Back in 2013, I launched The Great Vega Hunt, or Who Will Find a Genuine CC Running Vega 2300? There have been a number of submissions claiming to have found one, but several were cars for sale on Ebay or such. That’s hardly a genuine CC. Jim Grey did find this one that looks like it likely has its original engine. Were there any others that were genuine CCs, and I forgot?
But I seem to have found a very likely candidate. I first saw this black Kammback in traffic, and then found it parked at dusk in a park. Admittedly, the hood scoop and side exhaust made me quite certain it wasn’t an original-engined Vega at first. But two things now make me think otherwise.
For one, there’s no side pipe on the other side. If this had a V8 or V6 swapped in, there’s no doubt it would have had side pipes on both sides.
And then I saw it on the street again, this time at night. It was pulling away from a stop sign downtown, and the bleat of its single exhaust was quite audible. And to me it sounded just like a tractor engine Vega 2300 four working hard through a slushbox and emitting its result of its labors through that minimal muffler and side pipe. I had not expected that.
I won’t be able to prove it until I encounter it and get a look under its hood. But I think I may have scored.
A Unicorn–of questionable value, no doubt, but a unicorn still non-the-less. Bravo Paul on your success in finding a genuine seemingly unmolested Vega 2300. Was Ed Cole smiling upon you from his ultimate resting place? Smiling down from above, or grinning from the warm/hot zone below with an final laugh. Are you sure you aren’t living an episode of the Twilight Zone while hoping for another encounter? Maybe only the spectre/shade/ghost of Rod Sterling knows for sure. Cheers!
Bravo, Paul!
Good things come to those who wait.
Perhaps the same can be said about “bad things.” (Vega 2300s) 😉
I guess because of the challenge I’ve kept an eye out for Vegas. I have seen 2 or 3 on Craigslist but never near me, and usually with gutted interior and/or engine compartment.
That write-up on Vegas versus Pintos got me to thinking that both are now quite rare, but the Pinto is more likely to have it’s original engine.
Good work, I hope you can settle this once and for all.
I still like Vegas. Do I want one, well that’s harder to answer but I for sure like them. 🙂
The last Vega I saw on the road (at a 2016 car show) was definitely not 2300-powered. Not two miles from our farm, there’s a guy building a tubbed Vega drag car (very low-budget, but he seems to know what he’s doing).
I kick myself for not jumping on the eBay Vega LX I posted about a few months ago. It ended up selling for around $3K, and was a running, driving, original-engined car. I would have easily sucked all the air out of Cars & Coffee with it!
This car is far from unmolested, though (fiberglas hood, of course). The single side-pipe is on the correct side if it is indeed 2300-powered. It appears to have a script Chevrolet badge up front, which was a 1971-only badge (’72 and later had block letters VEGA). The bumper is correct for ’73 with the filler plate, so one or the other have been replaced.
I ran BF Goodrich tires on mine back in the day, and (pre-V6) had an 18″ glasspack bullet muffler (in the stock location) that actually sounded really good (I also had headers, which would have changed the exhaust note a bit, too). Pic is from Road Atlanta – a friend and I got permission to drive around the infield on a non-race weekend.
The 2-dr. wagon shooting brake style is a winner —
bring it back !
I agree Dan, I myself owned a Pinto Wagon, back in the day, But only as a family hand me down from my brother. But the Kamback Vega I always thought looked better. (Ok, I’ll concede that the Pinto had a much more reliable motor). Especially looked great when people modified the front bumper Camaro like. Looked like a 3/4 scale Camaro Wagon!
If I came across the Vega GT I sold in 1990 in the same condition today, I wouldn’t hesitate in buying it back at a reasonable price.
I had a Stebro muffler and later a Monza muffler and they both gave that little 2300 engine a nice sound out back. The attached pic was taken at a covered bridge in New Brunswick, July 1975. Great highway car with loads of luggage space (rear seat folded own of course). No mechanical issues on that trip which covered just over two weeks from Edmonton to NYC, Maritimes and back.
Oops, this was the second major trip in my Vega. July, 1977.
That looks a lot like the Vega my mom had when I was really young. They sold it when I was four so I only have the vaguest memories of it, but I remember it being a sort of burgundy color, and having the newer style grille, and I’m fairly certain it was a hatchback. I’d guess it was probably not a GT model, though.
