When was the last time you saw such a clean example of the ill-fated Chevrolet Citation? A big sales success in 1980 and 1981, the X-body Citation could easily have been one of GM’s greatest hits, but poor quality and a litany of safety recalls eventually made this dumpy but efficiently designed compact car one of the most ignominious four-wheeled failures of the 1980s.
It was ugly enough to make you think they were serious. There’s a lot one could say about the Chevrolet Citation and its FWD X-body siblings, both good and bad, but they were not attractive vehicles. The Citation looked like the inbred offspring of a Chevrolet Chevette and GM’s unloved aeroback A-body intermediates. In a way, that was very encouraging: Both the Vega and the H-body Monza/Sunbird/Starfire/Skyhawk had been handicapped from the start by GM’s reluctance to accept that people might want a small car that wasn’t a sporty coupe. The Citation was an actual car — a sort of doughy dumpling of a car, but a car nonetheless — and its un-sexy shape suggested that for once, GM had prioritized function over form.
The Citation wasn’t the first GM FWD car, but it was the first to actually be designed for space efficiency rather than technical novelty. The wheelbase was unusually long for a car this size, 104.9 inches, but the Citation was only 176.7 inches long, a foot and a half shorter than a Ford Fairmont sedan.
A five-door Citation qualified as a midsize car based on interior volume, and it matched the Fairmont for headroom, legroom, and shoulder room despite weighing 350 lb less. (Maybe there WAS a case to be made for using FWD in something other than expensive personal luxury cars — who knew?)
Rear liftover height was higher than one might prefer, but the hatchback body provided respectable luggage capacity even with the cargo cover in place, and you could fold down the rear seat to provide up to 41.4 cu. ft. of space.
GM also made a big deal about the aerodynamic design of the X-cars, although their 0.442 average drag coefficient was only middling for this era. Still, with a 0.417 Cd, the Citation five-door was far sleeker than the X-body Nova sedan it replaced, which had a barn-door-like 0.525 Cd. This car’s plastic bug deflector probably doesn’t help its aerodynamics any, though.
Unlike some past GM small cars, the Citation also seemed to be reassuringly free of eccentric senior-engineer-pet-project baggage. OK, GM was new to transverse-engine/FWD transaxle layouts (the FWD Opel Kadett D debuted about four months after the FWD X-bodies), but there was nothing conceptually adventuresome or risky about the chassis or powertrain. Even the standard Pontiac 2.5-liter Iron Duke four was a known quantity — none too refined and not very powerful, but holding no nasty surprises. (There was also an all-new 2.8-liter 60-degree cast iron V-6.)
Chevrolet had been kicking around the idea of a FWD compact since 1973, but the actual debut of the new X-cars could not have been better timed: They bowed on April 19, 1979, just in time for the aftermath of the Iranian revolution to kick off Oil Crisis 2.0. A sensibly engineered, affordable, economical FWD compact seemed like exactly the right car at exactly the right moment. Early reviews were glowing, and customers lined up to buy. Chevrolet sold 624,335 Citations in the elongated 1980 model year, while Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick sold an additional 487,875 of the similar X-body Phoenix, Omega, and Skylark. Despite a worsening recession and nasty-high interest rates, the X-cars sold an additional 771,241 units for the 1981 model year. Nobody cared much that the Citation was dumpy-looking: It could carry five, it handled okay, it got decent gas mileage, and it was cheap as long as you didn’t get too carried away with options. A 1981 Citation five-door started at a reasonable $6,404.
Sure, there were some practical shortcomings: The carbureted four made only 84 hp. The standard 4-speed overdrive stick shift had very wide ratios that let engine power fall off a lot between shifts, but the optional TH125 automatic sucked the life out of the Iron Duke and even the optional V-6. GM had managed to make the X-cars’ rack-and-pinion steering surprisingly vague, and the brakes were worryingly touchy, especially on the earliest cars. Also, while interior space was good, Fisher Body remained curiously unable or unwilling to produce a driver’s seat that was adjustable for rake, so you sat uncomfortably upright whether you wanted to or not.
None of those weaknesses was a deal-breaker by itself, and nearly all of them would have been eminently fixable without reinventing any rotatable circular objects. If those had been the sum total of the X-bodies’ weaknesses — and if GM had sorted them quickly and decisively — they would probably be remembered today with respect and even fondness. Instead, poor quality and an onslaught of defects turned the X-cars into a massive, reputation-sullying, preventable disaster.
For starters, the X-cars were often poorly built. The Citation was assembled in three GM plants: Oklahoma City (which also assembled the Pontiac Phoenix version); Tarrytown, New York (which also assembled the Phoenix and the Buick Skylark); and Willow Run in Ypsilanti, Michigan (which also assembled the Oldsmobile Omega and some Skylarks). A much-publicized 1981 exposé in the Detroit Free Press revealed that while quality at Oklahoma City and Tarrytown was about average for GM, Willow Run Assembly was by far GM’s worst North American assembly plant for build quality. Plant manager Herbert Leitz admitted to UPI that this was “certainly nothing we are proud of,” but declined further comment.
GM president Jim McDonald, who had overseen the early development of the X-cars while general manager of Chevrolet, refused to concede that GM was producing any “less-than-acceptable cars,” instead suggesting that customers’ expectations had become too high “in the area of fits and finishes.” McDonald also told UPI, “I think the X-car was a good execution considering the total sophistication of the car.” This was a curious argument: Nothing on the Citation or the other X-cars was particularly sophisticated, and even if it had been, it’s hard to see why that should have required buyers to lower their expectations for “fits and finishes.”
True, the Citation was the most genuinely all-new car Chevrolet had offered since the 1965 Corvair, so it wasn’t surprising that there were some teething pains. However, “teething pains” didn’t adequately describe the X-cars’ lengthy list of issues, which ranged from poor paint quality to driveability problems to poorly routed brake lines and power steering hoses that left them at risk of rupturing in a hard stop. In the first two years of production, the X-cars were subject to 10 safety recalls. The Center for Auto Safety charged that there were also other problems that really should have been recalled and weren’t, like a series of TH125 automatic transmission failures, brake boosters that cut out under high accessory load, and power steering pumps that lost pressure when cold.
The most notorious problem was the brake lockup issue, which became emblematic of how GM approached these cars. Even the most glowing early reviews of the Citation and its siblings had noted that they seemed prone to early rear brake lockup. This continued in production, sometimes with disastrous results. By July 1981, the NHTSA informed GM that they were aware of “at least 212 owner complaints involving 58 reported accidents and 14 injuries” related to premature locking of the rear brakes.
GM admitted that they were aware of this problem and said they had already addressed it by installing a more restrictive proportioning valve (the “27%” valve shown above right), which they offered to retrofit to 47,371 early-production cars. However, what GM already knew, and the NHTSA subsequently discovered, was that the principal culprit of the premature brake lockup problem was actually the friction characteristics of the rear brake linings, which would “bite” too quickly and too hard. The early proportioning valve exacerbated this, but it wasn’t the primary cause. Within a month of the initial small-scale recall, Pontiac quietly advised dealers that it might also be necessary to replace the rear linings, but only after replacing the proportioning valve, and then only if the owner continued to complain. It took almost a year for the NHTSA to complete its own tests and demand an expanded recall, and GM dragged its feet on responding to requests for information.
This became a sizable political scandal. In March 1983, NHTSA administrator Raymond A. Peck (a former coal industry lobbyist) faced a harsh congressional cross-examination accusing the NHTSA of either being negligently incompetent or — as the Center for Auto Safety alleged — deliberately going easy on the auto industry. Trying to salvage its credibility, the NHTSA sued GM that August, charging that all X-car brakes were defective. Four years later, the federal courts ruled in GM’s favor, dismissively describing all the owner complaints about X-car brake lockup (which eventually numbered about 5,000) as “anecdotal” and in the process significantly undermining the NHTSA’s recall authority; it was an awful precedent that validated GM’s strategy of obfuscation and denial.
Unfortunately for owners, X-car issues were not limited to the brakes, nor were they confined to the early production models. There were running changes that mitigated some early issues — throttle-body fuel injection was standardized on the four-cylinder engine for 1982 to address driveability problems, and the steering rack was relocated to take some of the slop out of the steering. However, each year seemed to bring a new crop of recalls, some quite serious, resulting from underspecified components, poor assembly, or both. Soon, buyers were shying away. Pontiac and Oldsmobile dropped the Phoenix and Omega after 1984, and the Skylark and Citation (which Chevrolet had unconvincingly renamed “Citation II” for the 1984 model year) survived only through 1985.
In 1982, GM essentially reinvented the X-car platform as the intermediate A-body line: the Chevrolet Celebrity, Pontiac 6000, Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, and Buick Century. They were bigger, heavier, and more expensive than the Citation and its siblings, but retained the same wheelbase and a lot of the same hardware. Early FWD A-bodies were subject to many of the same safety recalls as the late X-bodies, but being new and not obviously related, they were able to escape the X-cars’ bad publicity. The A-bodies eventually became decent but uninspiring cars that remained in production long after their X-car parents had been written off.
