottom line is if you’re even remotely interested in old cars and anywhere near Springfield, OH, it’s worth a side-trip.
I’ll second the shout out for Mershon’s, they are well worth visiting. I was in Springfield quite a number of years ago to see the trucks I purchased coming off the line at the International factory. With an afternoon to kill afterward we were poking around and came across this place. We asked to look around and told them we were just looking. They showed us around, answered questions, talked cars and let us hang around and look at cars for a couple of hours. Even let us tour the shop.
Some of these places have very poor manners and bad attitudes, but I was impressed with these guys. If I ever win the lottery, I might go back, pick something out, and drive it back to BC! Won’t be a Vega though…..
We really need to keep these cars around to remind younger folks how BAD cars were in the ’70s. Come to think about it clothes were too!
Everyone’s got a Vega story, and here’s another sad tale:
When I was 4 years old and my brother was about 1, my parents decided to divorce. In an attempt to keep things amicable and keep life on a somewhat even keel, Mom got the house and car, but Dad (who was a bit of a gearhead) had only his work truck as transportation. Being a young guy who presumably wanted to date, he needed a proper car. Mom had been digging the Vega since it was introduced, thinking it was “cute” and “fun”. In a gallant move (later understood to be a ruse to get a “real car” at a bargain price), Dad presented Mom with a brand new ’72 Vega hatchback. It was a stripper base model with exactly this interior but in gold, and a 4 speed. He in turn took possession of the immaculate ’68 LeMans hardtop coupe that’d been our family car. (A pretty slick move, really, as a comparable car in that shape could not likely have been found for the price of a stripper Vega, even in 1972.)
As was inevitable, our Vega developed the usual problems, including a penchant for randomly shutting itself down at stoplights or while idling in traffic. This of course was neither safe nor convenient, and on more than one occasion brought my then 25-year-old recently divorce mother of 2 small boys to hysterical fits of grief and frustration. These seem in my memory to always have occurred either during a torrential downpour or while stuck in blistering noonday heat (The pain of those waffle patterned vinyl seats on bare young thighs is etched in my memory), which was rather traumatic to my young mind. Mom replaced the Vega in ’75 when her new job and a new relationship meant that finances allowed it, with a ’75 Monza 2+2 with the 262 V8 and automatic. Still the same basic car, “cute” and “fun”, but now reliable and with some guts, at least.
Cut to 15 years later, and that new relationship had both blossomed and degenerated, leaving Mom on the brink of divorce again, and I suppose going through some similar feelings of “what am I going to do?”, and I’m home for the Summer after my freshman year away at university. Running some errands with my mother, who was then driving an ’85 Jaguar Van Den Plas, and in the midst of a discussion about what was going on in the family, we stopped to pick up some random item at a store about 30 miles from home. Completing that errand the car refused to restart in…wait for it…a torrential thunderstorm on a blisteringly hot day. As I watched my mother start to gear up for full-on panic mode, almost thinking I could feel that waffle vinyl seat burning me all over again, all I could do was descend into gales of maniacal laughter. All I could think to say when I regained composure was “At least this is a hell of a lot better thing to get stuck in than that fucking Vega!”
Just one man’s Vega story. YMMV.
I had a ’76 Pontiac Astre version which had the cool Firebird inspired tailights and typical Pontiac style split grille. Mine was two door sedan like this but had a five speed manual transmission. GM had improved the motor and extended the warranty. It was a pretty good little car, plenty of room inside. My two brothers and I took a marathon trip over the weekend trip from The Bay Area to Tijuana Mexico. Left Friday night at 11:30 pm. after swing shift ended drove all night, arrived Saturday morning. Spent all day looking around, then left Saturday night and arrived home early in the AM on Sunday. Slept the rest of the day, went to work Monday at 3:00 pm. The things you could do when you are young!
The only problem with the car was the lack of a/c, non opening rear windows, and the card table sized roof which didn’t block much sun from shining inside, baking the occupants.
Yes, I thought as a kid that wherever the speedo ended, that was the car’s top speed. I expressed this idea to my dad when I was 7 or 8, and he said, irritably, “The dial has nothing to do with it.”
