We took a different route on a walk the other day, and were a bit shocked when we came by this. We know the folks that live there; she used to teach Spanish at the Waldorf School. And they were inveterate previous-car hoarders; there were always three or four of their previous daily drivers stored on the front and side yard, never to be used again. Eventually, they got rid of the oldest ones to make room for some newer ones, like this one.
I’d seen this early Caravan (or possibly Voyager) before, of course, back when she drove it. I haven’t seen one with the quad sealed beams in a while; they’re pretty much extinct. And this one is now burned out, along with a big part of their house.
I have no idea what happened to cause the house fire, but I can’t help but wonder if their obsessive hoarding of numerous cars jammed on their little lot might have been a reflection of what went on inside the house too, and if it somehow contributed to the conflagration. But that’s pure speculation.
It makes me wonder whether the generation of kids who grew up in these are going to find them collectable, given how deeply they were imprinted on them.
Yes, every year there will be fewer of every kind of old car. Most succumb in the early years to ordinary wear and tear along with crashes. But once they thin out and become uncommon, we will still have fires, floods, severe storms, crashes and other things to take out some of the the survivors.
Yes, these early Chryco vans are getting pretty rare. I think I saw one in traffic a couple of weeks ago and noted what an unusual sight it was.
Don’t fret. This would be a fate, of pretty much most generation Chrysler anything products………
With this gen model, who wants to take bets on what ended it? Cracked head? Dropped Valve guides? Blown timing belt? Or the infamous transmission?
Excuse me, while I go check the spark plugs on my GM Deadly Sin, 22-year old runs-without-feeling-a-shift, rust-free, 179,000-mile Saturn S-Series that I paid only $200 for to lift out of an impound yard. Maybe I’ll put my sunroof open, as it still works, too….
Any 6th-grader can go “Hurr hurr hurr…Chryslers suck…uhuhuhuh”. If you’re going to be smug and scornful effectively, it helps to know what you’re talking about, at least a little. The infamous transmission you speak of did not yet exist when this van was built. A “blown” timing belt—no, they strip or they break, but they don’t “blow”—would not happen on the Mitsubishi 2.6 if that’s what this van had (they used a timing chain), and if the engine was a 2.2 a failed timing belt wouldn’t end the van; the 2.2 is a non-interference design. The dropped valve guides you mention were a problem with the Mitsubishi 6G72 3-litre V6 engine, which was not yet available when this van was built. Cracked head? Sure, that could be it…on a random-guess basis, on the list with “thrown connecting rod”, “spun bearing”, “catastrophic loss of oil pressure”, etc.
Good point about your Saturn, though; your one anecdote like totally invalidates a mountain of data and stuff.
Pay him no heed, Daniel. He thinks that because Paul said some nice things about a Mopar he once owned and criticised the bungled, over-budget Saturn program, that Paul is some kind of shameless Chrysler apologist. Hence the regular references to his Saturn.
The deadly sin-ness of the Saturn SL has nothing to do with its reliability anyway.
Same with the GM10s. For what GM spent to develop them they should’ve been best-in-class but they weren’t, and then they were kept on the market well past their sell-by dates, but none of that stops them from being “good used cars”.
Unfortunately for GM, car companies stay in business by selling good new cars.
Bbb but they’ll come back and buy another used GM, customer loyalty and whatnot!
I’d put a 2.2/2.5 and 3-speed TorqueFlite ahead of most any GM powertrain combination from the 80s for longevity. The 3800 engine might last longer, but the 440T4 won’t. An original minivan will hold off the tinworm longer than anything GM dished out at the time, too.
Don’t be smug, Chrysler had the BEST Minivans and are still selling them, even though GM and Ford aren’t… There’s those out there from competitors still giving a “wink” to FCA (Can Am) for getting them in the Minivan market, despite being competition. All those Nay-sayers never owned a Mopar product, and possibly never will. That’s all the same for me and the Chrysler faithful, we stand by our product, NO MATTER who runs it and whatever shape its in.
