(first posted 1/25/2016)
Ah, the Chevy Cavalier.
It would seem that every person I know (myself included) has either owned one or at least one of its J-body cousins in the Pontiac Sunbird (and later Sunfire)… or perhaps an earlier cousin of the more rare variety like the Buick Skyhawk, Oldsmobile Firenza or maybe even the infamous Cadillac Cimarron. The Cavalier always lead the J-body pack in terms of sales and at one point in time, they were absolutely everywhere. The final production Cavaliers (and Sunfires, too) are still found all over the place, continuing to rack up the miles as inexpensive ‘A-to-B’ commuters or a reasonably reliable first car for the newest of drivers; quite a storied end for a car that took a bit to get out of the gate.
The Cavalier started to appear on dealership lots in 1981 as a 1982 model and was the front-wheel-drive replacement for the rear-drive Chevrolet Monza which had ceased production in 1980. Buyers had the choice of a 2-door sedan, 2-door hatchback, 4-door sedan and 4-door wagon adorned with a woefully weak 88 hp 1.8L four cylinder engine breathing through a 2 bbl carb. This introductory power plant was also found in the Cavalier’s badge engineered cousins, the 1982 Buick Skylawk, Oldsmobile Firenza, Cadillac Cimarron and Pontiac J2000, renamed the 2000 in 1983, the 2000 Sunbird in 1984, the Sunbird in 1985 and finally arriving at the Sunfire nameplate in 1995.
The 1983 Cavalier featured a larger 2.0L four with throttle body injection and a convertible joined the line up. The drop top continued to be offered until the end of the 2000 model year with Pontiac also offering a convertible during the same period. In 1984, the Cavalier received its first refresh with quad headlights and a revised grille up front while the 1985 models finally received the 2.8L GM 60 degree V6 found in the larger Citation & Celebrity as the top end engine option, giving the car a much needed performance boost. Sporty RS & Z24 trim levels would arrive for 1986 and appeal to the sport minded or younger buyer while replacing the ‘Type 10’ sport trim level offered since 1982.
The Cavalier received its first major facelift in 1988 which included much more aerodynamic sheet metal, composite headlights up front, revised tail lights in the back with the hatchback being dropped from the line up. The 2.0L four continued as the base engine with the 2.8L V6 powering the upper end CL and RS models as an option and Z24 models as the standard power plant, mated to either a three-speed automatic or five-speed manual. The RS trim level also extended to the 4-door sedan and wagon body styles, giving these a sporty look.
This second generation line up would receive upgraded engines in 1990 (the 2.2L four and 3.1L V6) another cosmetic facelift for 1991, including front and rear fascia, which would carry on until the end of the 1994 model year. I personally owned a 1990 Z24 wearing the black over silver paint scheme, 3.1L V6/automatic combo, loaded up with all the goodies around 1998. It was a quick car for the times and sounded nice with that distinctive 60 degree V6 drone like the 2.8L before it. I still hear others recount their ownership and experiences with the V6 Z24s of the second generation, usually fondly to boot.
The Cavalier would be redesigned for 1995 and morph into its final curvy iteration, with the wagon gone from the line up and V6 engine replaced by the 2.4L ‘quad 4’ as the top end engine, standard on the Z24. This engine was replaced in 2002 by the newly developed 2.2L Ecotec engine, which powered the Cavalier until the end of its production run. This final 1995 redesign would carry on with few changes other than a light facelift in 2000 and again in 2003 until it was finally replaced by the Cobalt after the 2005 model year, ending a long and successful run for GM.
The 1982-1994 Cavaliers are a rare sight on the roads today with those built between 1982 and 1987 being especially scarce. Today’s example was found, not surprisingly, sitting almost abandoned in a lonely pay parking lot in Duncan, British Columbia. I have always felt that the Cavalier wagon offered up nice lines as a subcompact station wagon, especially those of the 1988-1990 era, riding on the upgraded style steel (or ralleye) wheels and decked out in RS trim. This particular CL wagon offers a nice package outside of the RS paint scheme and grabbed my attention immediately, despite its worn and rusty condition after 26+ years of service.
