This is an interesting pairing of cars that represent what was hot in their day (late ’80s): the Chrysler minivan and mid/compact SUVs. The Niedermeyer driveway in 1990 could well have looked like this, as we had a 1992 Grand Caravan and I almost bought a Trooper II instead of our Jeep Cherokee. As to the houses that they’re in front of, I would have been good with those too, but I suspect not so much Stephanie.
Oh, and there’s a Saturn Ion behind the Voyager; my mother had one. But let’s conveniently forget about that.
We’ve written up the gen1 Voyagers and Caravan gobs of times here, one way or another, but my CC on the original (Dodge) version is here. This one is from 1987 – 1990, as it’s a lwb Grand and has the composite headlights. And V6, to boot, either the Mitsubishi 3.0 or possibly the Chrysler 3.3, it it’s a last year 1990 version. In which case it’s also got the A604 Ultradrive 4-speed automatic.
Speaking of, there was a family at our kid’s Waldorf school in the Bay Area that had a 1990 equipped with that combo (3.3 V6 and A604), and for one reason or another, she lent it to me to use for a field trip up to Point Reyes. It was almost brand new, and my first drive in one. And quite impressive it was; my first experience with an electronically-controlled automatic and with overdrive, to boot. Its shift quality was unlike I’d experienced, and its decisions as to when to shift was pretty intelligent. I liked playing with the throttle to say how slow I could keep it in fourth.
I was duly impressed, if not so much so with the interior, which was looking a bit dated. But impressed enough to buy a 1992 Grand Caravan similarly equipped. Which of course went through four A604s in its long and hard 15 years and 170k miles as the Niedermeyer family truckster. That and several ABS pumps, which were covered under a lifetime warranty. Otherwise it was great!
I wanted to by a Previa, but Stephanie really liked the additional cargo room behind the third seat in the GC, which had the biggest capacity of all the minivans at the time. It was able to swallow the big Italian stroller as well as all the shopping and such. And lots of camping and other gear in later years. It was quite the beast of burden.
And in its late years, I’d remove the seats and use it for camping; another in my long line of Dodge/Ram camper vans.
I was quite smitten by the Trooper II when it came out in the US in 1983. I had been bitten by the SUV bug some years earlier, and seriously considered a Scout II Traveler, but it was just too crude for my taste.
I loved its Range Rover rip-off styling; I actually thought it had better proportions than the RR. In its first few years in the US it only came in a spartan two-door, with a rather modest little 1.9 four and only a manual. That was not going to work for Stephanie and the kids that were coming along at the time, so a Cherokee with V6, automatic, and four doors it was.
When the same Chevy V6 in 3.1 L form became available on the later Trooper II, we actually test drove one. It was decidedly roomier than the Cherokee, as the Trooper II’s tall and boxy body was impressively spacious. And the upright driving position suited me better too. The Chevy V6 was about as unexciting as it was in the Jeep. I was tempted, but there was no way I was going to trade in our three or four year old Cherokee for it.
Not long after we bought the Grand Caravan, and the Cherokee became a little-used third car.
As to the owner-built house, I’ve covered it here before. I like it, but most of you seemed not to. That’s ok,
And there’s even a period-correct Tacoma out front too.
That Trooper looks to be in pretty decent shape. I would take it. Especially after beating the snot out of my Chevy LUVs, I am an Isuzu fanboi.
I like all the choices you made and had considered at the time. The Previa might have been a better choice than the Caravan because of the latter’s well documented transmission issues, but the Previa was also underpowered and had that unusual mid-engine design that would have made working on it a serious PITA. But then again, it was a bulletproof Toyota, so how much work would it need, right?
I always liked the rugged looks of the Trooper II. The Honda Element I drive today is a little reminiscent of it, actually. I thought that the Trooper and Pathfinder were really rugged looking SUVs in that time and age. I would have gladly driven either if I had been of age to have one back then.
I actually really like the house. I found all the criticism and vitriol spewed in its original post quite annoying, if I’m being honest. I stayed out of the fray at the time so’s not to extract any more venom from the commentariat, but I’ll take this chance to make my stand. Good on this guy for using his head and his talents and doing it his way.
