Some people claim they recently saw Bigfoot, some saw Elvis, but nobody ever seems to snap a clear picture. Yet the Lazarus effect is real wherein a random species commonly thought extinct manages to rear its head and surprise the world’s population from time to time. Well, the other day I saw a Chevy Citation and managed to take a few pictures to prove it. Some may say this was the most successful car Chevrolet ever built. And it may well be, with the proviso that those “some” people are Toyota employees and this car was extremely successful in going a long way toward selling 22 million Toyota Camrys over the ensuing four-ish decades with over 13 million of those in the United States alone.
But let’s be magnanimous for the moment (we have time) and just stare slack-jawed in wonder at this amazing sight here in the year 2024 on a public road. An honest-to-goodness Chevrolet Citation from one of the first years of production, still apparently running under its own power and presumably by now over its initial teething troubles, such as they may have been.
Or maybe not, after all the car is parked in the overflow street outside of the junkyard, with its owner likely looking for something inside for their car.
Curbside Classic’s history is certainly well intertwined with the Citation; many a word has been penned on the subject, some of those by my own hand. Were they all ugly words? Certainly not! The idea behind the car itself was modern and inspired at the time (a front wheel drive car for the masses in the new decade!), the styling isn’t bad at all (and has stood up over time), and the fabled GM marketing machine certainly worked its magic to help push over 811,000 of these cars off the dealership’s lot in its first model year of 1980.
Alas, it all came to a halt too quickly, too soon, to the point that the second year’s sales crashing to a total of 413,000 (a number that would be cause for bonuses, raises, and promotions at most other makers) can only be considered a complete failure. It got worse from there with the cumulative sum total of the next four model years (’82-’85) only totaling 5000 more cars than that second year’s total.
I can’t quite decide the year of this one, the amber in the taillights tell me it’s a very early car, yet I believe the grille (further below) is from at least 1982. (Edit: It appears to be a 1981 model…) One or the other could of course have been changed over the years; I do know it’s not newer than 1983 when it was renamed the Citation II. What’cha talkin’ about, Willis? Yes, Chevy thought its buyers would be so stupid that they’d re-flock to a replacement of the seriously maligned original with the only real change the addition of a roman numeral “II” after the badge. Hardly, some Americans do actually make decisions that benefit themselves in the long run.
Where buyers instead started to flock was toward another car model starting with the letter “C”, that being Toyota’s Camry. While there was a vehicle in Japan based on the Toyota Carina called the Celica Camry that actually started production for their market in 1979 (the same time that Chevy started production of the Citation), the standalone Camry didn’t grace our shores until the 1983 model year. Well, wasn’t that convenient! The example above is actually a 1985 model but the changes from 1983 were minimal for that first generation when two body styles were available; a four door and a five door that in fact looked a lot like the Citation itself. What wasn’t minimal though was its ramp up to success.
While the first year saw 52,000 sales, the second year grew to 93,000, then 128,000 in 1985, 151k in ’86, 186k in ’87, 225k in ’88, 255k in ’89, 283k in 1990, and eventually to some 470,000 sold in its best year of 2007, with many (most?) of them being built here in that very American state of Kentucky since 1988. Even today Camry still manages to move almost 300,000 examples a year with the 2023 total being just under 291,000. That’s all just in the United States, mind you, worldwide the nameplate has been adhered to the tail of some 22 million examples over the last 44 years.
Of course someone will point out that the random example of a Camry I showed above is in the junkyard. What a piece of shite, obviously.
Well, no, here’s the gauge cluster from it.
I’ll embiggen it, the number itself though is already embiggened enough. Yes, that reads 380,682 (and .9) miles (not the wimpy participation trophy kilometer distance measurement) for a vehicle built in the dark ages of 1985 just after Morning in America. While of course not every Camry manages to reach that number in its lifetime, most buyers when they hand over their cash and sign on the dotted line for one likely feel pretty confident that their new Camry has that potential inside it. (How many miles do we really think that Citation on the street has on it?)
Many Citation’s buyers on the other hand were mostly trying to lick their wounds by the end of the first year of their tenure with it, I shan’t bore you with the litany of issues there were to be contended with, we’ve covered the saga in depth multiple times already. I had to look up what replaced the Citation in Chevy’s lineup after it was boo-ed off stage, and it turns out to have been the Corsica after a gap year. Yeesch. Not exactly something that lit the world on fire either.
