After writing up the Junkyard Chevette that we posted a couple of hours ago, I somehow fell deeply down the Chevette rabbit hole and found this video produced by Chevrolet extolling all the features of the 1979 Chevette. I’ll be damned if I don’t find myself wanting one now! For example, did you know that the 1979 Chevette offered door-affixed shoulder belts as an option, that same thing that became a cursed feature a decade later in numerous other cars? Or that it came with a service manual so you could learn to do basic servicing yourself and avoid the dealer? All that and tons more, I’m beginning to see how they shifted 451,000 of these things that year.
The tight turning circle was a real advantage over front-wheel-drive competitors, which in the case of the Accord was almost three feet(!!) greater than that of the Chevette. Three feet has the potential to make a big difference, based on your command of spatial relations and the size of the street on which you are changing course. On the other hand, I can’t help but to think 32.9 feet is still a tiny turning circle compared to that of a Caprice, a Volare, or a Thunderbird.
I have car magazines with introductory reviews of the Chevette. It was pretty well received by Car and Driver, as one might expect of literally any important product from GM. Within a couple years, Car and Driver was talking about its planned replacement. I’m not sure if they were interpreting reports of T-car replacements like the 1980 Opel Kadett D as being likely to spawn a Chevette, or they thought the J-car was going to replace the Chevette, but they were anticipating a Chevette that could meet the Accord, Horizon, and Rabbit on their own terms almost as soon as they finished testing the first one.
That’s a weird thing about GM. Until we opened our economy to China in the ’90s, the US was GM’s most important market. Yet we still had the antique T-car on our market after the Kadett that replaced it in Europe had been replaced for years. We still had the unexciting J-car platform after the European variants had been replaced by three subsequent generations of evolved designs.
Regulations rarely make things easier, but when the Chevette came out we were practically the only western country regulating new car safety and emissions. That’s part of the reason GM couldn’t just start selling T-cars here the as soon as they identified the need because Vegas were smoking on the side of the road if owners could find enough gas for them in the first fuel crunch. The J-car had a parallel development program for all of GM’s big markets. Components that could be shared often were, and components that had to be unique to the US were ready when production started for Europe and Brazil. When the J-car was replaced the second or third time, European cars had emissions standards. US cars dropped their 5-mph impact bumper regulations. Our cars didn’t even need to be designed for sealed beam headlights any longer. Wouldn’t it have been easier in the late ’80s to stay current in the retail sedan space by simply putting a bow tie in the place of a lightning bolt?
At the time, the Accord was viewed as a “step up” from the Chevette, Omni/Horizon and Rabbit.
The Chevette was viewed as Civic competitor. The Civic was all-new, and more refined, for the 1980 model year. The J-cars were directly aimed at the Accord. One of the selling points of the Accord was how well-equipped and well-trimmed it was. There were no stripped Accords. GM tried to match the Accord’s level of standard equipment with the J-cars.
The car had to be priced to make a profit, however, and GM’s cost structure at the time meant that the J-cars were priced far above the Accord. A lackluster drive train in the Cavalier didn’t help matters. The J-cars stumbled out of the gate, and only recovered when GM introduced less expensive versions, and upgraded the engines. But that killed any effort to match the Accord’s refinement and “premium” image.
After this fiasco, GM put the planned Chevette replacement on hold. I, too, remember reading about the planned front-wheel-drive Chevette in Car and Driver.
GM then tried a variety of tactics – the joint venture with Toyota (NUMMI), and importing various Japanese cars to sell with a Chevrolet badge. The final result was the Saturn project.
Roger Smith’s massive reorganization of GM in the 1984-85 time frame also threw a huge monkey wrench in GM’s plans during this era.
I have Car and Driver’s introductory test of the Accord. It was priced 10% less than the Chevette it was compared to and 20% less than the Rabbit in the comparison chart. The Accord certainly became a much more substantial car when the 4-door was added, and the relationship between supply and demand for the early hatchbacks made them far more expensive than other subcompacts through mark-ups, but they were targeted right at cars like the Chevette and Rabbit. The Omni and Horizon weren’t out yet, and they arrived to a world where they were larger than the Accord but the Accord was essentially a premium car.
How was the Chevette equipped? Remember that virtually everything was optional on domestic small cars at that time. A basic Chevette was really basic. A basic Accord was not.
When the Accord was introduced, the Rabbit was handicapped by exchange rates. That is why VW opened its Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, factory. VWs were rapidly becoming uncompetitive in price with Japanese and even American small cars.