Road & Track was still helmed by engineers in those days, and they published a big feature story on that engine, which of course they loved for its very innovative “features” (especially the coating – silicon? – they used on the cylinder walls in lieu of actual liners). And they even bought the excuse for the iron head: keeping the noise level down. I was less enamored of the engine than of the styling, which I did and still do admire very much. A few years later I had a co-worker whose chief sideline was buying Vegas with good solid bodies (still not uncommon then) and stuffing Chevy V8s into them. He had two of his own, a sedan with a 350 and a wagon with the 427. I got to drive both; the automatic sedan was a sweetheart, but the four-speed 427 was a real workout in Nashville traffic, with a clutch pedal that seemed immovable at first, and the engine heat pretty fierce even with every openable window open.
Nobody has brought up the Cosworths yet; that was a fiasco of an even weirder sort. The designers worked overtime to make sure the DOHC head got plenty of oil, but somehow neglected to give it an equally generous return path, so that at high RPMs a lot of the engine’s oil would be crammed into the head while the bottom end was going dry. Kablooey! The serious racers quickly developed an external return line that allowed the cars to more or less live up to their promise.
I grew up during the 90s-00s when there were still a lot of cars coming off the 85mph era gradually ramping up to 100 or 120 speedometers, for which I actually think that would be pretty accurate as a top speed in most cases. Now a days it’s once again a joke, V6 Mustangs started using 160 mph speedometers in 2010 or 2011(a number previously reserved for SVT Cobras) and what is their top speed? 113.
I swear that engine was the product of “oh yeah” among development engineers…. You can’t use an aluminum block without steel liners! ” oh yeah?” You’re going to have gasket issues with an iron head and aluminum block “oh yeah?”. It’s like they were trying to prove a point to no one who cared.
The speedometer of a Mercedes-Benz W115 200D also ended with 160. Oh, wait…
The current version of the V6 Mustang is limited to 113 MPH (more or less) because Ford doesn’t put the high speed rated tires on the V6 as standard equipment. If one reprograms the ECM chip it will indeed go much faster than the 113. I wouldn’t recommend this on the OEM tires, at least not for very long at a time, but it certainly can be done.
I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw a Vega in the wild, by now I’m sure that most of them have rusted completely out and/or the replacement engine has worn out. The Vega with the “high output” engine and manual transmission wasn’t exactly a hot rod, I can only imagine driving a base engine model with a Powerglide.
I do hope whoever buys this one preserves it as is and doesn’t swap in a different powertrain. As others have said above, we need unmodified examples to remind us of how things really were.
The driveshaft is a major contributor as well http://jalopnik.com/5869650/why-do-2011-ford-mustang-driveshafts-keep-exploding
I vaguely recall earlier issues with the Mustang driveshaft vibration, too. Ford’s quick and dirty (and cheap) fix was to attach a counter-weight. All it did was dampen the vibration but it was still there and remained, getting worse as speed increased. It was a half-assed solution instead of using a properly balanced driveshaft.
That’s true about the driveshaft issue, it had slipped my mind. My nephew has a 2014 Mustang GT that he has progressively modified to the point where it has around 800 horse power at the rear wheels, as measured on a dyno. One of the first things he did was replace the stock driveshaft with one made out of carbon fiber.
God, that is a beautiful little car. I’d buy it just to look at it and appreciate it as a piece of sculpture. Drive it? Well??????……I dunno.
Oh, it would be good for at least 20-30,000 miles before you had any *real* problems!
Let’s throw in a what if. How do you think a Vega powered by the Vauxhall 2.3L slant 4 would have performed and sold? Especially with a decent 3 speed auto instead of a Powerglide. Plus the added bonus of a 16V option from the Chevette HSR as an in house equivalent to the Cosworth.
It would have still rusted to death in two years. Vegas were made invulnerable to rust, like Achilles was made invulnerable to weapons: by dipping. Achilles was dipped in the river Styx , the Vega in a rustproofing bath. Achilles was held by his heel leaving him vulnerable to Paris’ poison arrow there. Vegas did vary a tiny bit here: when they were dipped in the rust-proofing bath theycwere not left vulnerable at the grip points. Instead when dipped an air pocket was left between the firewall and the underside of rear of the front fenders. This air pocket mean that no rustproofing touched the undersides of the front fenders. Just as Achilles needed no armor, GM decided Vegas needed no fender liners because of its Styx-style protection. Gravel and sand thrown up by the tires soon removed the paint allowing dirty, salty water to attack the unprotected areas of the front fenders. Two-year-old Vegas rusted through the tops of the front fenders at the base of the windshield.