At one time, there were a lot of Citations on the road. Their resale values understandably weren’t great, and only the sporty X-11 had any enthusiast interest, so by the time this 1981 four-cylinder car reached its 10th birthday, most survivors had reached beater status. When I was in high school, the Citation was the kind of car a teenager might buy for $1,000 (or even less, if the rust had gotten bad). A decade after that, most of them were gone. The cleanest 1981 Citation I can recall seeing, even in pictures, was the one Jim Klein spotted on Craigslist in 2020, another Colorado car with the same color combination that was beginning to succumb to corrosion.
That’s the usual trajectory of utilitarian cars, even great ones, but I think the Citation and its X-car siblings would now be numbered among the great GM cars if not for the needless, unapologetic, ongoing penny-pinching sloppiness of their execution. They came SO close: The X-cars were modern but not bleeding-edge, compact on the outside but roomy on the inside, easy to handle, and reasonably thrifty. It was a recipe a big section of the American market was hungry for — as Paul has pointed out, it was the formula for the very successful Toyota Camry — and that demand was reflected in strong early sales. No, the Citation wasn’t about to win any beauty contests, and it would have been nice if GM had come up with a four-cylinder engine that didn’t sound and feel like a rock tumbler, but this car would have had enough virtues to earn it ongoing “best buy” status if GM had addressed its problems in good faith and offered buyers a reasonable median standard of quality.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda. What made the Citation such a calamitous failure was that it didn’t have to be. It was like a baseball player who rounds third base and then inexplicably stops a yard or two from home plate, taking off his shoes and making rude gestures at the umpire and spectators until he’s removed from the game. If not for that senseless self-sabotage, articles like this would be calling the Citation “the car that turned things around for General Motors” after its past small-car missteps. “Sure, the original Citation was a little homely,” I would be saying, “but it was a solid, competent car that demonstrated that Chevrolet and GM were prepared to face the challenges of the ’80s head-on.” Instead, the homeliness and the bad reputation are about all that remains.
Related Reading
Curbside Classic: 1980 Chevrolet Citation – GM’s Deadliest Sin (#13) (by Paul N)
Curbside Lazarus: Chevrolet Citation – The Car That Launched 22 Million Camrys To Date (by Jim Klein)
Curbside Classic: 1981 Chevrolet Citation X-11 – A Diamond In The Mud (by Paul N)
Curbside Gift Idea: 1981 Chevrolet Citation – For That Special Someone (by Jim Klein)
I drove one of these while learning to drive in the early 1980s for drivers ed. the driving school changed from a 1978 Omni to a Citation. I liked the Omni better for the controls of the car and the way it drove. The Citation was harder to see out of the back with the more sloped roof. Neither was that great in power. Both were automatics. The Citation had a lot of torque steer. I liked 1960s cars better with rear wheel drive. The Citation seemed tinny compared to the old Darts and Novas I grew up with. My first car was a dart and so was my second. The Citation was advertised as “The New Chevy of the 1980s” when It cam out. It was the rightly designed car at the right time (1979 Oil crisis) which was bad in execution. Still prefer the 1960s and 70s compacts but the Citation chassis (X bodies) lasted until 1996 with the Buick Century and Old Cutlass Ciera. The 1982 A-Bodies had their improvements quietly put into the X bodies. The K Cars did the front wheel drive compact designed a whole lot better than GM did overall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh_F2vFfDW0
Al least the Lancia Beta they copied was a superbly-engineered car that was merely prone to rust. But it was sophisticated, not de-contented. Probably why it looks so dated compered to the subsequent J-cars.
If they cannot even adjust a rear brake-apportioning valve correctly, they should have gone bust in favour of Toyota.
It’s a fascinating read – how Detroit continued to produce such awfully crude, basic designs whereas the Japanese could offer better features (and build quality) and still make a profit.
The brake problem was *not* the brake proportioning valve (although that didn’t help), it was ill-specified rear linings with inappropriate friction characteristics. GM changed the proportioning valve early on without being nagged, but they were not so eager to change out hundreds of thousands of rear braking linings if they didn’t absolutely have to.
The thing about these cars is that nobody would have cared that they were de-contented or that they weren’t sophisticated if they had been reasonably well built. They didn’t even need to be Honda well-built or Toyota well-built; if they had been well-built enough that nothing important was likely to break or fall off or explode without good reason, it would have been fine. There was of course lots of room for improvement (a 5-speed gearbox and a driver’s seat that actually adjusted for rake would have been welcome), but the biggest concern for buyers was making it reasonably dependable, which included criteria like “won’t rupture brake lines and spray brake fluid all over the engine compartment if I hit the brakes too hard.”
Agreed, X-cars were not well-built. Certainly, the early ones. Nor were the early A-car derivatives (Chevy Celebrity, Pontiac 6000, Olds Cutlass Ciera, etc).
Please provide a list of “well-built” new cars, available in the US market in 1979, that had front-wheel drive AND
power brakes (probably over 95% of X-cars came with)
power steering (again, probably over 95%)
automatic trans (over 90%)
air conditioning (over 50%)
So, at least half of all X-cars had the above features associated with American cars.
P/B are not a huge deal–essentially a (space-consuming) vacuum booster.
The other three features not only take up under hood space, making it hotter in the shorter than usual engine compartment, not only do they introduce parasitic losses, but they are complex subsystems, which themselves had to be designed to fit into a smaller space.
Yes, a 5-speed would have been nice. Yet 5-speeds were not ubiquitous (as late as 1979, for example, BMW did NOT offer a 5-speed!), let alone a transverse FWD 5-speed.
Believe it or not, the X-car was the FIRST high-volume car with:
a transverse-mounted V6
cable operated manual transmission shifter.
Eventually, Honda would offer Accords with REAL automatics, power steering, and A/C, as well as power brakes. But not in 1979. The Camry launched in 1983.
The only other car that offered ALL these features together (auto, ps, pb, ac, that we’ve take for granted since the early 1980s) in 1979 was the Omni/Horizon.
It had a better reputation than the X-car, for sure. But not an especially good one.
GM proved, for the nth time, that “evolution” is better than “revolution” in cars–gradual change. Something the Japanese in general, and Toyota in particular already knew.
Finally, by the late 1980s, GMs “A-cars”, the FWD Celebrity/Ciera/6000, which were X-car version 3.0, were among the more reliable cars in the US market. Admittedly, it only took 10 years.
I did enjoy the pictures in the article. And I very much disagree on writer’s assessment of the Citation’s styling–I think it was a good-looking car in 1979. Arguably the cleanest-looking of the X-cars.
I was not of driving age when it came out, but I remember these cars. My dad considered a Citation in early 1980, and I went with him when he test drove a 2-door, with automatic, but no p/s.
“Steering feels heavy” he said. So was the asking price–whatever it was, it was sticker price. My dad got a new Fairmont instead. Based on the X-car reputation, and my friend’s family experience with a 1983 Pontiac 6000, my dad made the better choice.
Are any of you making comments like this actually reading the post? I said, and I quote:
The X-cars were a fine concept, they moved the game on in some significant ways, and most of their compromises would have been acceptable if they had been better built. I said that in the text! At length!
If only they’d copied more of the Beta, rather than just copying the Beta sedans’ styling and using them as powertrain test mules, while otherwise thinking they could improve on and/or cost-cut Lancia engineering.
For one such ill-advised “improvement”, I gather the X-cars mounted the powertrain on a drop-out subframe as the Beta did, but then GM added rubber bushings to the subframe mount points to reduce NVH, whereas the Beta subframe was rigidly mounted to the unibody.
Bushing compliance (not to mention decay as the cars aged) then resulted in front suspension and steering geometry that varied with suspension travel, cornering forces, and even powertrain lash under de/acceleration, resulting in sloppy and unpredictable handling, whereas the Beta’s handling was precise, predictable and controllable.
Lancia didn’t even bother patenting the Beta’s elegantly simple and clever multilink independent rear suspension, so GM could have simply copied that directly at little cost vs. developing the more primitive dead-axle design they went with.
The X-car beam axle rear suspension was a perfectly reasonable compromise for this kind of car. The layout was basically a rescaled Audi 80/Fox rear suspension, which was hardly primitive for the late ’70s and early ’80s. Also, while poorly selected or badly deteriorated subframe bushings can cause various dynamic ills, categorically insisting that rubber bushings are bad is ridiculous.
At least at that stage, the X-cars did not need more technical sophistication, they needed better execution of the pieces they had.
I never “categorically insist[ed] that rubber bushings are bad”, just critiqued the choice and approach of using them in one particular application, namely the powertrain subframe mounts to the body, esp. when they were already largely copying an existing design by some of the best, cleverest engineers in the industry who’d chosen not to use them in that particular application while using them elsewhere in other aspects of that overall design.
“GM could have copied the rear suspension at little cost”….
Yes. Cars then (and now) are full of “little costs”. They are the cumulative result of “little costs”, and when there are too many, the car becomes too expensive for the market price point it competes in, and the manufacturer loses a ton of money.
Automakers break down the systems and subsystems of their vehicles, both for engineering/design and manufacture. Suspension. Rear Suspension.