Mom was, believe it or not, a repeat Vega customer. Yes, at least one person bought a second Vega after owning one. I’ve only seen the first one in pictures as it was replaced years before I was born. Shortly after my parents got married they drove it all over the western US on a several weeks long camping trip with no major mechanical issues.
Ha! We had four! (parts car not shown).
Hey, the blue one is the same color as Mom’s first Vega, from what I remember of the pictures I’ve seen of it.
Here I was earlier today thinking that we had covered the full range of GM today, from the highs of Buicks in the 1940s to the lows of the J car.
But I was wrong. This piece makes the perfect pairing for the peak and trough of GM in one day.
FWIW I really hope you find your holy grail on this.
“But I was wrong. This piece makes the perfect pairing for the peak and trough of GM in one day.”
That comment has given me pause.
Do we have unrealistic expectations of what the General tossed out at us? Perhaps that is the problem. If so, there are really no deadly sins, save the ones we heap upon ourselves for thinking otherwise. Did GM proclaim the Vega to be the best small car on the market, or did the magazines overhype it? Was Cadillac the standard of the world, or was it just a nice car that represented the American Ideal to the world? If GM was great, it was because we believed it was. If it was bad, we overlooked the errors and continued to buy. We drove out the French, allowed Packard to die, and generally got our way when we were not happy with a company. So, are the deadly sins actually ours, not GMs?
My answer is that GM set the expectation very, very high. And then began to let us down.
John DeLorean knew there was trouble brewing for the Vega and tried to fix the problems, only to be rebuffed by more cost-cutting and short-sighted decisions from his “superiors.” It was also the 1st GM designed by a corporate committee rather than by an individual division.
Point taken, but is it GM’s fault for boasting or ours for continuing to believe the boasts when proven otherwise? When one has low expectations, one is bedazzled when given modestly good results, Thus, an otherwise average product is seen as very good, when in fact it is not. Likewise, when you are known for producing stinkers, a relatively okay car comes across as great. However, a meh Ferrari is called crap, and an okay BMW or Mercedes is called out as a failure of epic proportions. “Meh” and “okay” mean that it is average, not bad but not great. An average car from a crap company is an achievement, while an average car from a great company is a letdown, as we perceive them. Nobody hits a home run every at bat. But we call a .300 average good.
I see where you are going, but you are trying to say that it was an average car compared with other GM cars and that is not true.
If the Vega were just average in terms of durability, then it wouldn’t have been a deadly sin. It was terrible in terms of durability–way way below GM’s typical standard. It has the reputation it has not because GM overstated how great it would be, it has that rep because it failed to meet the public’s standards of durability and quality for a domestic car.
So, are the deadly sins actually ours, not GMs?
OMG!! You’re so right! Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I need to take down all those GM Deadly Sins I wrote and write up all of our/my deadly sins documenting just how we unjustly destroyed and bankrupted what had once been the world’s most profitable and valuable company by the sheer force of our unreasonably high expectations.
How can I ever begin to atone for these sins? Pray to Saint Mark of Excellence for starters?
So according to this comment, “The deadly sins are ours”, are we are now to blame the “Victims”, the unfortunates, the “unluckies” that bought the early failure prone Vega’s?
So Ed Cole’s rush to manufacture based on Chairman Roche’s two year time table to production didn’t matter.
So Ed Cole’s erroneous suppositions about the cooling abilities of the engine didn’t matter. “Ed Cole stated in an (engineering sic) meeting that there would probably be no need for a traditional radiator, due to the excellent heat rejection to the air from the aluminum block. He felt that coolant could simply be passed through the heater core, with outside air ducted through the core and exhausted under the car to provide auxiliary cooling. Several pre-prototype cars were built this way at his insistence, and all of them were dismal failures from a cooling perspective. After having one seize up while he was driving it at the Milford proving grounds one Saturday, he backed away from his theory and allowed the design to continue with a conventional cooling system.” Still the Vega 2300 had a small 6 quart cooling system capacity with a marginal 12″ x 12″ radiator for non A/C models and without a coolant overflow reservoir to save costs.
Since most American car owners don’t check coolant levels, then and even now, when combined with the high oil consumption of the Vega 2300 engine caused by the typical Vega engine leaking valve stem seals, then exacerbated by the designed low volume oil sump capacity of 3 quarts of oil (plus a small volume of oil for the filter), most Vega engines experienced engine killing SIMULTANEOUS OIL and COOLANT shortages leading to overheating.