And you can’t see that’s every bit as thoughtless and silly as rejecting any/every Chrysler product as junk…? Sad. If you’re picking a car based on “faith”, you’re doing it wrong.
That shift without a feeling is because the tranny is stuck in 2nd. Face it, while the great and powerful GM was busy coming up with yet another failed import fighting strategy, Chrysler on its knees came up and hit a grandslam with two outs and the count 0-2 in the bottom of the ninth.
Thinning of the herd recently rings with me, and there’ll be fewer of ALL TYPES of cars resulting from our recent natural disasters named Harvey & Irma.
Having fixated on these specific cars for the last seventeen (>17) years, I was saddened to see this [screen grab] from a Storm Chaser’s video.
There’s gonna be a glut of cheap reconditioned used cars with hidden flood damage. Let’s be careful out there
I bought a Chrysler shitbox…er, excuse me, Plymouth Voyager, new in 1986 as the family transportation. Drove it for 17 years and 200,000+ miles before driving it to the junkyard where, I can believe, it is still serving as their yard car. It had the Mitsubishi 4 cyl w.timing chain. I replaced the chain guides and both left and right CV joints myself, but a shop rebuilt the trans at about 115K miles. Ex-GF sold me a nearly new Jetta 5-speed in ’02, so buh-bye Plymouth. Unlike some German cars of the eighties these minivans haven’t aged well, but maybe in another 30 years they will become collectible novelties.
Yard car… a minivan would make a good one. I had an ’81 Subaru wagon and a ’78 Olds Cutlass wagon as my favorite yard cars during my stint in a wrecking yard.
Many people are automotive hoarders. Usually they have large rural properties, where the old hoarded cars are left down in the woods or fields, out of the way , slowly shedding parts and preserving memories.
“Hoarding” sounds like a pejorative expression, but I don’t think it is. If one has the space, there’s nothing wrong with storing some automotive history.
But jamming an urban property with old cars is probably a bad thing if it interferes with enjoyment of ones property.
“I can’t help but wonder if their obsessive hoarding of numerous cars jammed on their little lot might have been a reflection of what went on inside the house too”
If they are like my grandparents were, that seems likely. Every car they ever owned in their lives was parked somewhere on their farm. Meanwhile pretty much everything else ever owned filled their house, and other outbuildings on the farm, and some of the old cars were being used for storage, too.
I mean, as a kid it was fun to explore the farm and look at all the old cars ranging from the late 1940s through the 1970s, but in hindsight seeing now how it was connected to their general hoarding tendencies it probably wasn’t really a good thing that they kept them all.
My grandmother was a hoarder. I’ve heard it’s pretty common among people who lived through the Great Depression. When she passed we had to go through everything and open it up because you would find cash and jewelry and all kinds of things stuffed down in an old McDonalds styrofoam cup, filled with napkins, wrapped in rubber bands, in a shoe box, also wrapped in rubber bands, lined with newspapers from the 60’s that was in a larger box… and so on.
There’s a certain clarity of purpose and straightforward quality about the 1st-gen Chrysler minivans that will surely make them collectibles in a decade or so.
Avis gave me a recent Dodge Caravan the other day in Cal. instead of my usual compact, and I hated it. Too big, hard to see out the back, took me two cuts to safely get into a suburban parking lot space. Partly that’s my inexperience with vehicles that size. But the throttle response was very sudden, and the dash-mounted shifter was weird. No fun.
I hope four cars for two people in a city house doesn’t make me a hoarder. We just barely have space for them, counting the curbside in front of our house. We do use all four cars at least semi-regularly.
What about 5 cars for 3 people? I think I already know the answer…
I hope the unfortunate householders had insurance cover.
Everything over here has become disposable since the advent of the cheap japanese used import, thats what dealt the death blow to the huge still operating classic car fleet and they were scrapped in their thousands, now metal prices are down and its not even worth scrapping cars and wrecking yards are not interested.