Rear suspension, for example. Engineering determines the design, then they specify the parts, and they must tally the cost of the parts. Manufacturing must then assemble the vehicle–they must procure the tooling necessary (single or multipile spindle nut runners for bolts/nuts, holding/back-up tools/jigs to hold parts, locations for the parts along the assembly conveyor, special racks (lft tables) if needed, overhead rails to hold the tools. They must allocate people and/or machines to deliver the parts to the line.
Having manufactured both leaf spring rear suspensions on body-on-frame trucks, and independent rear suspensions on body-on-frame trucks*, as well as IRS on unibody vehicles, there is a lot more assembly labor for the IRS. The assembly labor alone adds up to several dollars a vehicle.
The cost of tooling is considerably higher, because there are more parts that need to be secured, which requires more tooling. This is not a HUGE cost, less than a dollar a car. However, in 2015 prices, it could be he difference in a fixed cost of $50,000 vs $100,000, per side. That’s $100,000.
The IRS components are also more numerous. So if there are different variations, there is more part proliferation, which requires more floor space.
An automaker will not last five minutes in the marketplace if they do not take these cost factors into consideration. Even a “bad” one has some semblance of a strategy for these things. The better companies excel at developing a good design that balances performance and price, that is relatively “manufacturable”. The integrate the subsystems well, and the execute manufacturing well.
As for “sloppy and unpredictable handling”. That’s not what the car magazines, and Consumer Reports said in 1979/1980. Quite the opposite–they felt the ride/handling was quite good.
As for Lancia, the results speak for themselves. By the 1970s, they had interesting engineering, but were unable to compete, and eventually became a badge-engineered marque under Fiat’s umbrella–just like Olds was a GM by the 1980s.
*BTW, GM’s decision to put IRS on their Tahoe/Suburban/etc was, IMO, a foolish choice. The competitor Expedition offered IRS since the mid-2000s. The benefit in ride and handling on a BOF truck that might be called on to also tow is very small. It is not as robust. And it is way more expensive to build than the previous, live axle on coil springs was. WAY MORE. It is a waste of money. However, until now, demand for this size vehicle is such that GM can easily pass on the cost, because GM cannot build enough of these big SUVs as it is. Until now, at least.
Note I didn’t say little “additional” or “extra” cost, just “little cost”, as in overall total cost. The Beta’s IRS design was already developed, not patented, trivial to alter for width, and ingeniously simple. The whole thing can be assembled off the car as a subunit and bolted up to the body with a handful of fasteners.
Many other manufacturers did eventually copy it, including infamously penny-pinching Fiat Group themselves for subsequent models. Notably, the Tipo Quattro (Type Four) platform used a minor variation of it for the Fiat Croma, Lancia Thema and Alfa Romeo 164 variants — Saab instead chose to engineer their own beam axle design for the 9000, ironically similar to the X-cars’ — where they just changed the Beta’s antiroll-bar-as-trailing-links to separate trailing links connected by an antiroll bar, probably identical mechanically but cheaper to manufacture and easier to tune with differing antiroll bar sizes. The stamped-steel parallel transverse links are in fact the exact same part for the Beta and Tipo Quattro cars.
Other comments here cover the likely factors accounting for the differences between magazine reviewers’ early favorable impressions vs. the eventual production models.
Back in June of 1988 I was gifted a 1980 citation by a coworker who realized I was in desperate need to replace my spray painted flat black 77 cutlass.
I put about a million miles on that thing in a month and one day decided to drive from my home in NYC to DC to see the sights. All went well u til the return drive home on the NJ Turnpike which at some rest stop (Vince Lombardi I believe) the heater core went south. I bypassed it and was on my way. The next day I took it to Union NJ to the money store where the car got jammed in reverse and never moved again. I left it there and never saw it again. I guess it got stolen and stripped…? Who knows..
Anyway, it certainly was a basic vehicle, just as basic as my first car, a 74 Beetle.
Was a good car despite the massive torque steering, leaking windshield seal and strange hum coming from the rear end. Those were the day. Lmao
Labor management relations at that time were probably at their worst, since the early unionization drives of the Depression era. Those were the days when we joked “don’t buy a Chrysler built on Monday or Friday,” Tom Peters’ book “In Search of Excellence” was criticized for claiming GM and McDonalds were paragons of excellence. And the Reagan regulatory era of less “regulation” for a more “business-friendly” climate, was starting its inexorable climb. Just one example from the era: the Labor Department issued a ruling that overtime didn’t have to be paid daily, after eight hours, but weekly, after 40 hours — so that opened the way for twelve hour shifts. I had a Celebrity, and for the time, it was an OK car.
Great read. Supposedly Bob Eaton, who would later run Chrysler into the ground and into Daimler, was in charge of engineering these. Is that factual?
My maternal grandparents had a 1984 when I was very young. Only can tell you it was a 1984 because it had the “II” and it had the weird vertical radio/climate controls. One day it was replaced by a Corsica.
Yes. Eaton headed engineering for what was originally called the “Small Family Car” from 1973, and he continued to coordinate it after it became a multi-division project in 1975–1976. That eventually earned him a promotion to VP of Advanced Product and Manufacturing Engineering Staff in 1982.
This car also has the vertical HVAC and radio setup, which I think the Citation retained through the whole run; that wasn’t added with the Citation II.
The 1985’s had a totally different dashboard. Something I never saw in person but have seen evidence online, actually through CC comments. Really strange to redesign a car dashboard for one model year. There’s probably more of a story I haven’t learned yet.
Hmm. You’re right, it is different, but I don’t think it’s totally different. It looks like what they did was to borrow the center stack module from the 1982–1984 Oldsmobile Omega. There were a couple of different dashboard variations for the four cars; with some of them, it’s really easy to see how the pieces were rearranged. For instance, the Skylark dash had the vertical slots to the right of the instrument panel, but it had a vertical HVAC module in the left one with a vent in the right slot (which looks rather clumsy, since it’s only about three-fourths the size of the slot it’s in), with the radio underneath.
At the start of the 1985 model year, there was talk that Chevrolet might keep the Citation II a while longer, beyond 1985. Since Pontiac and Oldsmobile had dropped out already, I assume Chevrolet and Fisher Body looked at what existing pieces they could shuffle around to “freshen” it without incurring additional tooling expenses.
Good observation. I wasn’t honestly familiar with the other X-car dashboards.
As I think about it, Chevy seemed on a different train than the other GM’s in the 1980s. Dumped the Malibu earlier, dumped the Celebrity earlier, late to the N and W body cars, no H body car ever, and kept the B body.
Here’s the 1984 Omega dash next to a 1985 Citation II. The instrument panels and plastic “faces” are different, but you can see from this view how it’s basically putting a different cover over the same center stack slots, with the vents at the top, the radio in the middle, and the HVAC panel below. The different instrument panel faces I think are pretty trivial from a manufacturing investment standpoint (it’s just a matter of making different sets of molded plastic pieces that attach over the same hardware). It’s actually rather clever how they arranged it — there was clearly some flexibility about the positions of certain pieces, and it gave them several variations that looked more different than they actually were.
Never noticed this. The redesigned dash for the Omega baffled me at the time, as it looked cheaper and less Oldsmobile-ish then the original 1980 dash. The original Citation dash by contrast had a dated ’70s look to it and also had the unpopular vertical radio slot that couldn’t accommodate Delco’s new larger panel radios. I’m guessing when the new Citation dash was greenlighted they were expecting these to be sold through 1986.
Yeah. Did get a bit of “americanizing”.
My buddy had a poop brown Citatation-4 cylinder, auto. It served its purpose reliably and unspectacularly until he got rid of it around ’88. Decent fuel mileage. Comfortable. It easily fit four guys in their early 20s on road trips. What else can one expect from a car-appliance?
You call it DUMPY but look at it – Audi is right now today trying to sell an A7 as “cool” but it’s nothing but an evolution of this very car.
My neighbor bought a new 1981 5 door Citation. It went back to the dealer numerous times with various issues and recalls.
One issue was the hatch back. As the last photo shows, the gap between the bottom of the hatch and the top of the tailights was at least .200″ or 5mm different, left to right, on his car. The top and side gaps were fine. It was engineered into the car.
The dealer said “Sorry there’s nothing we can do, it can’t be adjusted out !”
He traded it off after about 2 years on another GM product.
This ‘limited edition’ is the only Citation I’ve ever seen here. It seems to do fine. Ten years ago it did, anyway.
When the CEO of a company says their customer’s expectations are too high, the game is over.
My father in law, who viewed cars as appliances and shopped mainly on price, bought an end of the year 1984 Citation II at an incredible discount. A 5 door V-6, it really wasn’t too bad. Quicker, tighter, and no worse in the fit and finish department than my mother in law’s Ford Granada. Typical GM – they sort out most of the problems on a particular car just before pulling the plug.
We’ve read about how car magazines raved over the X cars in 1979-80, only to issue apologies years later when the extent of the fiasco became apparent.
What was the “secret sauce” in those early press vehicles that wasn’t in the general population of X cars? Of course, they were more meticulously assembled than their run-of-the-mill brethren, but were there differences in suspension components, brake materials, engine tuning, etc.?
I think it was actually kind of the opposite.