Engine overheating due to the coincidental simultaneous oil and coolant shortages caused typical overheating distortion of the open deck cylinder block bores and iron cylinder head/ head gasket/aluminum block interfaces with resultant antifreeze leak washing of the bores leading to cylinder wall scuffing, and rapid subsequent engine failure. GM was forced to have an expensive short block replacement program for the many engine failures experienced in the customer field.
We aren’t even talking about the corrosion issues, the decision for a standard, in actuality more costly to produce 3 speed manual shift, the carburetor issues, the list of bungled corporate decisions for the Vega is long.
So we should blame the victims (?), the customers, for these design flaws? NO, this was a definite deadly sin foisted on the car buying public. Sorry, but I don’t buy your argument as to where to place blame.
You are taking this a bit personally, Paul. This is not saying that GM built crap cars that almost killed the company. They are responsible for their output. Yes, they made a ton of self-inflicted errors, and deserve the shame heaped upon them for their transgressions. I, however, suggest that perhaps we are guilty of thinking that the company was a lot better than it was. We now think of Hyundai as a fairly competent manufacturer, but back in the 80s, we knew that the Accent offered would be a piece of crap, albeit a cheap one. Expectations were zero, so when they finally started building better cars, we were amazed. We didn’t think that GM produced crap when in fact, it was well known that they did, and often. We kept believing that the crap one we bought was an anomaly. Why did the general public keep buying what was obviously a dubious quality brand, even though they had a large presence and relatively decent history from 20 years prior? Had the spigot of sales been turned off, GM would have corrected itself (or died) much, much earlier. That happened to a lot of other companies, but not so much for GM. In that case, we believed their hype, so perhaps we are a wee bit responsible for enabling the disasters to happen. For everyone who bought a Vega after all the recalls and issues were established, who is the sinner? Are we just Charlie Browns who believe Lucy will let us actually kick the football this time? Producing a crap car when you can do so much better is a sin, but so is buying what we should know is a piece of crap anyway.
You are taking this a bit personally, Paul.
Not at all; I’m taking it humorously, as it seemed the only way to take it.
But now that you’ve elaborated on it some more, I understand what you’re trying to say somewhat better. To answer your question as to why Americans kept buying GM cars after the Vega, that’s one that has eluded me for a very long time.
Clearly, some of the cars GM built after the Vega, like the first few years of the new ’77 B Bodies were relatively well built and technically solid cars. They were the very last GM cars I would have considered buying or recommending. But after 1980, I wouldn’t have touched a GM product, any of them, with a ten foot pole. And Consumer Reports verified why I felt that way.
As to why other Americans continued to buy them, my answer would probably be considered derisive or unflattering, so I’ll just leave it to speculation. But I’ve never pretended to know why Americans (and other humans) do a whole lot of the things they do. Human nature.
Oh my gosh.
Do we have unrealistic expectations of what the General tossed out at us?
Well…
“In October 1968, GM chairman James Roche announced to the press that in two years, GM would build an new subcompact car codenamed XP-887, which he promised would feature new advances in engineering and manufacturing, but be priced to compete directly with the Volkswagen Beetle. The XP-887 would weigh about 2,000 lb (907 kg) and be powered by a small (by American standards — less than 150 cu. in./2.5 liters) OHC four. The XP-887, Roche declared, would show the world what General Motors could do.”
Here’s some of what it did:
1971 Chevrolet Vega Power Train Recall 72V164000
Action Number: N/A
Service Bulletin Number: 72V164000
Report Date: Jul 05, 1972 Component: Power Train
Potential Units Affected: 526000
Manufacturer: General Motors Corp.
Chevrolet campaign no 72-c-09. Possibility that rear axle shaft may have insufficient thrust button length. Could permit excessive end play and allow axle shaft to move inboard to point that “c” lock will disengage. Axle shaft and wheel could then move outboard of quarter panel and allow vehicle to drop onto rear suspension. (correct by inspecting and replacing axle where necessary.)