Funny how some things come up on CC. My dad died six years ago today, at the ripe old age of 99 years and 9 months, so he was a presence in my life for a long time. This article made me think of him, and the collection of wrecks that populated our 80 by 240-foot lot as I was growing up.
Way at the back of the lot one could find a ’36 Chevy panel truck, left by friends of my parents when they moved to farm country. The second car way in back was a ’48 Chevy that donated parts to Dad’s ’41 Chevy Master Deluxe. The last car was a postwar Pontiac that may have donated something to a slightly later Pontiac my oldest brother owned in the early 60s.
Moving forward, next to the house was a 1948 Cadillac that Dad had picked up in hopes that it could give new life to Dad’s 1947 Fleetwood. Presumably it was an engine transplant. By the early 60s, the ’47 Fleetwood took its place as the dead car; Dad had gotten a 1952 Cadillac to replace it. That lasted just a few years till Dad traded the Cadillac in on a 1961 Mercedes 190Db. The ’47 Fleetwood eventually went to someone who had hopes of restoring the thing.
After the Fleetwood went away, an engineless VW Minibus came along and functioned as a storage unit. Finally, though, by the late 70s, Dad had gotten rid of all the hulks except for a couple of things that my oldest brother left with my folks: a 1965 Impala Super Sport (somewhat the worse for rust around the rear window), and a custom-built race car. Besides that, there were new hulks. One was the 1941 Chevy mentioned above; I drove it my senior year in high school, and then, in a moment of just plain not paying attention, ran a red light and crashed it on the night I graduated from high school. At least no one was hurt! Another hulk joined it, that of my 1962 Plymouth Valiant station wagon. It met its end also in an accident; this time, the other driver was at fault, and essentially destroyed the front end. No one was hurt, though.
I’m grateful now not having a bunch of automotive hulks around me.
Lol, there was a ’60s VW microbus storage shed down the street from my childhood home too, as well as a ’78 Dodge Sportsman Maxiwagon van storage unit in my next door neighbor’s driveway (purchased new, replacing a Chevy Beauville) that actually ran, but by the ’90s was rarely used except for storage (just *what* was stored in there was a longstanding neighborhood-wide mystery, though whatever it was, the owner could be fairly often be seen adding or removing from it. Boxes were stored up to the ceiling, viewable through the windows of what started out as a passenger van). Some of the bench seats found a permanent home on the covered front porch that ran the full width of the house. Behind the big van in the driveway was one of those collapsible pop-up campers that folds down to a countertop-height box, which I never saw used the entire 30+ years she lived there.
No bull, my father bought the first one sold in Indiana in 1984. Caravan SE, burgundy on burgundy cloth. I was 5 years old. The dealer had been instructed by Chrysler to keep it as a demo but was a family friend and Dad thought it was the coolest thing ever and had to have it. Folks would come to look at it when he was filling the tank. It was that much of a ‘new thing’ – hard to believe now but completely true.
I won’t disclose the dealer because its a sad story. He’s lost his 40+ year franchise with Chrysler after the recession and sale to FCA, and his beloved wife of forever this year. She was also the secretary and effectively ran the business. I live in the DC area now, but stopped in to see him recently while on a business trip and it was one of those happy-sad moments. He was still there in his old office and we chatted for an hour or so, remembered me as soon as I walked in and I haven’t seen this man since probably 1993. Not a car for sale to be found. Same old showroom, same old soda machine in the corner, same flat top haircut he always wore since his time in the Army in the 1950s. I spent many hours playing with new Chryslers at that dealership back in the day- he knew I loved cars and that I was a curious kid who wouldn’t break anything. He was driving a 2011 Hyundai Sonata with 160k on the clock… And this was a businessman of great success in our small town back then. If you’re from Southern Indiana you likely know who/where I’m talking about.
Good Lord, how times change.
Did they sell custom vans? I might’ve delivered to him. If it’s the place I’m thinking of, they sold an eclectic variety of used cars. First place I saw a 911 in the life.
SpeedyK – I don’t ever recall a 911 (or anything Euro for that matter, except an Audi 80, ONCE) but there were definitely custom vans.