Early magazine road tests are based on long-lead press previews, typically held well in advance of public introduction and then “embargoed” until a later date. The cars the magazine people drive at the press previews are pre-production or early production vehicles, often with various minor details that aren’t quite sorted or finalized. As I understand it, the cars that are available to drive (which are not necessarily the same as the ones in the glossy photos) may be crudely finished engineering test cars with mismatched trim bits and some mechanical specifications that the engineers admit they’re still tweaking.
The magazine veterans know this, and they make allowances for it. It’s like going to visit someone while they’re in the midst of renovating their house — if there’s still plastic sheeting on things and your host says, “Don’t mind the dust, we’re still finishing up,” you’re not going to get too concerned with the sawdust on the floor. If you point out that there’s still a hole in the plaster, they’re probably going to say, “Oh, yeah, we just haven’t had a chance to patch that up yet, but we’ll get to it before the housewarming party.” (For instance, Car and Driver did note in their preview test that all the cars they drove seemed to lock their rear brakes awfully early, but at that stage, there was no obvious reason to worry about it, and the issue involved details that it was pretty reasonable for the engineers to still be working out at that stage.)
The other side of it is that long-lead previews are usually held on a closed course or manufacturer proving ground. Proving grounds are great for manufacturers, because you can get an awful lot of development testing done without taking your prototypes out on public roads and risking some kind of deadline-blowing disaster. The dilemma they can pose is that relying on them can create a kind of “teaching to the test” bias, where vehicles perform well in the specific conditions that are present on the various proving ground facilities, but stumble in the real world when they run into some problem that wasn’t on the test. This can be borne out in preview drive articles: The press cars may handle beautifully on the proving grounds, where they were developed, and then fall all over themselves on real roads.
From 1975 until mid 1980, my Dad was the fleet and lease manager at the local Chev-Olds emporium. I well remember the introduction of these cars as well the expectations, and later disappointment, that came with them. Its hard to imagine the hype that surrounded the X car today.
I worked at the dealership weekends and summers, helping to PDI and prep cars among other shop related tasks. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the damage these vehicles did to GM’s reputation, both with customers and dealer staff. The safety issues didn’t become apparent until later but the quality issues were apparent right from the first one that arrived in mid ’79. Leaks, driveabilty issues, fit and finish, and just a general cheap feel. I recall the service manager saying these cars required more shop hours to reach a point where they were presentable to customers than any other line by far. Followed by an argument from the GM warranty rep…
It didn’t help that for the first 6 months or so the only cars available were fully optioned expensive models, all sold at full sticker plus. As the problems piled up the warranty rep dug in and many long time customers were alienated, most never to return. When the rest of the “80 line was introduced that fall it became apparent that both the full size and intermediate lines had been badly cheapened the exodus began, both customers and dealership staff. First my Dad, then then the top salesman who had been there since the ’60s, then the service manager and so on. All of these people were old school professionals who understood that customer service was what sold cars and happy customers were your best advertising.
All were replaced by people who embodied every negative stereotype of slimeball dealership employees you can think of. There were reasons other than the product, but even today the sight of one of these reminds me of those days. Most of the good people, and a lot of the customers as well, ended up at the Honda dealer. My Dad went a different route, and his first company car was a 1980 Honda Accord with a 5 speed. He said at the time that it made a Citation look like a oxcart in comparison.
These cars were truly GM’s, and Chevrolet’s in particular, poison chalice
I worked for a GM store just before the belly-up experience. One day, the zone rep came to see us. He yelled, screamed and told us we were bad employees for not being good sales people. In his mind, GM’s problem was not product, it was a bad sales force.
Not surprisingly, you’ve added some key insights into the issues with the X cars, as in the rear brake linings. I did not know about that. Oddly, the four 1980 Skylarks that had been bought for the tv station I worked for did not seem to have the brake issue, but they had been specially ordered with every possible HD option and with wider wheels and tires. Maybe that included different linings?
All four had the 2.8 and automatic; when I became the general manager in 1981, I had my pick of the litter for my use. I drove them all and was rather surprised at how much variation their was in their acceleration. Of course I picked the fastest one, and it really did pull pretty hard on full throttle, revving and shifting higher than the others. But the curious X-car variation on torque steer was always an odd sensations as I sprinted on the on-ramp of the I-10 every morning; rather than the steering wheel wanting to pull one direction, the whole front of the car just pulled one way (to the left, IIRC), a symptom of the too flexibly mounted subframe and the steering gear being mounted to it. Very odd, but manageable.
I’ve said this before, but it really did feel like the Skylarks were better built than the Citation. Of course it had better interior materials. But for years I would see more Skylarks than the other X-cars around. Sadly, I have not seen an X car here for a few years now except the pristine Phoenix at the Malaise Car Show.
As to its looks, I feel a bit more charitable to the Citation. It was a rare expression of “form follows function” from GM, and I did tend to appreciate that. It could have benefited from a bit more grounding off at the edges, but this was during GM’s obsession with plane surfaces and sharp transitions.
As somebody who moonlighted a friends used car lot from ’89-95, I worked on a ton of these. Could change the steering rack in my sleep. And I agree, the Skylark did in fact seem better built than the others, with the possible exception of the Omega. Why? don’t know, but it could have to do with morale at the plant as much as anything. New Yorker’s are a proud breed.
Making sense of the brake problem is complicated because there were a lot of production variations. Initially, all X-cars had the original “41%” proportioning valves, non-finned rear drums, and “aggressive” rear linings. Finned drums were added in May 1979. At the same time, automatic cars switched to less-aggressive rear linings, although manual-shift cars did not. In August 1979, the later “27%” proportioning valves were added across the board, but stick shift cars still retained the aggressive rear linings, which GM later said was to help them meet the federal parking brake hill-holding requirement.
If the station’s 1980 Skylarks all had automatic transmission and were built after August 23, 1979 (that is, during the regular 1980 model year), they likely had what was basically the best-case scenario in terms of brakes: finned drums, less-aggressive linings, more restrictive proportioning valves.
The NHTSA still got some complaints about later cars built like that, which may have been due to — you guessed it — poor quality control. The NHTSA contractor’s report found that the “27%” valves were consistently less restrictive than they were supposed to be, and concluded that their nominal value really should have been more like 33%. At the same time, the original “41%” valves tended to be a bit more restrictive (lower-percentage) than their nominal value. So, if someone had their car recalled to replace the “41%” valves with the “27% percent” ones, they might really be trading 40% valves for 37% ones, which was not much of an improvement, especially if they retained the aggressive linings.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I strongly suspect that these cars were ordered later in the year. I never experienced any hint of rear wheel lockup, although I don’t remember having to hit the brakes really hard ever either.
I should probably explain for the record what the proportioning valve percentages meant. These cars used fixed-ratio proportioning valves, which limited hydraulic pressure to the rear brakes above a certain threshold. A lower percentage value was more restrictive. Less pressure at the rear wheels meant less risk of rear lockup.
The original valves were nominally 350 psi/41 percent, meaning that the rear drums received the same pressure as the front discs up to a line pressure of 350 psi; above that, they would get 350 psi plus 41 percent of anything over 350 psi. So, for example, with 500 psi at the master cylinder, the rear brakes would get 350 psi + (500 – 350) x 0.41 = 411.5 psi. The later proportioning valves were nominally 350 psi/27 percent, so with 500 psi at the master, the rear brakes would be limited to 390.5 psi.
Where the quality control problems came in was that the proportioning valves often had a higher-than-nominal proportioning point (meaning they didn’t start limiting rear brake pressure until a higher line pressure than they were supposed to) and a higher slope percentage (meaning they didn’t limit rear brake pressure as much as they were supposed to). The NHTSA contractor felt the 350/27% valves should probably have had nominal values of 380 psi/33%. With 500 psi at the master cylinder, a 380 psi/33% valve would give 420 psi at the rear brakes, which was actually higher than the the original “350 psi/41%” valve!
Because the X-cars had diagonally split brake systems, there were actually two proportioning valves per car; this was normal and fine. What was less fine was that the pressure limits of the right and left valves were often significantly different — the NHTSA tests found left-right variations of up to 5 percentage points. Premature rear lockup is bad, but what’s even worse is if one rear wheel locks while the other is still rolling, which can make the car directionally unstable. Some amount of production variation is hard to avoid, but 5 percentage points seems like a lot.
Speaking of brake proportioning in the X cars, was this the first time GM used a split-diagonal system? As you pointed out the X cars had 2 proportioning valves (plainly visible screwed into the 4 port master cylinder the cars used) and it’s easy to see where variations in the valves could cause premature lock-up on only one rear wheel. Not an issue on a vehicle with a conventional (at the time) front/back split system with one proportioning valve controlling both rear brakes.
I do recall reclining seatbacks being optional – separate option for driver and passenger side. You could order them even with the bench seat, which would result in separated seatbacks but a full-width seat cushion (with the center tray seen here starting in 1981, since there was no seatbelt for that position). I’m not positive reclining seats were offered in 1980 but they were by 1982; our ’82 Phoenix had recliners on both sides. The pivot point was a few inches higher than it should have been, which became uncomfortable if you reclined them more than a small bit. 1983 and later X bodies had modified bench seats with separate headrests similar to those in the A bodies. X cars with bucket seats from ’80-82 were basically the same as the bench seats with the center section removed, but from ’83 onward were redesigned and now much different compared to the bench seats, similar to those in the ’83 J and F bodies with more side bolstering and a lower recline pivot point.