I could not quite get a read of the odometer but there’s no question this car has seen many miles and likely a few owners since it first hit the streets in 1989. Its ‘beater-with-a-heater’ type of service is highlighted by the visible jerry can and milk crate of tools in the rear and it will ultimately find its way to the crusher sooner than later, removing yet another of these examples from the road. It carries around a fair amount of lower body rust, which was always a vulnerable place on the first and second generation cars and many examples are long departed from the roads as a result. The notion that this car has lived out its life here on the West Coast is likely a reason that the severe rusting has been kept at bay much longer than usual.
It would have been an attractively trimmed wagon when it was new considering it has the V6 engine, air conditioning, power windows and locks and upgraded wheels. The majority of ’89 Cavaliers were equipped with little more outside of the 2.0L engine and standard equipment package given their position and success in the GM line up as basic transportation. Those who opted for the V6 equipped RS & Z24 models received a lively package at an attractive price with these higher trimmed cars happily changing young owners during their days on the street.
At the end of the day, the Cavalier was continually built a little bit better as each model year progressed and though the potential was there for disastrous results given its long introductory model year and terribly weak performance, it ultimately found its way to being one of the best selling cars in America and certainly here in Canada too. Once so common that they littered the streets and parking lots of seemingly everywhere you went, they are slowly and quietly fading away, with the occasional ‘classic’ model popping up here and there as a reminder of what once was, like that song you used to hear all the time but forgot all about.
Oh, how time flies.
Oh my. Don’t remind me of our ’86 Cavalier station wagon suffrage.
That last word you used there does not mean what it sounds like it means.
And Jet, I thought the major was a lady suffragette
Love that song!
Thanks, Dan. English is a tough language. “Pain” is the better word.
Now _that_ I’ll buy wholesale, in this case!
My sister bought a ’92 or so 4-cylinder 5-speed 2-door new when she was going to school. It was a reliable car that served her well, I believe it had upwards of 200K on it when she sold it.
Sure, it was unrefined, but it was also dirt-cheap.
I actually saw a “twin” to this wagon about a month ago, though the one I saw was 4 cylinder powered. And about the same time I saw that wagon “puttering around” the parking lot of a small town Winn-Dixie in northern Florida, I found 2 different similar wagons on Craigslists in my area. Both of those were V6 powered, but neither ran and were described by their sellers as “projects”.
At one point in the late 80s I stopped at a small town Chevy dealership and considered trying to get them to special order a Cavalier wagon with the V6 and a MANUAL transmission….it was supposedly possible to get that powertrain combo though I probably would have had to get an RS instead of the (slightly?) cheaper CL.
I didn’t go through with it and that dealership went bust within 12 months….
I helped a Japanese friend buy a Z/24 back in 89(?). I was driving a new Integra at the time, and recommended he buy one, but he wanted to try an American car. The Z/24 was a nice car, pretty quick and comfortable, and good handling to boot. After three years though, it looked remarkably ratty, with the clearcoat peeling and nits and bits breaking off while the Integra looked new. I don’t remember what it was, but something broke at 13,000 miles, and that’s when I learned that GM was still only offering 12 month warranties on their cars.
These cars were fundamentally good with nothing wrong that an additional $1000 per car invested by GM wouldn’t have fixed
A 12 mo. warranty doesn’t sound right. Was your friend’s Cavalier purchased outside of the USA? I think we got 5 yr / 50,000 miles.
Yes, that 12 month 12,000 mile warranty sounds too short, but 5 year 50,000 miles sounds too long. I think 3 year 36,000 mile would have been the terms of a GM warranty.
BTW, many Japanese manufacturers offered only 12 month 12,000 mile warranties in this time period.
I think when Hyundai went to 10 years 100,000 miles in the late 90s that put pressure on the Japanese to lengthen their warranties.
