It seemed like a good idea at the time – a low-mileage, good condition 2-door GM car for $300 – How could you not buy it? Well…it looked like it had chicken pox when I looked at it – it was artificial-limb beige, and looked like it had a bad case of chicken pox. The car had random rust blisters all over it – and the lady that owned it scraped the rust off, and dabbed red oxide primer on it. Oh dear…
Once I bought it and drove it home, Dad and I gave it a more thorough checkout. I remember that it was exceptionally good underneath (Always a worry in salt-using areas), and it started and ran OK. I got a lend of a sandblaster, and sandblasted, filled, and primed the spots on the car. We sanded it down, and I picked a nice dark green metallic for it. I got a deal on some paint, and my uncle sprayed it. We let the paint set, and after a day or so, I took the car out…and the paint on the hood, roof, and trunk wrinkled! Disheartening. We put it down to his being used to spraying DuPont, and this was C-I-L paint.
Not my car, but similar to it.
It wasn’t anything too special inside either. I think the interior was beige like the above picture. When you’d turn the headlights on, the fuel gauge would move back past Empty, and point straight up. I never could find the cause of that. The car worked well enough, though. It started easily, and ran OK. It was fairly noisy, though. It had what sounded like a lifter tick when I started driving it, but that didn’t worry me much. Of more concern though, was the fact that it would stall when turning left with your foot off the gas. A call to my father’s mechanic solved the mystery:
Image via quadrajetparts.com
The Canadian-market cars were equipped with carburetors in 1983 with their new 2.0 litre engine. If memory serves something would flex, the drivetrain would shift, and the rubber Early Fuel Evaporation heater/carburetor isolation gasket would flex, and cause a big intake leak. That was duly replaced, and the car worked well afterwards. The engine was really the downfall of this car. Not powerful at all – on minor grades, it’d downshift into second, and still drop speed. It was not eager to rev up either. It developed a tick that sounded like a dead lifter, but ended up being what looked like a mechanical fuel pump but was actually a smog pump that’d worn on its rocker pivot. I cut that off, and the engine was a bit quieter anyway.
Beautiful PEI National Park, Stanhope, PEI
The car also took me on my first big drive – to meet my parents after my work shifts ended in PEI. I’d gotten off the evening before, and got up early in the morning to make the first ferry from Nova Scotia to Prince Edward Island. The car, although slow, made it there and back with no drama.
It was bugging me having to make a run for every hill in the car, so it was put up for sale, and the hunt was on for a new car. Do any of you remember the bad old days of having to take a “run” at a hill to get over it at a decent speed?
Not a flattering to me comment, but after watching the original Anne of Green Gables (the one with Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth) I was captivated by Prince Edward Island. Such a beautiful looking area, I hope to someday visit in summer.
I owned an 82 J2000 with the manual transmission, it seemed like an okay car when I bought it but quickly became quite annoying. Mine made a sound like some kind of threshing machine at idle and had one of the clunkiest shifting actions I had ever experienced. It gave the impression that the transmission was made of plastic.
I never experienced any mechanical problems, outside of the exhaust manifold splitting into two big pieces, and the alternator giving up “prematurely”.
PEI is one of the cleanest and nicest places I have been. They take pride in the place, no litter on the side of the road, and even the shoulders and ditches are often mowed.
I can recall a few of the exhaust manifolds splitting on these – they’d glow red under hard use, I think.
Anne of Green Gables? Seriously? Just busting your cookies guy. I’ve seen it too and it’s a great production. Way better than the shit on TV today. P.E.I. is gorgeous!
Seriously, this was my mom’s favourite book back when she was a girl – must be about when it was first written…. 🙂
Coming from a Vega, my ‘82 Type 10 (1.8l, manual) was an upgrade, at least as far as “comfort” features. The smog pump seized one summer day in Atlanta traffic, which caused clouds of fan belt smoke until it broke. I just bought a shorter belt and removed the dead lump and its plumbing. I shaved the drip rails, built a custom spoiler and ground effects, cut a coil off each spring and fabricated mounts to add a *second* rear sway bar in parallel to the original – it handled really well. When I eventually bought a Samauri, the Cavalier sat in pieces as I wanted to make a track car with it. Marriage and kids put the kibosh on that, and it eventually got towed as a derelict vehicle and I decided to just let it go quietly at that point.