There was a 1978 issue of Car and Driver that featured a comparison test of small cars. The Chevette and a Chrysler small car (can’t remember whether it was an Omni or Horizon) were the domestic entries. (The Ford entry was the imported Fiesta.) The featured Honda was a Civic, not an Accord.
The $4,510 Chevette had A/C and a manual transmission, but I bet it didn’t have a full cloth interior with reclining seats, a 5-speed transmission, a remote outside mirror, a hatch release, locking fuel door, rear wiper/washer, or tachometer that the $3,995 Accord had. The Accord having more content for a lower price doesn’t add to the argument that it was a higher class of car, and it really wasn’t any bigger inside or outside. The Scooter 2-seater was below an Accord in every sense, but a typical middle-class second car Chevette had a significantly higher MSRP than an Accord hatchback during the 1977 model year.
The 1978 comparison test would have been a bit of selective reasoning on Car and Driver’s part. It is true that a Civic was more likely to compete on price with a base version of any of the other cars, but the Rabbit probably still cost as much as an Accord, which was still the same size and of similar performance to other subcompacts. The Civic was a ‘minicompact’ according to the EPA, and was the smallest car on the US market by footprint for some of its run.
Nobody was paying full sticker for a Chevette during those years. With the Accord, the dealer did you a favor if he deigned to sell you a car without a markup, and not require you to pay $200 for mud flaps and another $100 for a wax job.
There were waiting lists for Accords from day one. There were no waiting lists for Chevettes, even in the wake of the second fuel crunch in early 1979.
Whatever the intent of each respective manufacturer, buyers clearly perceived the Accord as something above the typical economy car. The Accord was definitely a higher class of car than a Chevette. It was a “classless” car that appealed to people who could easily afford something bigger and more expensive. The Chevette was an economy car sold primarily on the basis of low price and good gas mileage.
I remember the hoopla surrounding the introduction of the GM J-cars. They were definitely aimed at the Accord, and were hyped as a “premium” small car that sold not just on price or gas mileage. They were not aimed at the Civic, and were initially slotted above the Chevette.
Manufacturer’s list price (1976):
Civic: $2729 (1200) $2939 (CVCC)
Chevette: $3098 (Scooter: $2899)
Rabbit: $3300 (base) $3899 (DeLuxe)
Accord: $3995
The problem was that nobody ever paid $3995 for an Accord. It was massively sold out from day one, and dealers all loaded them up with accessories and mark ups.
I pulled out my copy of the August, 1976 Car and Driver, which has the first test of the new-for-1977 Accord. The Chevette, which is merely described as ‘Chevrolet Chevette (A/C)’ with no (1) note to denote an automatic transmission, had an as-tested price over $4,500 by some visible-on-a-bar-graph amount.
The VW was actually a Scirocco, and it was over five thousand dollars. I confused it with a Rabbit because I’ve read enough comparison tests from later in the decade where the Rabbit was priced off-scale relative to competitors, something that moving production to Ohio failed to address. By that point fuel injection was part of the pitch, and fuel injection really didn’t become both excellent and affordable at the same time thanks to the huge strides in microprocessor availability for a few more years.
The dollar was in free-fall relative to the deutsche mark during this era, so the 1975 Rabbit being the best $3,500 car two years before the Accord doesn’t really have much significance. Reality was that the Rabbits needed a little more time in the oven, and the first ones were at risk of fizzling into the brilliant idea/flawed execution trap. Instead VW developed them magnificently from a performance and perceived value perspective. They could have dominated the world with a little better quality and a weaker West German currency, but they were transformed into a premium product by price and spending money on things people could see.
Accords never sold for $3,995 unless you were related to one of the distributors who wound up going to prison. On the other hand, there were no 1976 model US Accords, so price comparisons should be made with 1977 models from competitors. It was as time of constant sticker shock, especially for shoppers of small cars.
Somehow, whitewalls look good on a Chevette.
Back in 1987 I drove literally hundreds of new Chevettes when working for a dealership. It was the final year for production and GM pushed truckloads of these at the dealer. I didn’t know how they were going to sell them all, since literally everything else was better. But the Chevette was an honest car and didn’t pretend to be anything other than cheap and simple transportation.
I was slightly amused to see the Chevette, GMs smallest offering, ant the largest, (G-van) shared the same instrument cluster.
Those awful, and illegal, seat belts!