I take lengthy warranties as more of a sign the manufacturer is trying to win credibility with buyers, & not that the car won’t require unscheduled dealer visits.
I think I got a three year warranty with mine but only about a 50,000 KM service limit. Didn’t help when my head gasket and transmission blew at 54,000, but the General did help – just a bit, but not enough.
I was left wishing I had bought a Chrysler Neon instead.
That ’96 was the last GM product to have been in my household, or that of my kids or their spouses.
Attractive wagon, thanks for the surprisingly even handed writeup. I miss cars like this.
If I squint somewhat it starts to resemble my old Volvo 940T wagon.
Living in upstate New York, the tin worm would eat up these early and mid edition Cavaliers. Red rusted holes in the bottom of doors and fenders. Very similar as per an earlier Curb Side article:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/cc-capsule-1985-chevrolet-cavalier-type-10-notchback-nice-to-see-you-again/
How they passed NY inspection is beyond me!!
Depends on which law abiding New York State Safety Inspection Station you took it to since some were not as strict as others. My dad’s 93 Legacy was more rusty than those Cavaliers, but the Unibody was still solid enough in mid-2007 to pass the safety inspection. Course the driver side rear strut tower failed dropping the axle onto the bump stops the following April while it was parked so the Legacy was close to death anyway.
Ugh. It is difficult to understand fondness for these ugly, crude, mediocre-at-best, ill-built, pain-in-the-ass-to-work-on, utterly craptactular penalty boxes. They were rather like cockroaches, persisting despite fervent wishes they would finish dying. These are cars that made the competition from Chrysler and Ford look positively world-class by comparison. And yet Americans threw money hand-over-fist at Cadavaliers and badge-engineered equivalents, so GM had negative incentive to do any better. “Uh, OK, if they’re happy with this junk, we’re happy to give it to them…ch-CHING!”.
I think the reason that these sold so well is that in many parts of the country it was Chevy or Ford, and if you were lucky to live in a town big enough, then Dodge or Chrysler-Plymouth. The town I grew up in still has no import brand new car dealers so you need to drive at least 30 minutes to get to a Honda, Nissan, or Subaru dealer….Mazda dealers are over an hour away. The idea of driving/owning a Japanese branded car was still foreign (no pun intended) to many folks in the 80s.
I owned a 82 J2000 that I bought because I was still anti-Japanese (thank you, CAR magazine), and I wanted the (supposedly) excellent GM air conditioning and the near anvil reliability. Sadly, what I got was a car that was generally well-built but that had small and medium-sized parts break or fall off. The shift knob broke apart (it was just a plastic shell over a slightly smaller….knob?), a knob fall off the driver’s side window winder, a speedometer cable that got VERY loud over time, and an exhaust manifold split into 2 pieces.
But otherwise, it was reasonably well screwed together.
The 88-90 front and rear styling treatments were the best looking of the four the Cavalier wore over its thirteen year run.
I agree with you on this. The last flat-faced front grill of the followinf refresh looked cheap to my eyes.
I always thought the RS trim looked great on all variants. It really gave the sedans and wagons a much needed lift as they were usually cruising the streets in basic form.
I agree, love the nose and RS trim and wheels. Back in the late 90s I test drove a white 1990 RS wagon, 3.1 with 5 speed. Sometimes I wish I would have bought it.
As late as 2014, Ed Schmid Ford in Ferndale somehow got a mint low mileage ’93 Cavalier wagon in blue with unpainted bumpers. I asked the salesman, he told me it was a special request from a friend. But the owner of the dealer sold the business shortly after, with that salesman went out for exotic birds business.
That vintage of Cavalier had clean attractive styling and the wagon was very much a right-sized vehicle in terms of interior space v. exterior dimensions.
Unfortunately the crappiness endemic to nearly everything GM made during the Lopez Era rendered it Cheap Beater material practically from the day it rolled off the assembly line.
Didn’t Paul do a write-up on the internals of the early J car four cylinders? Sort of a comparison of the OHV vs. OHC variants? Tried but couldn’t find it .