Those were pretty rare around here. I haven’t seen one in years!
With smoked out headlight covers, it looks a lot like it’s Euro Vauxhall/Opel Cavalier cousins…
Opel Ascona. Opel & Vauxhall generally used different model names until the early 90s.
The car certainly looks cooler that way, Ed, and sounds like it would have made a fun track day car! ?
My worn out 08 Kia Rio was so gutless. I once had to stop on a steep hill. The light turned green and l shifted into low. Punching the gas, l slid back about three feet, nearly into the F-150 behind me until my 13 inch tires bit into the road and l crawled over the hill at about 20 mph.
Wrinkled paint has more to do with surface prep than the brand of paint. I once had a Buick Century whose trunk lid would wrinkle after painting until I applied a coat of sealer.
What was the previous coat being sprayed over? If it was Cheap Repaint Enamel unprotected by a barrier or sealer, it will often do that.
It’s so long ago I can’t remember, really. I think the paint on the car when I got it was original. It didn’t really wrinkle like enamel over lacquer (or vice-versa), it was almost like the paint hadn’t set and re-flowed or something.
Nice COAL write-up. Good to read and brought back some memories.
My first brand new car was a 1984 Cavalier Type 10 hatchback. Manual transmission and F41 suspension. It was a good car, serving me for 8 years and well over 100K miles. Several quirks. The most annoying was a head liner that started to come down. The funniest was the turn signal stalk… Every time it was used, the wipers would swipe once. Never found the problem.
My Cavalier could certainly have used more power, but I don’t remember it being too slow either. Maybe the manual transmission helped. My dad had Volvo’s, which I often drove and which were not powerful either, so maybe I was just used to low powered cars. In any case, my Cavalier got very good fuel economy, especially on the highway, which sort of made up for the lack of power.
Despite it’s faults, I have many good memories of my Cavalier. I don’t have many photos of it, but I kept the original sales brochure (a habit I developed with most of my cars). It looked nearly identical to one pictured in that, right down to the two-tone blue paint.
Thanks for the kind comments. That blue colour was nice!
My Mom’s first car was a 1985 Cavalier.
I’d like to take a moment and thank Marc for providing the definitive description of generic 80s car paint…. “artificial limb beige.” If the generic 70s car color was “turd brown,” truly “artificial limb beige” captures the generic 80s automobile.
That one had me laughing, but it’s dead on! I know they have come a long way with prosthetic limbs these days and they are much more lifelike, but the old ones all had that color!
My ’82 AMC Concord could be described as being that color. The color was called Jamaican Beige by AMC.
How they made that name I will never know!
Somehow when I think of Jamaica, beige isn’t the colour that comes to mind.
I remember a short business trip from San Ramon, Ca. over to Monterey, Ca. for a meeting back in 1985. A colleague and I drove one of the company pool cars, an ’85
Cavalier, which seemed to be a step up from another earlier model I’d previously driven. But I would never choose one to replace the ’84 Camry I owned at the time.
We bought an ’86 Cavalier Station Wagon for my wife. It must have been in ’89. It had high miles for it’s age and we kept it for about 6 years.
The positives: It had TBI and started reliably. Fuel economy was very good as well. At about 35 mph the torque converter switched into a direct lock with the crankshaft. It kept up with traffic even over the Appalachian mountains. We took it for several long trips.
The negatives: rusty panels. In the end it looked similar to a Holstein cow. The seats were about as supportive as beanbags. The quality of the interior was a real turn off.
The seats were almost like a road, crowned in the middle!
Hmm, I seem to have gained the ability to edit/delete Wolfgang’s comment. Good thing I’m not mischievous!