The Feds required passive safety systems and GM decided that they couldn’t do it in all their cars and make the profit they wanted. So, they went back to a goofy design from a few years before. The door belt.
For the door belt to be a passive safety system, the belt needed to be snapped into the buckle, and anyone getting into the car needed to somehow get the lower belt on their lap and the upper belt above their shoulder as they entered the car. Anyone who ever tried to use this as designed, found that it didn’t work. The lap belt tangled in your legs, and the whole design was a joke. What ended up happening was owners would leave the belt unbuckled and if they wanted to use the belt, pulled it from the door and buckled it in.
However, what happened in a situation where the car door opened? In traditional belts, you were buckled into the floor. In new cars without the awful door belts, you had the belt and the air bag for safety. In the GM cars, you had NOTHING. The door would open, and you would be tossed out because the belt was attached to the door. Honestly, who in the Federal government did GM pay off to permit this?
No one liked these belts. They weren’t safe. They didn’t work. They shouldn’t have ever been allowed by law.
VW had a similar system in the MKI Golf, and at least some of them had a knee-bash bar instead of a lap belt. Here is a Popular Science article I found about the system when it was under development. They reached production and customers in the US in some Rabbits, and they were awful. For those of us long of leg, knee-bashing was a constant reality and the belt itself felt slack and useless. I never crash tested one, and I was glad I didn’t.
The standard these dead-ends were developed for didn’t get enacted for an almost a decade after being proposed, allowing workable solutions to almost be ready when it became law. Unfortunately, the aspiring totalitarians still killed hundreds of short and light people by treating their power as if it were that of invention, but there was always going to be some learning curve involved in airbags. Too bad it had to be so steep and that responsible people were sacrificed to protect people like the regulators.
https://books.google.com/books?id=jWlaIWwcsiwC&pg=PA93&lpg=PA93&dq=volkswagen+passive+shoulder+belt+knee+restraint&source=bl&ots=iLX6ylTcvz&sig=ACfU3U30-OeSuM28W6MzCZr0N7u3tzZrTw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwixurPHjL7qAhXEknIEHTXzCRIQ6AEwBHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=volkswagen%20passive%20shoulder%20belt%20knee%20restraint&f=false
Here is the link I forgot.
The Chevette was issued at a time when our nation’s ditches were still being cleared of Vegas. Chevrolet sent out to market a narrow, tinny thing and promoted the fact that as a “Scooter”, it was cheap and it was frugal, four years after making the same claims for a low, sporty thing that rusted in showrooms and ran rougher than a Bulgarian lawn mower. Consequently, at a time when America was looking for a gas frugal car, it took Chevette years to sell as many copies that the Vega sold in its first year. This should not have been a surprise since many Vega owners were still paying off their lemons.
My cousin had a Chevette. My uncle bought it. It was never fun to ride or drive. It was narrow, even for a pair of skinny teens. It was slow. The only thing going for it was that it was new. I kept thinking that it was nothing more than a slightly nicer Crosley.
There were still 811,540 rubes waiting to buy a Citation in 1980. I bet someone at GM concluded that Ed Cole was a marketing genius who knew that the small car customers wanted a Camaro that they couldn’t afford, and that’s why the Vega outsold the rebadged Vauxhall Chevette. The Citation pretty much sealed GM’s fate.
Too bad it was not offered with the sudden unintended acceleration. That was an Audi only feature I believe …
I spend way too much time watching corporate sales and repair videos on YouTube. Sometimes I think of all the other stuff I could be doing, but eh…it’s fun.
Note how they made a point of specifying that the Chevette had a CAST IRON engine. Possibly to ease the minds of any former Vega owners who were inclined to buy another small Chevy?
I also had to laugh at the big deal they made of “computer selected springs.” Chevy was making the same claim starting in about 1970, if my memory is correct.
I have some hazy recollections from my nerdy teen years reading Consumer Reports.
One was that they didn’t see the Chevette as all bad. In fact, average in terms of reliability, which could pass as a compliment at times on a domestic car.
Combine with likely one of the lowest average transaction prices for a new car, a dealer network second to none in terms of size, and many Americans still not quite ready to abandon a domestic nameplate, and sales punched above the weight of the product.
The Chevette getting a little okay press….
I’ve seen pictures of the other versions of this car produced by the various GM affiliates such as Opel and Isuzu. They seem light years ahead of the Chevette especially the interiors. Why couldn’t GM make a car at least half as decent?