Great piece, Carey, and what a survivor. The few, remaining examples I see of the original J-Body Cavaliers always leave me feeling nostalgic of the 80’s, high school, all that stuff. These cars were everywhere. As you’ve stated, this design found redemption as quality and performance (and looks?) steadily improved over the course of its long, long life.
A Cavalier wagon almost became our primary family car. My folks were looking for a replacement for the family ’84 Tempo (which I inherited) in ’91. Mom found a lightly used, 2 year old light blue metallic Cavalier wagon at a local dealership, and she liked it – but then when consulting with family friends, we decided that $10,000 was too much to spend for a small Cavalier. We got an ’88 Nova CL instead for a much lower price.
Count me as a Cavalier fan. I didn’t own one personally, but several family members owned ’89 and newer models with mostly good results.
Didn’t Paul do a write-up on the internals of the early J car four cylinders? Sort of a comparison of the OHV vs. OHC variants? Tried but couldn’t find it .
My wife at the time girlfriend had a 1986 Cavalier coupe, light blue, dark blue cloth buckets, basic 4-cylinder, automatic, that she bought with 28k miles on it. That car was great. Honestly. It was built like a little tank – I know because I drove it often enough while we were dating. It never gave her any trouble in over 120k miles. Eventually the bottoms of the doors began to rust and she was afraid that it would start needing mechanical repairs after all the years she had it so she decided it was time to sell. She then looked at a newer Cavalier and wasn’t impressed, so she got a 1992 Accord LX coupe and has been a Honda fan ever since. She still talks about how good that Cavalier was to this day and how well it served her over the many years and miles she owned it.
I was pumping gas in 1984 when I was 20. Used to have an older couple (probably early 70s then) pull in for gas, the wife always drove and they had a brand new Cavalier 4-dr in red with red cloth interior. Was a nice little car. She always got out with a roll of paper towels to make sure that if I ever spilled gas on the side of the car (easy to do with those old pumps) she would make me wash the paint off with the windshield washer squeegee and then carefully wipe around the fuel filler door. It must have been their first new car. I often wonder what happened to them and that red Cavalier.
I hired a Holden flavoured J wagon for a week before leaving Tassie having sold my cars it was from a cheap heap rental crowd and it matched that description single point injected engine it had little power and what it had was sucked up by the auto trans very average handling and little comfort, roomy though for cargo,I was glad to drop the keys in the slot at the airport
My wife had an 88 cavalier back in 90-92 when were dating and then living together. It had been her mother’s company car and was noteworthy for having an old fashioned fan instead of an electric rear defroster, because it was a Florida car and also for spitting out a spark plug at a traffic light one day. Other than that it provided boring and reliable transport despite a year of driving the legendarily potholed BQE until we replaced it with an 85 Ford Ranger (another CC worthy vehicle) and got engaged. It was a tossup which freaked out her parents more, the pickup or the engagement ring.
is that a leather steering wheel on the 1982 Cavalier CL?
Funny how what was a POS in America was trusty transport in the UK. Cavaliers were everywhere in the 80s & 90s til the tin worm saw them off. It’s ages since I saw one, the SRI was a favourite of chavs, boy racers & small time drug dealers.
Looks like the upholstery on that wagon has held up very well.
For me the front end of the 82 was the best, then the 95. 03-05 was 62 Ambassador/74 Matador sedan ugly.
My Mom had a 1994 purple Pontiac Sunbird with the 3.1 V6 and automatic, with air conditioning, sunroof, CD & cassette player and a few other odds & ends but a fairly basic but peppy car. She had it from 1994 until 2007 and other than a broken fuel gauge which she never bothered to fix. She still says to this day best car she ever had.
With all the J-car variations produced around the world, and over a long production run, the J must hold the record for the number of different front clips used on a basic body! This one’s my favourite (out of the ones I know), the JD Holden Camira.