Mark in Maine below has nailed it.
Safe travels sir!
Just like station wagons of the ’60s and ’70s are enjoying a resurgence in popularity these days, at some point minivans of the ’80s will as well.
My parents bought a 1984 Voyager — shown here. It was an unusual example of them being early adopters. They were nervous about buying an untested car, but ultimately decided to take a chance.
It was fully loaded — also unusual for my folks, and it was the first car mom had ridden in that had power windows. During the test drive, dad was driving and mom went to open the glove compartment (which was underneath the passenger seat). Just at that time, dad hit the power window switch to lower her window and mom thought that the glove compartment switch opened it. He lead her to believe that the glove compartment knob was really another window switch, and then after a few minutes told her he was just joking. She broke down hysterically laughing. I remember the salesman (who was along for the ride) looking at them like we were all a bunch of lunatics.
This picture was taken when the Voyager was pretty new. I remember that dad immediately replaced the tires with Eagle GTs because he said the standard tires were junk. The GTs were white-letter tires, which looked a bit odd with the wire wheel covers.
It was a great car — served our family well, and was unbelievably flexible.
My parents also bought a 1984 Voyager, for them as well it was a rare case of them being early adopters. I was only four at time, so my memory is of course fuzzy, but as I remember it their original plan was to buy a traditional, full-sized van. After going around to a bunch of dealerships and looking at what they had to offer, we finally stopped at a Chrysler-Plymouth dealer. The salesman showed them this brand new thing they called a minivan, and obviously they were sold on the idea. I imagine the fact that it was presumably priced lower than the big vans probably helped.
Theirs was a pretty bare-bones model, with crank windows and just a radio but no cassette player or anything. It was however the first car they ever owned that had air conditioning. I think it even had the base 2.2L engine. I definitely remember Dad saying that it was underpowered. But in general they liked it enough that they bought another 1991 Voyager when the updated models came out. This time they opted for the 3.0L V6.
Wait, that’s not the one the American History Smithsonian has on display is it? If not, theirs is identical
Close, but the Smithsonian’s is a Caravan and ours was a Voyager… the grille design being the only notable difference. Ours was also dark brown, though it’s hard to tell in my picture.
But I find it amusing that our family car from childhood is an artifact the Smithsonian!
I think the first and second generation may be collected but after that?
I’m on my second Caravan and love it’s practically but I am the first to admit it has the personality of a toaster.
When these first came out there were so many different looks from plain Volkswagen to wood trimmed hi-liner. I even remember a friend of the parents had a two tone 89 with the turbo 4 and stripes on it.
Nowadays, you have to read the letters beside the Grand Caravan nameplate on the hatch and guess what that means.
O.M.G: did I just wax poetic about minivans? ?
Guess this maybe CC in 25 years.
. Whadda think Paul?
There is a 1986 Dodge Caravan on display at the Smithsonian in Washington DC
http://amhistory.si.edu/onthemove/collection/object_30.html
Maybe it’s due to the stacked headlights (no, I’m not joking) but I have always thought these were simply the best looking Chrysler minivans of the lot.
These are quite rare indeed. Hagerty Insurance has declared the first year Voyager as being extinct. Thankfully I’ve seen two first generation Chrysler minivans in the past few months – a woody Voyager like Eric703s parents bought and a Caravan with ladder racks.
It made me a bit reminiscent and curious how it would have been had my parents bought the five-speed Voyager they once test drove.
Count me as a fan of the first generation, as well. Later models were improvements, but the first ones were just so ‘pure’, a veritable two-box with just enough styling so as not to be an eyesore. Iacocca gets the credit, but his contribution was mainly just approving it for production. It was really Hal Sperlich who brought it all together.
Honestly, I’d love to have a pristine, original survivor to take to weekend auto shows. Unfortunately, given their appliance nature of use and discard, even though their were hundreds of thousands of them built, I’m guessing there aren’t a whole lot left. They weren’t exactly the epitome of reliable, maintenance-free transportation, either.