That Trooper looks amazing for its age. I owned a ’96 5-speed V6 for a couple years and really enjoyed it. I only parted with it because my use case for it made it completely impractical for me. And I’m going to say it again- Chrysler interiors of the 80’s and 90’s may have lagged behind fashion, but they sure did wear like iron.
Yeah, there’s nothin’ the matter with the house; I checked.
I had an 88 Trooper II, 4 cylinder and a 5 speed manual transmission. The first year with the rectangular headlights. I always felt that it was a fantastic vehicle and is one of the few cars we’ve had that I really regret giving up. We didn’t have it long enough for rust to become a problem; rather we lost it due to the equally common blown-head-gasket problem. I just wish I’d been in a different place than I was at the time so that I could have either fixed it myself or paid to have it fixed. Instead, we made the (poor) decision to buy a Saturn SW2 to replace the Trooper. The Saturn was the worst vehicle I ever owned.
I’ve given thought to trying to find a still in decent shape Trooper again. I suspect that 30 some years hence it may exhibit flaws that I didn’t perceive in the late 80s…but I’d love to see.
Oh, and I think the house is really cool.
Jeff, I saw a red 4 door Trooper a few miles from home with a For Sale sign on it today. If you’re serious, I can check it out and you can fly out to the West Coast and drive it home.
ohhhhh…very tempting. But I should probably let the Highlander Hybrid die first, and then broach that challenging spousal conversation. 😉
Based on the lifespan of our Toyota’s, I think the Trooper will be gone by the time your Highlander dies. In fact I may not be around either.
That Voyager is almost exactly like the van I learned to drive in and what was what I drove in high school (not mine but my parents were generous about letting me use the van, even though the van sometimes smelled of certain burned plants after I used it), right down to the color and the wheels. Except ours was a SWB Dodge. It had the Mitsubishi 3.0L and the TorqueFlite, which probably aided in it surpassing 200K. That Caravan had a penchant for overheating and vapor locking, but it never had any transmission problems!
H’mmm. Okeh, I’ll bite: how do you get a fuel-injected vehicle with an in-tank electric fuel pump to vapour lock?
That’s what I was told it was doing! I ain’t no mechanic so…I didn’t know that fuel injected engines don’t vapor lock.
Basically the van would just stall out and shut down…power steering not working, etc. Let it sit for 30 mins to an hour and it would drive again. Thoughts?
Possibly fuel pump relay.
Sorry, I missed your reply. By description, it could easily have been the fuel pump itself: a faulty motor that heats up and stops working. Or it could have been a problem that has affected cars since long before electric pumps were a thing: trash in the fuel tank. The gunk accumulates on the intake screen until it blocks off the fuel to the engine. Let the car sit, and the crud drifts away from the intake screen and settles back down to the bottom of the tank, so the engine can be started.
That could have been your house? It might as well have been mine. In 1988, my parents traded away a Trooper to buy a Caravan.
I’d forgotten how on the first-gen Chrysler minivans with the top LE trim like this one, you had to choose between the two-tone paint seen here or Di-Noc wood. I don’t think single color without wood was a choice. I’d also forgotten the then-new 3.3 V6 made it into the first-gen vans. Big improvement over the Mitsu 3.0 and especially over the 2.6L Mitsu four-banger that was originally the only upgrade over the 2.2.
Also, I like that house.
That house rules. I love it.
It was the house that first caught my eye, I was wondering could it be that house, or it’s close relative.
Then, as now you just can’t beat a Grand Caravan for hauling family stuff. We just got back from camping with our GC last night. I’m happy that ours is a stow and go so I don’t have to wrestle those heavy seats like I did with our previous Caravan. That sure didn’t do my back any favors!
I’ve never so much as ridden in a Trooper II, always liked them though. Sporty and utilitarian.