“…[T]he aluminum block made the Vega’s engine more sensitive to overheating, particularly in combination with the cast iron cylinder head, specified for cost reasons. (Curiously, the Vega’s iron head actually weighed more than the engine block, making the engine somewhat top-heavy.)…
If an aluminum/iron engine overheats, the aluminum side will expand faster than the iron side, putting considerable stress on the head gasket (which mates the head to the block) and eventually causing it to fail.“…
However, the cost-cutting binge had left the Vega with an undersized radiator and no coolant overflow tank. …As a result, any serious cooling system problem, like a failed thermostat, was a recipe for serious engine damage.
This problem was compounded on early engines by excessive oil consumption. The thirst for oil usually had little to do with the aluminum block per se; the main culprits were the valve stem seals, which would crack with age or wear and leak oil into the cylinders. Since engine oil is partly responsible for engine cooling as well as lubrication, the resulting tendency to run a quart low only exacerbated the 2300 engine’s vulnerability to overheating.
“The soft engine mounts may have contributed to another early Vega problem: loose carburetor mounting bolts that could allow raw fuel to leak into the cylinders, potentially resulting in either dramatic backfiring or an engine fire. In April 1972, Chevrolet recalled about 130,000 Vegas to correct that problem, which cost the division both money and credibility. So too did a larger recall of 350,000 early Vegas to fix another, unrelated carburetor problem that could lead to the throttle linkage jamming in the part-throttle position.”
Note: Thank you to Ateupwithmotor.com from whom I have shamelessly quoted all of the above. Some great reading here:
https://ateupwithmotor.com/model-histories/chevrolet-vega-cosworth/
But enough about the engine, let’s talk about cars that started rusting completely through at the base of the windshield within a year.
“Contrary to popular belief, GM did rust proof the cars, but its design allowed for air pockets to develop between the front fenders, cowl, and firewall during the rustproofing process, leaving the steel in those areas dangerously unprotected. Yet while all these defects were known to company brass, the Vega debuted on September 10, 1970…”
https://www.cheatsheet.com/automobiles/why-the-chevy-vega-set-off-big-problems-for-general-motors.html/?a=viewall
But that’s too painful….
Instead let’s talk about assembly quality.
“…quality took an ugly turn in 1972. The Lordstown plant had previously been run by Fisher Body, but in the fall of 1971, GM turned over control to the GM Assembly Division (GMAD), looking to reduce costs. GMAD immediately laid off some 700 workers — including the quality-control inspectors DeLorean had added — while upping production from 60 cars an hour to 100 an hour.
Predictably, assembly quality began to drop. Workers protested that they no longer had time to do a good job, but it was to little avail. Accusations of deliberate sabotage and GMAD managers’ heavy-handed approach to discipline (which allegedly included sending workers home for minor infractions like unauthorized bathroom breaks) led workers to call another strike in early 1972, but it ultimately earned them nothing. The Vega soon became one of the worst-built models in the Chevy line-up …”
Collectible Auto mag did a feature on the Vega many years ago, covering the same territory, plus:
===
“It astonishes me that not one of us thought of what would happen when we ran out of water. After the fact it certainly seems reasonable, but it never occurred to us. And the test system didn’t let things fail. For example, if a test driver let an engine run low on coolant, and it burned up, he’d get fired. The drivers were out there checking coolant, checking oil, checking everything every shift.”
===
In other words, GM intentionally wasted the testing process. They designed the test to lock Murphy out of the room, to pass the fail. Why did they even bother? Who knows.
GMAD may prove to be the deadliest of deadly sins for GM. When the divisions controlled the plants, they also could control quality. When GMAD took them over, quality tanked.
Sure, they still had a ways to go before implementing the Deming principles that made Japanese companies industry leaders in build quality, but it’s not hard to see the difference between any 1970 GM car versus those only a couple of years later.
Sure, there were marketing mistakes but if quality had simply been maintained at a 1970 standard, most of the deadly sins would have been minor and GM may still be a juggernaut.
Quality can cover up for dated design or inferior performance. Just take a look at the VW Beetle for an example. A pre-World War II design with funny handling and sluggish acceleration, it sold because it was one of the best-built cars in the world.
I am with Chas108 on this. GM set the bar very high for a very long time. Other companies could best GM in individual metrics but only GM did so many things so well on so many cars for such a long time. Until it didn’t or couldn’t any more.
The Vega was sort of the opposite. I am not sure that any American car had so many failure points and so many designed-in weaknesses. Even the Aerostar was better.
A company can coast on a good reputation for a long time, especially on a reputation as good as GM’s was. And this was what GM did.