Of course the Chevy Celebrity and its multiple inbred corporate cousins took many of the Citation’s bones and over the next decade and a half continually improved them and turned into a bit of a cumulative success, while though usually trading on price rather than pride or much else. At any rate, I don’t believe a 1988 Celebrity for example features in the rotating collection of cars shown in the front lobby of the GM’s Renaissance Center Headquarters. (Actually I have absolutely no idea if there even IS a rotating collection of cars in the lobby but if so I doubt it includes a Celebrity, not even a Eurosport wagon version…never mind the Corsica or the Citation)
Interestingly (or perhaps ironically), photo-bombing this picture is a very recent example of the car that a modern Citation should and could still be taking on today (in theory), the Toyota Camry. As I took this last shot I realized someone was in the car, swiftly curtailing my inner Annie Liebowitz impulses – I was initially hoping to get pictures of the interior and of that magnificent wheel/hubcap and tire with seemingly more sidewall than wheel itself…
While I’m generally mostly ambivalent in regard to the majority of Chevrolet’s as well as Toyota’s products (I’ve owned multiples of both and generally been quite happy with both), there’s no denying that this Citation was an exciting sighting. Sadly that is due to its almost complete extinction, this is the first I’ve seen on the road in likely two decades (as opposed to in the junkyard where they are still seen, if rather uncommonly). Early ’80s Camrys? There are still several doing daily driver duty in my town. And they’re still selling hundreds of thousands more new examples of them every year. What could have been, Chevy, what Could. Have. Been.
Related Reading:
Curbside Classic: 1980 Chevrolet Citation – GM’s Deadliest Sin (#13) by PN
Curbside Classic: 1980 Chevrolet Citation – Murphy’s Law by Joe Dennis
Curbside Gift Idea: 1981 Chevrolet Citation – For That Special Someone by Jim Klein
Curbside Recycling: 1981 Chevrolet Citation – How Many Could Still be Left Out There? by Jim Klein
Curbside Recycling: 1980 Pontiac Phoenix SJ – Pontiac Flips America The Bird by Jim Klein
This touches close to my heart.
If you’ve read my first COAL then you’ll know that my hard working dad lost everything in 1979 due to a recession.
Now back in those days, a bankruptcy was really difficult at best. For example, if one owed back taxes, as my dad and mom did, the IRS was not under any obligation to give the tax payer the amount owed. No, they simply told my parents that “when they stopped taking any refunds away from my parents, the debt was paid.”
That said, my parents needed a car.
My dad went to the Chevy dealer with me and the dealer was pushing Citations. The one he “felt would work to get my dad financed” was a stripped down club coupe- light blue over blue vinyl with auto and air conditioning as the only options. No master what they did, my dad was turned down cold.
4 years later, things were so much better for my parents. My dad had become a devoted Christian man, paid all his past debts and still needed a car! It was a brand new 1985 Camry!
By the way, now that I’m reading these daily and I’m seeing cooler names (XR7 Matt, Vanilla Dude, etc) I’m now
BroughamChip! Yea yea, no one likes wire hubcaps and moon roofs but me! It’s OK!!
It is an ’81 – ’82 had horizontal slats across the grille.
Excellent find. A devastating legacy for GM. For that era, the packaging, and space efficiency, was remarkable. As Chrysler’s K-Cars proved to be more reliable, durable, and easier to service.
From the grille texture, I believe it’s an ’81. The ’81 brochure has adjacent pictures with and without the amber taillight.
For once, GM introduced a car exactly when the market required it instead of years late, but at what long term cost! Was it just transverse FWD that caused the engineering and manufacturing failures, or was it poor management or cost-cutting? The successful B and A body downsizings might have exhausted their talents and funds–and time.
My spinster aunt in Towson had one, replacing a ’69 Cutlass. A Corsica with airbag replaced it, so it lasted most of the 80s daily driving to Columbia, MD.
Yes you are correct (I think). Somehow I manage to overlook my own linked 1981 Citation find that has both the grille and amber taillight. Doh!
The amber rear signals were optional through most of the run, bundled with the chrome door and side window trims and the pinstriping both also seen on this car. I suppose what happened was the take rate melted away as the Citation became more and more a fleet car.
Yes this; it was called the Custom Exterior Group or something similar. Included the amber section in the rear lights and extra chrome moldings. I didn’t remember a pinstripe but maybe that too.
What I don’t know is whether the amber lens area really was a turn signal, or (as on the 1976-77 Vega) just looked like a turn signal but didn’t really light up, and the rear turn indicators were the unfortunate US-market combination red brake/turn lamps. Also, did non-Custom Exterior Citations at least get a separate red turn indicator that was separate from the brake lights? Seems like they could have with this taillamp design.
I can confirm that base Citations had a combined stop/tail/turn in the outer compartment with a red blanked-off panel in the center section. The 1982 Citation brochure specifically describes it as “deluxe bright-accented tail lamps *with amber turn signals*” (emphasis mine) so anything else would be false advertising.
Link: https://oldcarbrochures.org/United%20States/Chevrolet/1982-Chevrolet/1982-Chevrolet-Citation-Brochure/slides/1982_Chevrolet_Citation-14.html
As an aside, the early Chevettes’ rear amber sections were indeed functional blinkers and the 1980 facelift (butt-tuck?) deleted those for a setup similar to base Citations.