I actually liked the versatility of the older style seats over the Stow-N-Go seats. With our Town and Country you could remove the middle captain seats and move the rear bench seat forward. We have friends who owned a Chrysler Voyager short wheelbase van with the back 2 rows as bench seats. They borrowed our 2nd row captain seats for their van for a long trip.
On the A604 transmission. My experience seems so different from Paul’s. We had a ’94 GC ES. On the one hand the transmission seemed to try to upshift to aggressively and too quickly. Driving it around town in 3rd instead of O/D seemed to help. On the other hand we had NO problems with the transmission in the 234,000+ miles we put on it! It started to fail at that point but the van was too worn out and rusty to fix. No problems with the 3.8 liter engine either. It was as strong as ever when we got rid of the van.
The Caravan sold me on a new 2002 Chrysler T&C. For a while we were a 2 minivan family.
I love everything about this post. In HS I had a 1986 Trooper II 2 door LWB with the 2.3L/5 spd. I beat the ever living hell out of it in NEPA. Snow, riverbank sand, fire roads to trail heads, hauling punk rock band equipment, camping in all sorts of spots from shopping center parking lots to NJ shore sites. Not a straight panel on it after a year of ownership. I used to leave the key in it and let it be used communally with my friends and brothers. I had a same year 4 door for parts, rusted beyond repair, but had a strong engine and trans….and a home made party deck on the roof that ran from bumper to bumper. Weber carb, BFG All-Terrain T/As, Cibie accessory lights,….Man what a rig.
Rust and head gasket issues finally killed it and no garage would inspect it, passenger front seat was falling through the floor board. I moved on to Subaru Loyales and Outbacks for a while after that.
From 2015 until recently I had a 92 Voyager as a DD/camping beater with a 2.5 L/3spd. auto combo. Loved it as a DD, a great commuter. With 250K + miles on it and several small accidents from the previous owner I let it go when the trans lost all forward gears.
Now I am in a 1999 Cherokee as a DD, love its versatility, but the 4.0 can get thirsty. Beats the 86 C10 I had to DD briefly while sourcing a new daily, but I hope to get one of my 2 4 cylinder powered projects going as the coolness of fall sets in.
As to the house? I liked it in the first post, I too avoided commenting. There are a handful of interesting self built houses in my area being between 2 major state colleges. I feel the atmosphere contributes to the cool architecture locally.
I owned the 4cyl 5-speed version. With AC! What a mule, an absolute mountain goat.
Once in bitter winter I crossed the recently featured bridge to be told: “Sorry, roads closed, too much snow…”
“Okay, I’ll just move ahead a bit and find a place to pull over (when I get to my destination)”
It was no problem whatsoever.
I once towed a dead coach (think Greyhound) with it. Just in case anyone says that didn’t happen, I know where there’s a bit of video documenting it, recorded in some obsolete format.
My biggest beef with it was that for sunny day turnpike running it was gutless, had trouble keeping up with normal traffic. I’m thinking something like 75 mph was pushing it hard, completely wound out. At times I thought freeway running was going to blow it up – never did.
Voyager, I owned a few of ’em… nothing memorable to report, that I recall this minute.
The home, not my style. Even less interest than Voyager. shrug
Ah! I see the House Of Current Cliches is still standing, in defiance of most commenter’s expectations on its last appearance.
Unlike this Whittaker house, I too liked the look of the Trooper, but I’m surprised you liked the drive. I found them very crude-feeling, especially in ride and steering. Like any Isuzu, though, they sure as hell last forever, particularly in a country without road salt like Oz.
My other ponder is a bit off-topic, arising from the mention of four transmissions in your Caravan. I wonder if any of our mechanical and engineer CCers know why it is that transmissions became so frangible as soon as overdrive and electronic control arrived, and have stayed that way as the gear count grows? Sure, it’s not every transmission, but there’s no way they are as long-lived as the old collection of 2 and 3 speed jobs – but why?
I too liked the look of the Trooper, but I’m surprised you liked the drive.