Anybody who has traveled the desert Southwest knows it is littered with old cars. The reasons are purely economic – land is cheap, and it’s probably too far to the nearest scrapyard to pay for the gas to tow it there.
That’s probably not the case in Eugene.
Eh, that’ll buff right out.
Yikes, that’s a shame. An SE model too with two-tone!
Also, I’m surprised no one has references Planes, Trains, and Automobiles yet 😉
Adam: the dealership that you spoke of wouldn’t by chance be in Corydon, would it?
This Floyds Knobs resident is curious . . .
Mark – Correct answer, friend ! 😉
Too bad this article came out too late for my brother, who had his ’84 Voyager hauled away 6 years ago after the local zoning Nazis came calling.
12 years earlier, he’d bought it from the original owner to haul his guitars and amps to shows and gigs. Though the 2.2 was pretty gutless, it had less than 40K on the clock, and cargo room was a big improvement over his ’83 Celica GT hatchback. But not the reliability!
After two months, the automatic croaked and it became his storage-shed until he had to get rid of it. The Celica hatch resumed it’s faithful hauling duties for several more years until he replaced it with a ’94 4-runner.
Happy Motoring, Mark
Too bad this succumbed to a fire, there are essentially a handful of Gen 1 vans left. I haven’t seen one personally in almost a year. My family never had one (we actually purchased a 1998 Grand Voyager Expresso new in ’98, when I was in first grade) but these are just as much a classic as the Mustang and the Camaro, and so on.
I have collected my first “classic” car, a ’93 Concorde, because, like the ’84-90 Chryco vans, they are getting thin on the ground. The ones I do see are beat to hell and are on a “car today, toaster a month from now” basis. Really sad. The Eagle Vision, which is practically the same car, could be truly/nearly extinct. Sad because I imagine the Vision could have given its Honda, Toyota, maybe even Audi and Acura contemporaries a run for their money.
Luckily, my Concorde was in mint condition, garaged since day one and owned by one elderly couple. I continue to keep it garaged and only drive it on nice, warm days.
If I had the space, I’d be collecting a lot more Mopars. I want to get a Lebaron hardtop (’87-90). But one thing would lead to another, and I’d have an eclectic yet large collection of various Mopars from ’60s to present day. My wife, an import lover, would kill me. She wasn’t too happy about the Concorde (“why do you like a grandpa’s car?”) but she finally understood my sentimental attachment to the LH.
Getting back to the Voyager, I do think these will have some collectability if they haven’t already achieved it already. I did see a quad-headlight (pre-89) Caravan Turbo at a Mopar meet a while back. Also saw an ever-elusive ’79 New Yorker R-Body. That was the highlight of my day as everyone else gawked over the Chargers.
Whatever the cause is, it’s hereditary. In our tightly packed city area, a neighbor had a succession of previous cars, all inop: 4-cyl Capri, turbo T-Bird, Explorer, Cherokee and possibly more I can’t recall. Next, #1 son had an inop Datsun crew cab, then a semi-driveable ’62 Falcon (but a 4-door six) project. They’re gone, and now son #2 has had an early 90s Acura (but an automatic) rotting away for a few years. He recently added his late 90s 5-Series that must’ve seemed like a great driver until he got that first estimate for major repairs. Their mom has been fuming about all this, but clearly she’s outnumbered!
Hoping no one was hurt in the house fire….
-Nate
The last one of these I saw was about a year ago, and amazingly enough it was the rare cargo version with the even rarer rear barn doors instead of the usual liftback. Note the slightly less sloped, more vertical rear windows than found on the hatch version. Don’t remember if it was one of the early models with the stacked quad headlamps or the later version with a single rectangular headlamp (exclusive to the cargo van, a standard US rectangular sealed beam inside a bezel to fit the larger space for the custom-shaped composite headlamp used in the passenger version. If I’d owned a post-facelift 1st gen Caravan/Voyager, I would have tried to swap out the composite lights for the old-school sealed beam setup from a junkyard cargo van since the “aerodynamic” composite lamps gave poor light output and the plastic fogged up, whereas the sealed beams were a standard size that could be replaced with rest-of-world ECE spec lamps from with separate bulbs and glass lenses from Cibie or Hella).