The 1980 and 1981 cars were available with a recline function on the passenger side, but not on the driver’s side; Car and Driver was *very* salty about that. The 1982 cars belatedly added the option of a driver’s side recliner. For whatever weird reason, Pontiac made you buy the driver and passenger side ones separately, but Chevrolet packaged them both together.
Of all the things to push back on or avoid fixing, rear brake linings on a brand new car without rust or other significant wear has to be one of the cheaper and easier things to correct/replace, even if it was in the hundreds of thousands. Far cheaper than losing customers for life for sure.
This thing looks like a highly preserved and always garaged specimen originally sold in Arvada (north of Denver), for once appearing to be sold by perhaps local heirs apparently in Aurora (east Denver) rather than just towed to the junkyard. I doubt the trunk has ever seen a load any heavier or bulky than half a dozen bingo cards.
Far cheaper than losing customers for life for sure.
I believe the majority of GM executives at this time still believed their customers were for life regardless of the crap they were served despite much evidence to the contrary.
My late maternal grandfather and his son, my late uncle, sure had that ingrained response to only buy from GM no matter what. Thankfully I did not inherit that gene.
I’ll agree that the Citation wasn’t the handsomest car ever built, but I’d never say it was ugly. I don’t think it’s any more or less attractive than the Nova it replaced. This could be my small hatchback bias showing, but if a Citation had shown up in my driveway back then (before all of the quality issues became known), I wouldn’t have been disappointed even as an 11 year old.
I will agree that the Citation was the blandest of the four X-bodies. In my opinion, the Phoenix, especially with the snowflake wheels, was the best looking. The Skylark if you didn’t like hatchbacks.
The final RWD Nova four-door sedan was a reasonably handsome car — kind of miraculously so, to my eyes, since in my estimation the 1968–1974 Nova had been beaten with every end of the ugly stick, twice.
However, my point was not to lambast the Citation for being ugly, but to say that its dowdiness seemed to signal a welcome willingness on the part of Chevrolet and GM to put function over form. Their previous small car efforts had been driven by styling, to their great cost. At some point early in the development process, Bill Mitchell had swept in and started going on about which Italian sports cars he wanted them to emulate, and of course every car designer in the universe loves Italian sports cars, so the concept renderings and styling clays would look great even though they weren’t terribly practical. Then, product planning reality would set in, much like a hangover, leaving cars that still looked pretty cool if you squinted a bit, but were built like motorized wheelbarrows and had almost completely lost sight of the original objectives.
Part of why that kept happening, I suspect, was that someone got nervous about making small sedans that were practical enough and roomy enough that they might tempt people out of bigger, more profitable models. With the Citation, Chevrolet had actually done just that: They built a midsize car in a compact package that was actually practical. If the Citation had been reasonably well-built, there would have been no real reason for choosing a Malibu instead (something even Chevrolet tacitly acknowledged by turning this platform into the A-body Celebrity). It was really immensely brave, and I give them a lot of credit for it.
The notchback versions of the X-cars did not really look any better, I think, and you could tell immediately that they were a sort of weird sidestep from what these cars were designed to be. To me, there are really two kinds of automotive ugliness: There’s senseless ugly, where an automaker does something bizarre or ghastly just to look different, or because the original idea got so lost in translation that it’s no longer coherent, and there’s honest ugly, where there are aesthetic compromises that make a vehicle legitimately better at what it’s supposed to do. The Citation five-door fell into the latter category.
And you could even roll the rear windows down in the Citation! Not far, but still…
This also broke twice in the year in my Citation. I remember coming from Gaspesia, 500 miles away, in thé rain with my two children and the rear window wide open…
The ne plus ultra of Honest Ugly was the 1998 Fiat Multipla MPV. The Multipla (which wasn’t sold here, but I nonetheless encountered on the street at one point) was a weird, ugly thing, and if you rated cars solely on looks, it was completely appalling, a real WTF moment. If you were brave enough to look at it more closely, to walk around and poke at it or to sit in it and drive it, it became clear that it was actually quite brilliant, a genuine city car with room for six and outstanding all-around visibility that made it easy to park and maneuver. Just about every weird design feature had a clear practical purpose. It ended up being too odd for a lot of European MPV buyers, but my understanding is that it developed a loyal cult following that felt (mostly correctly!) that it was outstandingly good at most everything it had been designed to do. It’s hard to hate a vehicle with that kind of ugliness unless you just reject the idea that a car might have some purpose other than looking like a sexy sports car.
Not knowing any better I bought a very low mileage used Citation four door, yes it was obviously a basic cheap car but I / we thought it looked okay and was comfortable to drive .
4 banger Iron Duke and slush box, it didn’t take long to begin failing almost everything, what a shame .
-Nate
“It’s the first Chevy of the 80s…it’s the first Chevy of its kind…
Chevy Citaaaaay-tion!”
I always wanted a car that could tow a boat with the rear wheels removed!
Ha!
And as a bonus, you lose those pesky lockup-prone rear brakes!
“One day, it was replaced by a Corsica” Now theres a step sideways.
As a little kid who only was a passenger and had no information besides what the family drove for cars (this was pre-internet), the Corsica seemed like a big improvement!
GM had very capable designers, engineers, and production workers. All of them were hamstrung bu GM management, which was filled with arrogant people, some of whom remembered GM’s market dominance of the 1960s and acted as though GM still was dominant. They were driven to please shareholders, not customers. They acted with animosity towards the people who designed and built cars. These are the reasons that GM effectively went out of business in 2007 (ish) and had to be recreated as a new corporation.
Evan, it was a confluence of factors.
From the outside, it does appear that arrogance was a problem. It was–it was evident from the inside too.
From the inside though, there was another, perhaps even bigger problem. “Boot-licking”. People said/did what the boss wanted. Another problem was lack of diversity. I don’t mean race/gender/ I mean that GM’s success had closed off people to seeing outside of GM.
And the “boss” was often NOT arrogant. They were simply doing what was in THEIR best interest, financially and career-wise. And THAT was the root problem, IMO: don’t disturb the gravy train for senior leadership!!!
Change is hard. Change is risky. Especially when you work at the most successful company ever! By the 1970s, this was longer true, but it was not that far away from 1950-1965, when in fact, GM was arguably the greatest corporation on earth.
I started working at GM in the mid-1990s, after the dark days of the early 1990s. Not from Michigan. Not from the auto industry, though I was an auto enthusiast. I’d see ideas and vehicles that were mediocre hailed as “the next best thing”.
I still remember the day went to the Truck Manufacturing Validation center for the first time, to make sure my boss’ presentation (which I was responsible for) to an Executive went smoothly–I pre-scoped the conference room that was booked to ensure the charts and layouts would work, to make sure my boss presentation went smoothly.
This was a facility was a converted, smaller, assembly plant that had been closed in the early 1990s. I’m pretty sure they made S-10s and/or Blazer II/Typhoons.
I was blown away. I been in offices (I was an assembly plant manufacturing/industrial engineer)) before, but this place was straight out Hollywood. Hospital clean conveyors–to simulate manufacturing/assembling new future models, and identify any issues. This is always done–but it is one thing to do in a “monster garage” (that was, and still is, the norm), another to have a moving line, to simulate the actual process in a plant. All the equipment–it was expensive.
Yet the conveyors were not being used. Conference rooms straight out of Hollywood.
And yet, out in “the world”, beyond the Flint-Pontiac corridor (that included suburban Detroit!), we were peddling mediocre Grand Ams, while Honda had Accords, and mediocre 97/98 Luminas, that were not as good as 92 Tauruses. And a lot of people around me, especially higher on the food chain, appeared to really believe that it was “unfair bias” against the Grand Am, which they believed was as good as or better than an Accord. In general, GM’s cars were often mediocre,or over-priced, or both.
On that day, I realized we, GM, were the walking dead–finished, and we did not know it. Our leaders were in delusion. Not tomorrow, not next year, but one day, kaput….
Or so I thought. I would soon get promoted, and start working in Truck Manufacturing HQ, and my next stunning realization would be that “the enemy is us”. I would see firsthand the decisions made by corporate that were directly responsible for many challenges plants faced–that I had personally faced as a plant manufacturing engineer.
Because, at the end, the buck stops in the assembly plant. All the short cuts, cost saving upstream–the plant is where we pay it all back–and more (in manufacturing terms).
I would spend over two decades, with others of course, fighting to try to clean up our little corner. Sometimes we succeeded, often we did not. Eventually, I realized that pushing too hard sometimes was shooting my future in the foot. And I blamed our senior leadership in general and CEOs in particular. They made a lot of money, and were not willing to jeopardize their (excessive, given their performance, IMO) generous earnings–and that mentality pervaded the leadership. Don’t rock the boat too much… look away…
Even so, we made a lot of progress 2000-2006. A lot. Every launch I worked on was better. he 2008 Malibu was the best example. It was a pre-bankruptcy product–FINALLY, a credible competitor. It was an honest GOOD car.