The Camira reminds me both Korean Daewoo Espero and the Brazilian Chevrolet Monza J-cars. The Brazilian Monza lived together with the Vectra A and both were replaced by the Vectra B in 1996.
That rear end is quite different to anything we ever saw in Australia, as is the two door body. The following model reverted to a grille, though different to your Monza. But the J cars didn’t last long here. After the first flurry of interest (fueled by a Car of the Year award from Wheels) Holden stuffed up the conversion to unleaded petrol in 1986, losing 27hp! Meanwhile the car got a terrible reputation for build quality, and they were gone by ’89. Not a good time for Holdens.
Thats the POS I rented in Tassie same model
I can see similarities, but I also see enough differences to make me think they hardly share anything. I’d like to see some of the bodies in white to look for actual similar and different stuff.
I do agree that basically a Z24 like (5M, 3.1) wagon the age of this car is the ideal one.
When I moved to Michigan in ’86, these were absolutely *everywhere*. I later learned that everyone who lives in the state has a relative who worked for GM (okay, almost everybody) and there was a GM friends & family lease for $59 (!!) per month. It was not significantly more expensive to drive a Cavalier than to buy a bus pass.
Well…maybe not in monetary terms, but not all costs are monetary; making this deal meant having to drive a Cavalier. Was that better or worse than taking the bus? Tough call.
To me, ANY motorized vehicle is better than the bus.
To be honest, I’ve never ridden in a city bus.
I’ve used mopeds and a motorcycle and cars with no heat in the winter. Even a bicycle to commute when I was young and awesome. But never a bus.
Maybe they’re great.
I may never know.
Depends on if you have free parking or bus lanes on the interstate.
I’d rather have the Cavalier, at least I don’t have to deal with sticky floors, strange smells and phone zombies
If memory serves, the GM J cars were slow movers for the first couple of years of sales. I believe it was Road & Track that named them the “J-edsels”. It took them a bit of time to appear everywhere. Competing with the ’81 Escort, released in early ’80, Rabbits, Omni/Horizons and early K cars. Corolla folks had to wait a bit for the FWD craze.
My stepson drove a very well-used Sunbird for a few years with only constant shift cable troubles. A friend’s wife owned a very high mileage V-6 model that somehow refused to die on nearly zero maintenance. Two people I knew purchased new models with the 1.8 OHC turbo engine. I believe they were Brazilian produced Opel engines. Reliability with them was not good as I recall. GM certainly used a variety of engines over their lifespan.
Not “a few years”. They took a year to catch on, since the Chevettes were so cheap. Chevy tried to sell Cavi as ‘premium compact’ and “the complete car’ upon introduction [spring ’81], but it was a deep recession.
But then by spring ’82, the Cadet strippo came out and then rebates, which pushed Cavalier into the mainstream. 1983-84 models’ sales went up and then was nearly #1 car behind Escort for a time.
“Jedsel” was cross-town rivals snickering at ’82 J cars.
The J car that didn’t catch on was Cimarron.
Actually, I had written ” the first couple of years” but you’re correct. It didn’t take so long.
Yes, by 1982 a very severe recession was in full swing and long lived. More than a few ’82 model US cars languishing on dealer lots for an extra year.
For some reason the Cimarron was common around my area. I’ve forgotten what a typical sticker price was on them, but it was preposterous. Perhaps they were being deeply discounted.
83 they hit the NZ market 1600 OHC engine Wheels magazine named the COTY, my dad bought one he ran it a couple of years then clean swapped it for an Isuzu Aska badged Holden Camira for the NZ market only GMH in OZ kept updating their Camira well into the 90s GMNZ went with the European Vectra as soon as it was released around 89 or so in fact the first were badged Vauxhall and rebadged locally as Holdens
The Isuzu veruion is quite a rarity mt dads car is the one on Wiki pic taken not long before he totalled it in 87.
Actually Holden killed it in ’89 due to customer apathy and replaced it with the Holden Apollo (a rebadged Camry). We probably never bothered sending that one across the ditch.That Aska/Camira does look tasteful.