Do me a favor: delete it. I want to see what happens.
That issue happened to me last week with a lot of the comments, I thought the same thing, that ability in the wrong hands could have been, um interesting !
“Do any of you remember the bad old days of having to take a “run” at a hill to get over it at a decent speed?” Oh yea, I do 😀 ! just before the winter of ’94-’95 I was looking for a beater so I could put my ’89 Mustang LX into storage and found an ’85 Tempo for the paltry sum of $80.00. Yep, Eighty bucks. Didn’t run for crap but it didn’t take me long to figure out why, it seemed that every vacuum hose under the hood was dried out and leaking. After replace what seemed to be about 200 feet of vac hose I got the car running pretty decent but it was a major league slug, the damn thing would lose a drag race to a glacier! One day I was down in Uniontown,PA and heading east on US40 there’s a pretty long and fairly steep grade. I think that poor Tempo was doing maybe 20 with my foot to the floor when it finally crested that hill. Had quite the parade of irritated motorists behind me…
I had a 1990 F-250 non turbo diesel with 8 leaking injectors. Hills would kill this thing. I once timed a 0-60 run… 26 seconds.
“Do any of you remember the bad old days of having to take a “run” at a hill to get over it at a decent speed?”
Had a friend in college whose father replaced her Type 110 Cavalier with a new Hyundai Excel. We decided to take her car on a road trip to DC. The foothills of the Blue Ridge outside Charlottesville were excruciating: four people on board, foot to the floor, we were doing 30mph max uphill… Compared to the Cavalier, the Hyundai was garbage. More reliable garbage, but garbage all the same.
My sister’s first car was an ’82 J2000/Sunbird similar to the one featured. She had a large hill on the highway on her way to work that she would complain she felt like she was going to roll back down before slowly getting over. To top it off, she got her first speeding ticket not getting a run for it but *at the top* of said hill. Swears to this day that it was physically impossible for that little can to be doing above 55 at that point. 😀
Chicks in ’80s commercials always seem cuter/nicer/sexier than they do today (in many cases). I wonder why that is. . .
They remind us of girls we used to know, and the good times that went with them. Today’s ones remind us of our daughters.
Fibberdy jibbets ! The women WERE better looking in the ’80’s. One reason…no tattoos.
Not fat?
I owned an 1800 Cavalier my old man gave me; kinda dull uninspiring thing but the most reliable bulletproof beater I’ve ever had. Stolen in the end, I felt bad about that being as it was the dad’s.
I have never owned a car that struggled to climb a hill although I have ridden in and driven a few. One of my closest friends from high school had a ’61 VW Beetle that he drove until just before college graduation. The VW was super reliable but any type of grade would require a downshift to third gear, and sometimes second gear, if the rise was long enough. There was one long climb on the Western Kentucky turnpike that would slow the Beetle down to 25-30 MPH before topping the crest.
The absolute worst vehicles in my experience were the National Guard’s two and a half ton trucks. These beasts had a five speed transmission with a two speed transfer case so you had 10 forward gears to choose from. Any type of hill would require immediate downshifting to maintain forward momentum. The worst thing you could do in one of these is to stop on a hill and then have to take off again. Even in first gear/low range it was easy to smoke the clutch trying to get the truck under way. Good times.
“Do any of you remember the bad old days of having to take a “run” at a hill to get over it at a decent speed?” Here I go again, with my dad’s 1961 Mercedes 190Db. When I was learning to drive, Dad took me to some hilly spots so I could learn about driving that thing in hills. I would gain speed going downhill, and try to make the most of it going uphill. It was still a slug, and incredibly noisy and smoky at that, as it labored up even small hills.
One of the great blessings of being my age is that when I was in the market for cheap beaters they were all from before 1973. At least stuff from that era could climb hills.
Stick shift Cavaliers were never common where I lived.
My father had an ’89 Cav wagon with a stick, wasn’t all that bad of a car.