It was later than it should have been by about 2-3 model years, but I was there in the manufacturing of it–and I saw people choose the right thing, even if if “cost” more up front. Minor things, but doable. There was nothing “Break-thru” about the 2008 Malibu–no major innovations. Nothing “better” than Camry/Accord. But we executed the details well, and the result was a car that was, finally, for the first (and sadly, LAST) time we had a peer to the Camry/Accord!
Unfortunately, it was too little, too late. The financial crisis torpedoed the Titanic. The bail-out, an EXTERNAL event, forced GM to make the hard decisions that everyone knew were needed since 1990. And yet, like an obese older person with heart issues, GM just couldn’t make those hard choices–because there was no guarantee they would work, and if they failed,the gravy train would end–for both senior execs, and on a lesseer scale, senior UAW officials.
I liked your brief comment and wanted to give you one (former) GMer’s take. Have a good Memorial Day.
Sounds like this article is written by a typical GM hater.
If you think the car is ugly, that’s your opinion based only on aesthetics.
I wouldn’t consider it GM’s worst mistake, either.
As the owner of 4 X cars over the years, including 1 that was a 1981 model with the 4 cylinder engine that I drove until it was over 20 years old and had over 200,000 miles on it, I never considered these to be bad cars.
I’ve heard it all and listened to it all over the years and I remain unmoved by the comments and remarks by those who believe they are authority figures just because they publish an article on the internet.
Though in this case the author has done more research than the typical X car hater author.
Still, not everything stated is completely correct.
An example of which is why the power steering rack was moved to the engine cradle in 1982 and off the firewall. There wasn’t any “slop in the steering” – there was sometimes noise transmitted to the passenger compartment when the car was stopped and the steering wheel was turned and some owners complained about it.
Doing running production changes is not an uncommon thing on any car line.
And switching the fuel injection in 1982 on the 4 cylinder engine was part of meeting increasing emissions standards. Every car with a carburetor will eventually have some kind of driveability problem. It’s the nature of the beast.
“Early FWD A-bodies were subject to many of the same safety recalls as the late X-bodies, but being new and not obviously related, they were able to escape the X-cars’ bad publicity.”
Really? OK, like which recalls and safety issues? I never heard that one before.
I’ve done by own research over the years to figure out why people dislike these cars so much, and it appears to be mostly word of mouth complaining.
Though there is some truth to what is stated in the article, these cars aren’t nearly as bad as they have been portrayed. I certainly didn’t have all of these problems over the years.
The NHTSA was wrong for jumping the gun and suing GM over the rear brake lockup issue – which yes is attributable to the rear brake linings having too high of a coefficient of friction on the earliest 1980 production models, and basing their “findings” on anecdotal evidence. This is why GM won the lawsuit. Yes, GM could have handled the situation better than they did. I for one never experienced anything like that on my cars.
I could go on and on making corrections to this article, but I won’t.
And production figures did drop off over time, but consider the new from Chrysler competition in 1981, the competition from within GM from the new for 82 J cars and A cars, and easing gas prices as we got further into the 80s.
800,000 Citations were sold in 1980. Over 1 million X cars in 1980 alone. It was a new design. 3 factories running 3 shifts per day, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There were bound to be some issues when you’re selling every car you can as fast as you can make them.
These cars should have been released in September 1979 but they released them early, in April 1979, due to the second gas shortage/oil embargo which prompted GM to release them earlier than planned. Some of the pre-production issues weren’t worked out yet. GM should have held off but they didn’t. Sales took off immediately because of the market conditions at the time.
It isn’t like there aren’t lots of other cars out there by other automakers that don’t have recalls or problems. Like 2025 and 2026 Hyundais that brake unexpectedly due to some kind of software issue and cause accidents. Or Hondas with Takeda airbags that spray shrapnel in people’s faces when they go off. Or Toyota Camrys in the mid 2000s with 3.0L V6 engines that have oil gelling that clog the oil passages and ruin the engines. Lots of cars have problems and issues.
Bottom line, they weren’t perfect, but they weren’t as awful as the magazine articles and online authors would have you believe.
I agree with a lot of what you said. Keep in mind, writers, reporters, like to spice things up, and build on perceptions, myths, real, or imagined.
I made a longish comment above regarding the fact that the X-car offered a combination of creature comforts in a FWD car that were not commonly available in 1979.
Other manufacturers took X-cars, tore then down, analyzed, and made sure to avoid these mistakes.
The X-car is an easy target for the uninformed.
Thanks for the memories! I ordered an 81 Citation 2.5 4-speed from the Chevy Dealership I was a service advisor at for my parents. The maroon cloth interior just like the featured car was a $28 upgrade IIRC. Other options included: stereo, gage package and chrome for the side glass.Some dealer employees thought it was a V6 when I drove it, it really didn’t go that bad with the Manuel tranny! Not so much on cars equipped with the Turbo Hydramatic 125. Our family had it for 11 years and the only problem we had was having to replace the valve cover gasket every year or 2, I tried different gaskets and sealers but this problem persisted on GM cars until they started using aluminum valve covers .My Parents averaged over 30 MPG on a trip to Canada. We certainly got our moneys worth on that car! The attached picture shows it being prepared for delivery at the dealership.
The judge presiding over the NHTSA lawsuit on the rear brakes took an unconscionably long time to reach a verdict, and it was the wrong one. I still remember and despise his name: Thomas Penfield Jackson. He was a perfect tool for the anti-regulatory Reagan administration.
I wasn’t aware that Judge Jackson had this case. I remember him for a different reason. He presided (at first) over the Microsoft antitrust case of 1998. He spoke of Microsoft in an openly critical manner outside court. Among other things, he said Bill Gates had a Napoleonic concept of himself. Because of his comments, his verdict was vacated. The case was sent back to the lower courts and assigned to Judge Colleen Kotar-Kotelly, who refrained from ordering Microsoft to be broken up.
I’m not a great fan of Microsoft and Bill Gates, and I was disappointed that Judge Jackson wasn’t more discreet.
https://abcnews.com/Technology/story?id=99269&page=1
https://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/06/28/microsoft.judge/
My mom purchased a new 1981 Citation 4-door like the one featured here in late 1980. It was silver, not then a ubiquitous color, with a maroon all-vinyl interior. I didn’t think of it as an unattractive car at the time and preferred this body style over the club coupe variant and the Buick, Olds and Pontiac coupes with their nearly upright backlights.
I helped her spec out the car, find suitable examples, and negotiated the price. We selected the V6, automatic transmission, air conditioning, power steering and brakes, and an AM radio.
Just before she took delivery, I was able to get the keys and check the car out on the dealer’s remote lot. This was the era of arguably the lowest point in domestic car build quality and “fits and finishes.” There were numerous articles at the time providing extensive checklists for inspecting new vehicles.
I took the advice seriously and have never (before or since) checked out a car so thoroughly before purchase. The only flaw evident was weak struts for the rear hatch, but they were able to hold the hatch fully open.
Having the second-year car, she avoided most of the problems recounted here. I do recall that she did experience the power steering pump weakness in cold weather. Also in later years, she had to use a broomstick to hold the hatch open. The car was garaged and not driven all that much, with about 50,000 miles accumulated over the 12 years that she had it.
A large utility fleet I worked for bought a few of Citations in ’80-’81. They were pretty miserable, I remember a lot of CV joint boot failures, the 2.8L constantly throwing belts, which to add insult to injury were quite difficult to replace and adjust properly, early Rochester Vari-Jet carburetor driveability issues, and constantly fogged windows in the 5 door hatch models because the defroster blower wasn’t powerful enough. By 1984 customers were scared to death of the Citation (and were buying Celebrities in droves) so GM Fleet started dumping Citation II’s on fleet customers. We got a bunch of these later Citations, all 5 doors with TBI 2.5L’s and painted in a bunch of weird colors like lemon yellow and dark red. Those Citation II’s were great fleet cars, very reliable, durable interiors, seemed most all the bugs have finally been worked out. Except the defroster…
I remember when the X-cars were released in 1979, the auto-rags were beside themselves exclaiming how wonderful they were. I test drove a Buick Skylark and liked it; I ordered it with the four cylinder and the four-speed transmission. When it finally arrived, I test drove it and was surprised at the amount of torque steer-I thought the front wheels were out of alignment. Too make a long story short, it was the worst automobile I ever owned and after the Vega and Opel I had that is saying something. I have to wonder if the cars GM furnished to the press were hand built or carefully tuned and adjusted to eliminate (or at least minimize) the issues with the torque steer and brakes; in the road tests I read about the X-cars, I never came across and complaints about these issues. The
skylark was the last GM car I ever owned.
Yes, the press cars were ringers.
I took a picture of this Citation (II, I think) at a local wrecking yard. Yes, this was this year, and yes, they are the only one in town who’ll hold onto anything that old… And undesirable. Anyway, the reason I took it was because it was a dead ringer for the car I most remember my grandparents driving. Blue on blue, only theirs was a 4, this was a V-6; theirs had AC, which this didn’t, so at least I could perish any thoughts of bringing it home for sentimental reasons. And that would be the only reason I’d even think of it.