So fixing the engines would not have fixed then cars.
Even if that been fixed -Oh Lord! The Vegas were assembled at Lordstown. For entertainment look up “Lordstown strike” .
A few years ago I saw an online ad for an immaculate ’85-’87 (I forget the exact year) red Audi 4000 with 32K miles on it. I think they were asking $8500 for it. I couldn’t justify getting it on any rational grounds, but I was tempted.
I once had a ride in a Ford Crown Victoria taxi with 160 mph speedo. I wondered if that made sense for CV police cars, so all CV’s got them.
Probably a former police car…they have 140MPH speedometers.
I’d think Yellow Cab would buy new cars, not ex-police cars that have been through the mill.
Plenty of taxis are retired cruisers. Easy check: a police Vic will have “CERTIFIED CALIBRATION” under the odometer display.
I didn’t recall a vinyl roof was offered on the notchback at one point.
Another example…
Maybe it’s because I’m often drawn to the tragic, but I always marvel at how a car that absolutely nailed it in the looks department could have everything else about it be so, so wrong. I hope today’s buyer is making arrangements with a museum as I write this.
Anybody else notice the odd wear in the interior for a car so seemingly pristine from the outside? Beside the already mentioned carpet, take a look at the tops of the bucket seats. There also appears to be something broke or floating around in the instrument pod.
I too noticed the discoloration in the tops of the seats. I’m not surprised. As I noted above, my friend’s new Vega started to fall apart as soon as she started driving it. The carpet became unglued and trim pieces inside and out were coming apart. The early cars were pretty bad. In addition to cheap materials, the workers in the Lordstown assembly plant were not happy campers in 71-72.
GM plastics of the 70’s were notorious for discoloring. This may be worse than most, but I’m not surprised. The formerly uniform tan interior of my 79 Malibu had turned into a dozen shades of tan , white, and in places pink by the 90’s.
In the late ’70’s we were putting cast iron sleeves in the (then almost new) aluminum vega blocks to fix them. It worked well, but was expensive. The sleeved Vega could then enjoy a normal service life.
Most folks opted to dump the Vega cheap to some kid who was going to put a V8 in it. I’m sure that the vast majority of those were thrashed to death decades ago.
Anyway, it I saw a stock Vega today, I would assume that it has a sleeved block.
Robert, I remember ads in MT for the same thing. Nice little sideline, I’d think.
My mother had Ford’s Vega equivalent a 71 Pinto automatic what a terrible thing that
was I can say that the engine never expired . At the time I thought maybe Ford
tried to make it as miserable as possible so you’d buy a bigger car with more
profit going to ford.
Standard operating procedure for the Big Three back then. They really didn’t want you to buy small cars. Your instinct was correct.
My boss at the time loved Vegas and went through at least three of them. He leased them, at the time I thought it was a mistake. It wasn’t.
We actually owned *four* at one time (one for parts). Gluttons for punishment, I suppose! That’s me and my ’71 in the middle.
You said it “such a good looking car” and it was and still is. For a small car it really looked great. How could GM get the looks so good and then blow it big time on the mechanicals? And the Vega wasn’t the only such mistake in GM’s 20 year run from 1970 to 1990. Citation ,Fiero,,etc.
Install a 2.0 4 cylinder engine and 4 speed out of a ’72 Pinto and you can have a Vega with a durable engine. Just need to live in a no road salt state and good to go for the long haul.
Internet doesn’t seem to show anyone ever having attempted this, though.
Had a ’71 hatchback (bought used in 1978) with this color interior and green exterior, but had the “high performance” 2 barrel 110 hp engine and 4 speed trans. It was slow and rough running, the 90hp powerglide version must have been maddingly slow.
The engine held together for the 9 months or so that I owned it, it had about 60k miles on it but I had no history on what may have been done to it’s engine before I bought it. It did blow it’s water pump and overheated, after pump replacement the power went down and the oil consumption went up, so I figured it was a good time to sell.
Looks like it sold quickly, the ad was deleted March 9th.
I haven’t seen a running Vega in over 30 years. Since the body is in good shape, I’d recommend pulling the original drivetrain and dropping in a newer plant. A 3800 with a manual would do quite nicely….plus it would be much more reliable.
How Vegas were delivered.
Good lord! Mershon’s is in my town. I pass it every day going to work. Don’t remember the Vega. Wonder if it’s still in/near the showroom? I’ll keep an eye out.