Dodge must have felt they’d sell alot of these, because they went through the trouble of making smooth side panels (as with the full-size vans of the day) rather than just blanking the window cutouts with steel panels like they would in more recent generations. The window in the sliding door shown here was optional.
A guy I knew bought one of these early cargo-Caravans with a stick-shift – the only one I’ve ever seen with a manual. Perhaps my brother could’ve used his a few years if he’d found one with a stick.
I liked the early Mopar mini-vans because, unlike just about every other van made, engine access was excellent. Today, even sedans and pickups have the engine buried under the cowl or firewall.
Happy Motoring, Mark
The single-per-side standard-size rectangular headlamps weren’t quite exclusive to the cargo van, actually. They were also used on the export Voyagers, with a variety of bezels not found on the US models: chrome (see here)or charcoal grey (see here). Note also amber rather than clear front turn signal lenses, and side turn signal repeaters. Not visible: taillamps with amber turn signals and rear fog lamps; for those see here and here.
I drove a 1984 Dodge MiniRam for 16 years and approx. 250,000 km. 2.2 engine – 4 speed standard – very reliable, but slow up any hills. Many small problems but biggest complaint was thin door posts allowed door to get sprung in high winds allowing cold air in. Always had a small block of wood to force doors back in bit but still lots of wind noise. Averaged 30mpg highway, but sometimes had to drive in 3rd gear at 55 into strong headwinds. Rust got it in the end. Drove by it everyday where stored by next owner till sent to crusher, seems transaxle went. I was saddened to see it go.
Well, I have some very mixed feelings about this one. That exact model and color combination, right down to the wire wheel covers, was the Voyager that my father bought when they first came out in late ’83. It was only in the family fleet for less than 2 years IIRC because everyone hated it. I had a particularly intense loathing for it, as it was the vehicle that I first took my driver’s license road test in, and failed. I’d done all my practice driving in manual transmission vehicles, but when it came time for the test my mother insisted that it would be easier to pass with an automatic, so I reluctantly caved in. I can’t recall exactly what I failed for, but I remember it had something to do with the vehicle moving when I didn’t intend for it to. A result of being acclimated to cars that weren’t in motion unless manually instructed to be so. For my second test I used the ’82 Dodge Challenger that I’d done most of my practice driving in, and passed with flying colors. I never drove that van again, and never wanted to. Hated that thing.
When we resided in Maine, I stumbled onto a brown five-speed Voyager for sale in someone’s front yard down in Cumberland one afternoon. I think I picked it up for whatever cash I had on me. The cam turned out to be badly worn, and it backfired frequently. The rest of the engine was okay, however, so I Sourced a replacement junkyard head (Freeport Auto Parts-fun old yard), put it back together, and we drove it for a few
years with no issues whatsoever. That square, brown thing was kind of fun to drive. I still like the purity of the original T-115 – not particularly fancy, but well thought-out. They were interesting because no one had ever experienced anything like them before. We are back in Southern Indiana these days, and there is, of all things, a second-generation AWD Caravan somewhere up the road from us, that I see most days as it passes our place – still going . . .
You said she taught Spanish at the Waldport school. Would this be the Waldport High School, around 1968 to 1971? And did she drive a 1968 Javelin at that time? If so, Que Pasa, Miss Meldhal.
Waldorf, not Walport. The Eugene Waldorf School.
A little late but here are some stories on it.
http://www.kezi.com/story/35749502/residents-escape-eugene-house-fire
http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/35714591-75/south-eugene-couple-escapes-burning-house-with-their-cat-early-monday.html.csp
Note that the fire dept. said cars in the driveway hindered their access to the house. There were usually about a half dozen cars packed around the house.
Eugene passes intrusive new zoning bylaws in 3..2..1….
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s like anything else: if you can’t behave yourself, your privileges and toys will be taken away.