As was pretty well covered, to the extent the Citation is memorable, it’s for the wrong reasons. Not that I have a bad impression of Grandpa’s. The opposite, if anything. I don’t remember many complaints; it was fine as basic transportation. And that’s the best you could get from it – if you were lucky. It definitely wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t particularly comfortable, it wasn’t great to drive… It’s one of those cars. If you have good memories of it, they’re because of the people and circumstances around it, not the car itself.
Not sure why the photo didn’t come through – trying again…
After two days, I found there was no horn on my car. They forgot to install them at thé plant! On day five, my new car manual shifter stalled in fourth gear. It was just thé beginning of a tumultuous relationship… I never bought another american car.
I was given a 1982 Citation with only six miles on it. My employer bought a fleet of them. After a year, they were all replaced because they were junk. Except mine. It had a special contract requiring that we keep it longer. Within that first two years, the Citation proved itself to be the biggest lemon on wheels. From the first week when the chromed plastic flaked away from the gray plastic beneath it, to the final moment when it stranded my boss on I-25 outside Silver Plume, that car had more problems than anything I had ever experienced.
My Citation was identical to the one highlighted here, with the horizontal 1982 grille.
I have in earlier reviews, detailed many of the quality problems I had during the two years I was assigned, so I won’t repeat all that here.
Thank you Aaron for this work. Even decades later, I find it unbelievable how bad this car was. Reading others comments about our negative attitude towards these cars as mistaken is a shock. I clearly documented each breakdown, each manufactured flaw, and had to defend myself from my supervisor’s disbelief until she took the Citation from me for a week of driving.
She dumped from our fleet after it broke down, leaving her stranded alongside the expressway, missing our annual audit at Keystone, and ruining her week, just as it repeatedly ruined mine over the previous two years. I wasn’t glad it happened to her. The Citation wasn’t a car anyone should have been forced to drive.
I’ve never trusted GM again.
When the lease ran out on my dad’s 78 Buick he looked at an 81 Citation. It was silver blue over blue cloth, an Iron Duke, automatic, air, remote controlled mirror and an AM radio. All the others were loaded.
I didn’t get a good feeling so we backed out of the deal. He ended up with a 77 Corolla SR5!
Later, a coworker bought a 2 year old 1980 model used. It was loaded with everything and had the V6 and automatic. I drove it quite a few times and it felt very disconnected. While the V6 felt plenty potent for in town driving, every jab downward on the throttle made it feel like the driver’s seat was a buggy with the area in front of the dash being a horse. He drove it i belive 3 years trouble free. Interesting cars, another case of GM not finishing what they started. We found that to be true in our last GM product, our 2018 Sierra. The cylinder deactivation system was a joke and then of course the stupid half baked transmission- both issues at the high mileage of only 40k.
This machine is arguably the worst of America, writ large.
What was then usually the world’s biggest corporation could only produce a dull-looking, all-iron pushrod-engined un-innovative fixed seat(!) uncompetitive – with world practice – not-great-driving car. A thoroughgoing mediocrity, and a not-too-well built one at that. Just consider that tiny Autobianchi had made the FWD five-door hatchback 15 years earlier, in 1964.
Incredibly, the company had the resources in its own operation – in Europe, hell, even Oz – to do far better, but it did not pay any heed. I doubt it asked.
Arrogant, and spectacularly ignorant, unaware of a world map outside itself.
This rather gawky looker should instead have looked like a Lancia Beta, have driven as well as one, and been blessed with really decent quality (and without the Lancia’s hideous rust, it must be said!)
I think the thing is not so much a sin as it is symptom, and at that, a symptom of an entirely preventable disease that finally killed the company by 2008.
I am honestly baffled by the assertions that the X-car — a basically sound package, bar some fairly niggling complaints, marred by frequently horrendous quality — should have been more like the Lancia Beta, a clever concept marred by some niggling complaints and legendarily horrendous corrosion problems.
The comparison of the Citation to the Beta is not altogether inapt, but suggesting that the Citation’s problem was that it wasn’t enough like the Lancia strikes me like listening to someone talk at length about how they blew up their life with alcohol and saying, “Wow, that’s rough, buddy, it sounds like you need a stiff drink.”
I keep saying this, but if the Citation had been reasonably dependable, its performance and chassis would have served well enough for the large majority of its owners. (The sporty Citation X-11, with the H.O. V-6 and completely retuned suspension, was successful in SCCA Showroom Stock, even though the early ones were marred by the steering rack/subframe compliance issue and quite a bit of torque steer.) The remit of the Citation was inexpensive domestic transportation, and it would have been eminently fit for purpose despite the niggling complaints if not for the frequently deplorable build quality and alarming string of recalls. As a *design*, as a package, it was basically fine, especially considering that it cost about $1,000 less than a contemporary Honda Accord, which was a lot smaller inside.
Also, GM did NOT have other, better FWD small cars elsewhere when these were designed. As I said in the text, Opel’s first FWD Kadett arrived months AFTER the X-cars were already on sale.
I get your point that the X would’ve passed into vaguely-fond remembrance as once-good transport if it had been well-made. My point is that this dully-engineered – and arguably badly-so, with the sub-frame and brake nonsense – was produced by the biggest company in the world, potentially an engineering powerhouse. The Kadett was clearly being developed while the X was, and the result was a stylish and competent player in its class, with some driving verve to it. Honda was tiny compared to GM, yet made the far nicer Accord. There was no chance the huge GM looked to anywhere other than itself, and even then, not as far as its own German arm. Myopic, hubristic nonsense, wholly unacceptable from such a world leader.
The Beta’s just a point of comparison for size and concept (and shape), and I do understand the Citation couldn’t have had all the expensive tech it had. But some could have been there!
This must a been in climate, controlled, storage for a long spell.
When I was in college, circa 1980, I test drove a Citation “Club Coupe.” Having been raised on small European cars, it was one of the first American cars that made sense to me. Aside from the vertical radio orientation, and the very basic fittings, everything seemed more than adequate. The space utilization and visibility alone were major breakthroughs for American packaging engineers. It was sad to see the bickering from GM that followed — at a time when most Americans were now well-versed on the utter sanity of Japanese small cars, which only revealed further the disconnect with which American companies handled their homework. Sigh. Thanks Aaron!
I came to North America in early 1980s. As I grew up in China in 1970s even the information was very limited, we all knew America was car country with its mighty automobile industry. However, when I arrived in Canada, i was shocked on how mediocre US cars were. By 1980s China already had many Toyota and Nissan cars running around, they were all better than those US cars on the streets. Among the worst were X body, K car and Tempo which were supposed to compete for Civic, Accord, Corolla and Sentra. We know the results. I was shocked to know the GM chairman at in public claimed the X body car was “ very sophisticated “ car, didn’t he even drive a Honda Accord? Anyway, we have been told the US auto industry failures were due to auto unions, I think the GM management and engineering should get a larger share of the blame.
True, but like so many disasters, there wasn’t just one thing that went wrong, but an entire chain of mistakes that led to the disaster that decimated the US auto industry. Mismanagement? Check! Union greed? Check! Poor quality? Check! All of the entities involved were responsible for the US auto industry’s decline versus Japanese, and later, Korean competition.
Now the Red Chinese are threatening to complete the destruction of the US auto industry, by dumping products that have been heavily subsidized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to win market share and eliminate domestic competition. They tried it with a different kind of car, by being the low bidder for new subway cars for the MBTA, Boston’s subway operators, and the cars are years late, riddled with defects and far over budget. But it’s too late now, the Red Chinese are building the cars in Springfield, MA, and cancelling the contract will cost dozens of American jobs if the Springfield plant closes, not to mention the delays in getting new subway cars in service to replace cars that are over fifty (50) years old in many cases!
Are you trying to be overtly racist with “red chinese” or do you just enjoy being derogatory to an entire people? How do you describe the Mexican auto industry and their workers? the Germans? the Japanese? “Ugly American” is a stereotype as well that unfortunately seems to have legs in some parts.
It is difficult to blame the Chinese for the alleged wrongs you are accusing them in relation to motor vehicles when Ford and GM are both building cars IN CHINA and importing them to the United States with Lincoln (Nautilus) and Buick (Envision) badges on them and seem to try to advertise them as very red white and blue. Pro-Tip: if you don’t want your competition to know or learn how they need to build to be better than your own product, don’t have them build your product. Or certainly don’t whine about the “threat” they now pose to your own company.
It’s even more difficult to blame the Chinese manufacturers when Ford is continually and actively as I write starting joint ventures in the US with Chinese manufacturers and along with Chrysler looking to unload manufacturing space to them or build product for them in Europe. Do they really think that will reduce competition?
It’s even more interesting when you see a number of the world’s manufacturers actually building products here in the United States that are inexpensive or at least well under the average transaction price (Corolla, Civic, various Hyundai and Kia models, and many more), while the US home team either can’t or won’t build anything on this soil to compete that isn’t a protected truck product that the greater American public can’t really for the most part afford any more. And don’t bother mentioning the Maverick, the car with the $19,999 teaser price that ballooned to $30k base price in less than four model years and is built in Mexico – so much for supporting the American worker as opposed to the American executive suite.