That blue 1983 coupe looks exactly like the one I had in high school. Bought it at 77,000 miles, and my family drove it until well past 177,000 miles. Not bad for a $1,300 car. I followed it up with a 1983 Cavalier Type 10 hatchback. Sold it off at 180,000 miles. Not the greatest cars in the world, but completely adequate with decent gas mileage and few needed repairs.
To answer your last question, well, I’ve lived in Illinois all my life…
…so, what’s a hill?
😉
New Orleans has one big hill. Locals call it the “I – 10 high rise”. Can be scary at times.
Excellent story Marc, thank you. A couple weeks ago, I was reading an comparison review by Popular Science from 1985 between the Cadillac Cimarron, BMW 325 and Mercedes 190. Respected PS writer Jack Keebler said he’d choose the ‘competent’ Cimarron, manly because of the value it offered compared to the others.
PEI is a Canadian jewel.
The second car my sister was given by my parents was a Cavalier like the one above. Hers was a greenish-bluish silvery color, with a matching interior. Hers was the “CL” version, very plush interior. Unfortunately it had the VW sourced engine, that blew a head gasket and she drove it like that for a few weeks until it locked up. The county we lived in had strict emissions laws stating that you couldn’t “swap engines”-it had to be replaced with the same one, and every place me or my dad called, had blown up motors like ours, or the 2.0 motors that we couldn’t use. So the car got junked, despite it being 5-6 years old and in decent shape otherwise. They went out and bought her a 2-year old Cavalier, a base model this time. Nothing but hard black plastic on this one… it was definitely a step down from the other one. (She killed her first car by driving it through a wall, in D when she thought it was in R. The second Cav was killed when she drove it to Chicago (from Milwaukee) in 2 instead of D, wide open on the freeway for a couple hours blew the motor sky high. I had to drive from Madison to go get her…)
“Do any of you remember the bad old days of having to take a “run” at a hill to get over it at a decent speed?”
No. That never happened in the Chicago area.
There’s a road in my town that’s a 30 degree slope of about a kilometre long. Thrashing up it a while back with an elderly friend of my father’s in the passenger seat, he commented that “if your car could make it up this hill, you’d bought a good one”. He wasn’t just commenting on the car’s power range to climb the hill, but also its’ chances of over heating on the way there.
I bought a brand new 1986 Cavalier CS sedan in January of 1987. Bought it with 32 miles on the odometer, I put on 25 during the test drive. Heavy duty cooling, suspension, and over-sized tires. The salesman tried to get me to look at a Camaro 2.8. “No one will know it’s a V-6.” “I’ll know.” I put 125,000 on my 5-speed sedan ($75 option), 60,000 were after my friend (driving through Arizona) rolled it in the middle of winter on I40. A bunch of trucks appeared out of nowhere, pushed “Mimi” on her wheels, and (after a little talk with AZ DPS) drove back to California. There was a roof carrier on it at the time of accident and that concaved the roof so I made my friend push the roof back out with his feet. Only cracked the windshield in the upper corner. Snapped off the radio antenna. Shattered the driver’s side mirror. Looked a mess (see photo), but ran till I could no longer drive it due to coolant coming out of the heater core.
Had the “high output” 2.0L EFI that made an impressive 100hp. My other car at the time was a 1977 Olds 98 with the 6.6L that wheezed out 185hp.
I later owned a used 1986 Cavalier wagon, base. It had the gauge package (all but tach, and the gauges had NUMBERS not H-L or hot-cold), AC that blew cold but couldn’t on when merging with freeway traffic. “Myrtle” made about 86hp in front of its lovely 3-speed auto. After Myrtle ran a conrod through the block, I replaced it with a 7 year old Olds Aurora. I should have just put a new engine in Myrtle. It was comfy, easy to drive and carried all kinds of stuff from dogs to gardening.
I miss the wagon. I don’t really miss the Aurora (except for the 4.0L V-8).
Not great cars, but solid and pretty reliable.
77 Gutless S needed a freeway runup to a hill