All good points. I don’t give the General a pass on building and marketing total and absolute garbage. I agree that GM failed itself and the public by shamelessly riding on past reputation. All true, and shamefully so.
My point is that We, the buying public, fell for it for way too long and way too often.
The line is “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Did every automotive journalist fall hook, line, and sinker for the hype? Did people continue to buy GM products after being failed miserably by the last one? The public fell for the lies over and over again, well beyond the point where we should have known better.
I am never saying that GM did not commit the sins they did. I am just saying that the buying public was complicit in enabling the sins to continue as long as they did.
“The line is “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” ”
This is true, of course. However, cars are sort of unique in the long periods of time involved. Everyone knows that every company builds the occasional bad car, so buyers have to distinguish the fluke from the long term decline. The guy who buys a new car every 2 years probably doesn’t experience the worst failures. The guy who buys a new car every 10 years certainly will, but it may take him 20 years to decide that the first bad one wasn’t a fluke. And by then the company is saying “Yeah, but our new stuff is better now.”
It takes years and years for perception to catch up with reality in the car business.
The Vega was not a bad design. Its downfall was in the execution, be it quality glitches not rectified or corner-cutting in significant areas, once those problems were ironed out, the platform proved to be just fine, as in the Monza or Sunbird.
But as I mentioned elsewhere, just about everything that went wrong with GM can be traced to manufacturing, not engineering or design.
I like the Vega wagon – to me the best-looking of the bodystyles (though I like the panel van too). A real unicorn would be finding a stock Vega GT wagon.
Hard for me to not look wistfully at that car…
Not that I would keep it original, mind you. But with a modern Ecotec 4-cylinder or maybe the 300-horse 3.6 that comes in the Impalas…and bigger brakes…just drive a Solstice/Sky under it and call it good.
There’d be nothing else like it.
I love Vegas like I love Corvairs. But, I would never own a Vega.
Great find. Not defending the Vega Engine, but it certainly isn’t a tractor engine.
A sleevless all alum engine with an overhead cam definitely is not tractor material. Besides tractor engines are meant to be basic and last forever. I think you owe tractors an apology.
I’ve always liked the way these look. Especially the sedan delivery version with panels where the rear windows are on the station wagon.
But actually DRIVING it? No. Not without the infamous V-6/V-8 conversion.
Up until about 5 years ago when I bought the Kadett, I was daily driving a ’77 Vega Kammback. It still had the 2300 or 140 as I called it. In CA we have strict smog laws and the 77 needed to go in biannually for its check. Tailpipe sniffer, visual, and vapor recovery system. It ran ok, although a stick would have been better. The factory air was nice and once up to freeway speeds it was a decent ride and a nice little cargo hauler. I would rather it be powered with the Cobalt SS supercharged ecotec.
“The 1976 to 1977 2300 engine received a new cylinder-head design, incorporating hydraulic lifters to replace the taper-screw valve adjusters, improved coolant pathways, longer-life valve-stem seals, a redesigned water pump and thermostat, and a five-year, 60,000-mile (97,000 km) engine warranty. The engine’s name was changed to Dura-Built 140.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_2300_engine
You had to be there at the time to understand how bad, in basically every way, these cars were in the real world. At the same time, GM and the dealers consistently pretended that things were great all around. If you got a lemon (almost all of them were lemons), then you were either that rare unlucky owner, or you must have mistreated your car, as far as GM was concerned. Any pity they took on you for repairs or replacements was because they were soooo generous and cared soooo much. But don’t dare blame the car or GM. They had your best interests at heart, and if things weren’t working out, well, look in the mirror. We at GM might take pity on you, but we sure aren’t going to even consider that your bad experience had anything to do with us. You just don’t know how to take care of your things, obviously.
I don’t blame the car (it was cool looking and could have been great). I don’t blame the line workers. They built what was put in front of them. I don’t blame the engineers. They tried new things, but they weren’t given the time and resources to properly sort things out ahead of the introduction of the car. I blame GM management, who worked from an unreasonable script, and refused to deviate from it because of time and costs. They arrogantly decided they had everything figured out, and it was simply up to the organization to quickly implement an obviously brilliant game plan. Oops!
In the midst of the car’s development, GM suffered the debilitating 1970 strike, and VW and the Japanese were eating their lunch on the coasts. Safety and pollution concerns and mandates were in full flower. They were not good times for Detroit, and this car line got pushed out in the midst of all that. In hindsight, GM would have loved a “do-over”, but the times were what they were, and GM was the rare car company that could survive a comprehensive screw-up of that magnitude, at that time.