The Chinese are offering two things that none of the domestics apparently want anything to do with – 1. World Class EVs (described that way by Jim Farley, CEO of Ford – he stated he didn’t want to give back the Chinese brand test vehicle he drove around Detroit for 6 months (yes that just makes me want to run right out and buy a Ford EV…and we own two different domestic brand EVs currently.) and 2. Affordable vehicles. The reason for this is (and this may be a shock to you) that there is an entire world out there with many more people (and buyers) than those here in the United States. As far as the Chinese government “supporting” their home industries, sure. And the U.S. government now owns a part of Intel, tried to get ownership of 90% of Spirit Airlines, and seems quite willing to do whatever our oil industry needs to rake in record profits along with various other schemes that seem quite different than how I learned to define “free” market economy in high school.
The American manufacturers are welcome to step up their game. The Korean and Japanese manufacturers seem to have figured out how to produce affordable vehicles in the United States, why can’t the home team? Or is it that they won’t rather than can’t? I hear and see a lot of whining and complaining, but not a lot of doing. As our betters are fond of telling us, perhaps it’s time to pull up some bootstraps and get to work.
I can’t really see what the Chinese are offering that will decimate the domestic industry since I don’t think they build many full size pickup trucks. And our home industry does not seem to believe that there is any demand for smaller, more affordable and efficient vehicles than what they produce on our soil. After all, you can’t really consider all the imported product that Detroit ships across the ocean or across two land borders as genuinely “American”, can you? Detroit has been helping Mexico, Korea, China, perhaps Canada, and god knows where else to eat our lunch for decades. But maybe in a decade there WILL be a C-150 pickup or whatever that’s built in Nebraska or Oregon, and if it’s anywhere as good and reliable as my made in China Apple phone or my made in China HP laptop at half the price with no visible downside, well, nobody else seems to give a shit about me, why shouldn’t I buy the best option for myself? I already own four American branded and built cars currently, I think I’ve done my bit.
I was going to add to my comment, Jim, that arguably the greatest current example of US potential for greatness (ie: the opposite of GM and the Citation) is Tesla. Innovative, entreprenurial, world-leading, high quality, free-thinking, and, of course, industry-changing. (Damn shame it’s led by one of the very ugliest Americans ever made! Or, was that too always part of the American success story, namely, awful people of great vision and powers, let unleashed by unlimited capitalism? Question not for this site, I think).
Time for some COALs, surely, Mr K? Very curious as to how the Tesla has stacked up. By most accounts, they’re unfailingly excellent, and therefore, it must be said, a strong testament to the country they were invented (and usually made) in. Report for duty at once.
Frankly I’ve been struggling with not having any desire to feed the haters in any way and don’t wish to give freely of my time and work product to entertain or provide anything to those that are disagreeable to me although it does pain me as I do/did enjoy it. Yes I do owe a backlog of COALs (10? 12?, something like that), there have also been other significant pressures on my time at present preventing that continued endeavor currently. In one of my actual professional lives I’ve actually reduced much of my own exposure to a small curated group of other individuals with whom a similar wavelength exists and it has made things much more bearable (and enjoyable). Cutting out some of the cancer, as it were…Sad but necessary.
But as a short teaser, the blue one was excellent (and it was a first year example built during a big end of quarter “push” period). Zero unexpected issues for 3.5 years. No “failures”. Good fit and finish. No rattles. And good enough for us to have replaced it with a white 2024 version of the same model a bit over two years ago now, before Musk went completely off the rails and pretty much torpedoed much of a chance for a third one down the road in our driveway – it was too good a deal to pass up at the time, frankly, with tax benefits costing an end out of pocket expense of around $8000 to reset with a new car, new warranty, zero miles, and many upgrades. It is mainly (99%) my wife’s car and she loves it as a car.
The 2024 (while looking pretty much identical) has numerous changes under the skin and inside, most of whick would be not noticeable to most people but serve to make it a better car, quieter, more comfortable, safer, and just simply upgraded in almost every respect relative to the first one. This one (built in the new Texas factory instead of California) has been flawless. Zero issues. (As expected.)
There is much dislike for Mr. Musk, (A South African by birth I shall add), and almost all of it would seem to be entirely warranted by his actions, words, and apparently opinions, not due to his wealth. Not often can an individual do as much to completely alter public perception of his own product to the negative merely by their own persona and actions. I’ve long been on the record of not being enamored of the man as an individual but respectful of his accomplishments or at least the ability to get his employees to do as he wishes. No other car company has accomplished as much as quickly, never mind his other endeavors. Frankly I’d consider it almost embarrassing to be running one of the other “American” companies today and compare what they do vs what Tesla has accomplished. The others have literally all regressed.
There are by now enough Tesla owners out there that can’t all just be carrying Musk’s water for any reasonable person to have to admit that they are in general VERY good cars. In most every objective respect better than most any other (at least American and European) manufacturers offering competing products. Some may hate the minimalist interior, others may dislike things for being different superficially just to be different and won’t consider any reason beyond their own notions, and others are just plain (insert your own word here) and not willing to consider the possibility of something new perhaps actually being better – many or most having never driven one, usually not even sat in one and if so rarely for a semi-extended period of a week or more or a long roadtrip’s worth, and certainly never owned one, many so-called “journalists” included. Whatever. Are there maddening aspects of ownership? Sure, especially if/when jumping in/out of it when driving another car regularly due to those differences, vaguely similar to the differences in how Ford vs Chevy may do things and require a personal adjustment when swapping cars – not noticeable to my wife who almost exclusively drives if but more to me who fairly rarely pilots it. Reliability and assembly quality? Excellent. Power and economy? Virtually without peer. Charging network? Embarrassing that this had to be created by private industry and probably Musk’s masterstroke and simply far better than anything else out there by an exponential factor. Value for money? Triple yes, as you may recall we were seriously considering a Lexus RX when we test drove the Model Y the first time and almost immediatly concluded we would be chumps to buy the Lexus. 6 years later that has not changed.
If Musk didn’t turn out to be the way he turned out to be, there is little doubt that I’d be looking at one for myself too. I don’t know how many sales and profits his persona has cost his company (and his own personal wealth) but at this point I am one additional unit that has been lost, certainly at present, and likely at any time going forward. But notably that has little to do with the product itself (unlike the Chevy Citation post that we are commenting under.)
I seem to recall that these cars had a nasty tendency to shed their rear axles at speed, dropping the back end of the car onto the pavement, with disastrous results! That was one of the more egregious examples of GM’s quality problems as the eighties opened. Jim MacDonald’s comments, however, were an eye opener! Nothing sums up GM’s arrogance and isolation more than blaming the customer for expecting a high-quality product, and suggesting that “customer expectations were too high”! No wonder Toyota began to really eat GM’s breakfast, lunch and dinner at that time! GM still hasn’t recovered from their own arrogance and isolation, and will likely never again regain the market share they lost, thanks to the attitudes that leaders like Mr. MacDonald and Roger Smith displayed at the time.
“When I was in high school, the Citation was the kind of car a teenager might buy for $1,000…”
An ’84 Citation II was my high school ride in the early 1990s. Aaron’s statement above was spot-on, with my parents purchasing the car for me when I was 16 in 1992 for a mere $900. Mine had about 75k miles, if I recall correctly. Contrary to reputation of the eariler models, mine was actually an amazingly trouble-free vehicle, giving me zero issues in almost 3 years of very abusive teenage ownership. The Iron Duke was gutless, the torque steer was pronounced, and the design was butt-ugly…but it was roomy, economical, and unstoppable in the snow. It never left me stranded. I was grateful for my parents helping me get a car, but I can’t say I have any soft spot for the Citation even after all these years.
My Dad & Mom ordered a 1981 Buick Skylark Limited from the local dealership. Loaded with options. When it came in from the factory, I immediately noticed the horrible gaps between the body panels. Example: The edges of the hood scraped the inner edges of the front fenders. At the opposite extreme, you could stick a finger through gaps between the doors. It was a mess. Even when it was new, my Dad had to return the car to the dealer several times because it leaked engine oil, antifreeze and transmission fluid. The plastic escutcheon plate over the trunk lock was from an Olds Omega. It clearly said “Omega” on it. I don’t know how a production line worker could possible make the mistake of installing an Oldsmobile trim piece on a Buick, even if they were both made in the same factory. In the end, it didn’t matter because it was only glued onto the trunk lid and the adhesive gave out; the escutcheon fell off. The engine would stall in traffic until it heated up for about ten minutes. The only cure seemed to be running it on premium gasoline (which still doesn’t make any sense to me). Eventually, the headliner fell down over the driver seat. Nevertheless, my Dad and Mom kept the Skylark nearly twenty years. Mom finally sold it after my Dad died. It had only 23,000 miles on the odometer when she let it go. Nobody in the family has owned a GM car since then. Here it is, 46 years later, and I’m still bitching about that car!
The best part about this car is that its Wikipedia page currently says that it “needs more citations”.
Back in the bachelor days, a house mate bought a new Citation, 4-speed and V6. A while later, I bought my first new car, a Mazda 626.
I was chided for buying a “Jap car,” and told I should have bought American because I’d never easily get parts.
As it happened, he hit a deer and waited 5 months for a new grill. I stuffed a pheasant through my grill and had a new grill the next day.