I didn’t say I did. I said I liked its spaciousness and the upright driving position. As a matter of fact, yes, it handled (on the short test drive) less nimbly than our Cherokee, but the it was significantly taller and was of course nothing other than an Isuzu pickup under that boxy body. It was a truck, in the true sense of the word, and drove, handled and steered like one. I could have accepted and lived with that. It was still a significant improvement on the Scout II I drove.
I’m not aware of any SUVs in the mid 80s that had better dynamics. They were all truck-based, except the Cherokee, which was in a class of its own. The RR was not available in the US then, and would have been out of our price class. And it wallowed as part of the trade-off of its long-travel relatively soft coils.
For reasons unknown to this non-engineer, the identically-suspended Pajero/Montero/Rude Spanish Word drove a hell of a lot better than the Isuzu. I can personally attest, having driven several types of both way back when, for reasons forgotten. The Suzie just felt like a cheap imitation of the Pajero, even as it got more doors and better engines. The second-gen was a great deal nicer, if duller to look at, a proper 80% Range Rover, thought with 400% of the reliability.
As to issues with automatics, a few things to keep in mind:
The Chrysler A604 was the first electronically controlled automatic, with adaptive shifting and such. If its sensors sensed anything amiss, it reverted to limp mode (second gear only), which made owners (and some shops) assume the unit was fundamentally broken, when that might not have actually been the case. Old school automatics might have shifted hard or slipped some, but there were no sensors or microprocessors to go amiss.
One of (most likely the biggest) cause of failures in this transmission was that it required a totally new fluid, but Chrysler failed to make that explicit. Folks would change/add fluid, using the typical Dextron. That was the kiss of death. Our frst transmission went shortly after I had the fluid changed at a transmission shop where they talked me into using some expensive all-synthetic Amsoil. Bad call.
This transmission,and its six-speed variant, became very reliable. In fact I have one in my Promaster, which is rated to haul two tons of cargo as well as a substantial trailer to boot. There’s a guy who runs a fleet of Promasters in commercial use, and he’s seen over a half-million miles on them.
Keep in mind that old school automatics required regular band adjustments and such, and frequent fluid changes. They were hardly perfect, but they they were easier to fix. Simpler. Cruder.
Modern cars tend to run much higher mileage than cars in the good old days. I have no statistics, but I suspect on average modern automatics are significantly more reliable, requiring essentially nothing, or a fluid change after a very long interval, unless they go totally bad. Our expectations and parameters have changed much more than the actual rate of failures.
Obviously some all-new automatics that were introduced in the 80s and such had some serious weaknesses. But they were rushed into production, and eventually became reliable. Mostly.
I had pondered most of these variables before asking the question, especially the (implied) one of consumer expectations and usage, but it remains that the seemingly simple idea of adding a gear and some solenoid-based control of shifting seems to have brought in permanent era of unreliability. Far too often, it seems to be the case that about 60K miles is your lot before really expensive trouble.
And, yes, I’m aware there are more “seems” in this than there are in a good dress, but surely it’s a solid question of the day, as in “Are modern autos way less long-lived than the old brigade?”, or thereabouts?
No, it’s just the opposite. The average age of a vehicle on US roads in 1969 was 5.1 years. In 1977, the figure was 5.5 years. In 1983 it was 7.2 years. 1990, 7.6 years; 2000, 8.9 years; 2014, 11.4 years; 2018, 11.8 years; 2020, 12.1 years. Over a quarter of vehicles presently on US roads are at least 16 years old. Newer cars last longer than even fastidiously-maintained older cars. Partly it’s because now we have better materials and build techniques, and partly it’s because today’s fuels burn a lot cleaner and today’s lubricants do a much better anti-wear job.
often, it seems to be the case that about 60K miles is your lot before really expensive trouble.
I don’t have time to dispute this in great detail, but that’s not at all my sense of what’s typical. A transmission failure at 60k is way out of the ordinary envelope.
Here’s the reality: it’s generally not economical to replace an automatic in an older car, yet cars in America typically are driven 200+k, on average. That alone goes against your take.
As I said, modern transmissions are not just an ancient three speed with an extra gear and some selonoids added. That was sometimes the case some decades back; not in recent history though.