Yes, that is a 1973 Vega with its original engine! It’s been parked here since 1974.
lol
I can’t imagine there being any early Vegas with a truly original, from-the-factory engine still being driven on a regular (or even semi-regular) basis.
However, there might be a few that have had the original engine replaced under warranty by a GM dealer with the improved version that had iron sleeves. With tender loving maintenance and careful driving, a few of them might still be around. But very few.
Here’s an irrelevant comment from far, far away; what a good-looking car the Vega was, especially as a Kammback. I’d have bought one back in the day, and because of its looks, tried to justify any bad behaviour it insisted on showing.
You “found it parked at dusk in a park”?
That sounds like a script for a movie about a serial killer.
Here’s my theory. This a former V8 conversion that has been “de-V8ed” and the stock powertrain put back in after many years. We can speculate on the reasons this was done but it would, in fact, preserve the original engine far beyond it’s normal early demise. Doing it on the cheap, the owner decided to keep one half of the V8’s exhaust system for use with the 4-cylinder engine. At any rate, we as of yet have no proof that this has an original Vega plant. It could just as easily be an Iron Duke, those sound like tractors too.
That’s not too bad. It would certainly explain the hood scoop and the single side pipe. I can’t imagine anyone putting a hood scoop on a 4-cylinder Vega, whether it was the original or swapped-in four, nor using a single side pipe that looks like it was half of a dual V8 exhaust unless it was already there.
Lets go back to 1980, in a (Canadian) world full of crappy second hand cars, that really limited your choices to either expensive and/or problematic imports, or thirsty large American iron that withstood the abuse and indifferent maintenance practices common to $300 cars. With that in mind, the Vega stood out as an outlier of a choice for my father to purchase for my sister as a beater a-b kind of car. I think it was about a ’74, in yellow and fairly screaming to be put out of its misery, which in her hands took about 6 months. Six long clattering smoke filled months. And then, to my amazement, dad bought her ANOTHER one. In truth dad likely was the character model for the father in “A Christmas Story”, as in his twisted logic, there was goodness to be found in these miserable cars, if one looked carefully. As this was Canada, the second misery appeared to us as a ’75 Astre, which I always referred to as the “ashtray” for the way it smelled and just reflected its general appearance in dark green metallic. I remember it well, staring at its idling motor in all its paint shaker glory, and musing that moms 304 Gremlin was a Ferrari in comparison. It was all for nought, as it too died quickly, only to be replaced by a ’73 Dodge Polara, which lasted for years.
Lets put it another way: If a car is so utterly dysfunctional it doesn’t even warrant a photo taken, even when the
” bloom is still on the rose” so to speak, did it really ever exist, or should it have?
Just because you may find your unicorn, Paul, should you look for it? Really?
“Six long clattering smoke filled months” made coffee come out my nose!
With all due respect- you’d have to pay me money to take back my ’74 Vega. Now, or 24 hours after I sold it in ’75.
I remember seeing an early Vega notchback – white over turquoise – auctioned at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale 7-8 years ago. It had almost zero miles. Window sticker still on. Maybe even still plastic on the seats.
It was appalling. I could easily see paint flaws – where layers of spray hadn’t been done evenly. Panel fit was piss poor. The car’s lack of quality could be seen at a glance.
This fly in amber car was a fascinating case.
Call her what you wish, but I love my ‘76 Betty Lou Vega? I’m the 3rd owner with just 17, 500 miles, original black exterior(repainted once) & firethorn red plaid upholstery. Would you believe always in Michigan? People look at her like she’s a unicorn with their mouths open and more often than not scream,, “nice Pinto!” She ticks off the Camaro and Mustang dudes at the car shows as people gather around her like a crime scene?
I bought the vega you have pictured in the article. I bought it from a hot rod shop in Monmouth oregon back in early February, and it still had the original 4 in it. It had been taken apart completely though, and was headed for the crusher. The guys I bought it from had saved it from going to the crusher, and I ended up paying $700 for it. All the parts were there, and it is the exact car you have pictured. Side pipe was still there too lol.
If it means anything to anyone now, I bought this exact car a few years back and can confirm it was an original 2300 vega