My “81” did not have the “amber’s”.Was pretty optioned up though.
Was it just transverse FWD that caused the engineering and manufacturing failures, or was it poor management or cost-cutting?
GM’s engineering staff was obviously stretched by the demands of the downsizing of all three major body groups; the B/C Body in ’77, the A Body in ’78, and then this X-Body in ’80, although the X Bodies actually came out in the spring of 1979. The X-Cars were rushed into production, and the results were comparable to other rushed introductions, like the ’57 Chrysler cars. GM should have waited another 6-12 months to flesh out the bugs.
And yes, there was cost cutting, mainly on the Citations interior, in an effort to offset the higher costs of the development and tooling for this new FWD line of cars.
Characteristic case of GM “beta testing in production” by succumbing to “launch fever” rather than, as you say, waiting the 6-12 months it would take to iron out the bugs first.
One time I can think of when GM did actually take the time to “get it right the first time” was the 2008 Malibu developed under Bob Lutz’ astute oversight, resulting in glowing reviews in the automotive press and good sales success, tho’ it surely helped being the penultimate model released on the Epsilon platform that had debuted 6 years earlier. Whenever I see these around, I still admire the clean and tidy, well-resolved styling and wonder if they’ll become a “future classic” akin to the tri-five Chevy of their era.
Alas, its successor the 2013 Malibu was a return to form, launched probably a year or so sooner than it really should have been, lacking refinement in many areas and with fussy and contrived “trying too hard” styling details all over.
I agree 100% with you on the ’08 and ’13 Mailbus.
The grill is 1981. In 1982 there was a horizontal bar grill similar to the Malibu. The Citation was rebranded Citation II in 1984 not 1983. In 1985 there was a new instrument panel which seems odd for a car that would be discontinued at the end of the model year but Perhaps there was some dithering at GM over the X cars fate. Someone local dug up a Citation and was driving it around briefly during the prolonged mid aughts oil price spike. It was more rust than car. I hadn’t seen one in years by that time and haven’t seen one since.
Somehow, I semi-frequently see a Citation in a similar color still running around here in salty Michigan. I haven’t been able to get a picture of it, but an older gentleman drives it, so he might have bought it new and kept it on the road. The styling hasn’t held up too badly, considering, but it’s got to be a very small percentage of Citations that are on this side of the junkyard fence.
He’s just waiting for it to get old enough for you to adopt Detroit’s brightest shining light of the 1980s…
By 1980 I had watched Chrysler Corporation screw up so many new model launches, but never imagined that GM was starting down that ugly road too. I was sure that these were going to be a blockbuster success – and then, suddenly, they weren’t.
In addition to helping launch the Camry, they also sold a lot of K cars over at Chrysler.
They sure did, Chrysler though also failed in the long term to convert that bonanza into a long-term reputation for quality, squandering any good name they had with I believe only the Voyager name currently living on (well, ok, also resurrected) from the k-car era. No Aries, no Reliant, no Caravan, no 400, 600, or LeBaron anymore…
Weirdly the Malibu is the current obvious successor to the Citation’s market segment, though its sales don’t hold a candle to the transplant’s offerings. At least Chevy is hanging on there with a sedan for some reason, probably incremental sales at some profit level albeit without any real updates while Camry now is going 100% hybrid and the Accord is also mostly hybridized.
The first FWD Chevy deserves a number of Citations:
-Helped save the Chrysler Corporation.
-Dawned a third consecutive decade with another Chevy the General would prefer we forget; Corvair, Vega, Citation.
-Another trifecta: Chevy still couldn’t figure out that small shouldn’t mean cheap. Another economy minded plastic fantastic every feature is optional car.
-Convinced a lot of midwesterners that a Japanese car could be A-Ok.
-All while being the best selling 1980 model year car, and probably the best selling new car in the US of all time.
In high school back in the early ’90s I drove a 1984 Citation with the fuel injected 2.5 ‘Iron Duke’. While it was a woefully uninspiring and underpowered driving experience, it was actually a dead-reliable vehicle…and I subjected it to nearly every bit of abuse that a teenager could throw at a car. It never once whimpered, started every time, and was fantastic in the snow. Granted, by ’84 the breed had improved somewhat over the initial earlier model years…but I still consider my ownership a lucky outlier from the experience of most Citation owners.
That being said: do I have a soft spot for these cars? Nope. Would I want one again? Not a chance in Hell. Although I suppose a mint X-11 might be an interesting ride…
Most of the reliability and quality-control issues were addressed by 1982. Citations made that year and later were similar in reliability to other American cars of the day in my experience. Similar to how most Vega bugs were worked out by 1976, but the improvements came too late to save either car’s reputation.
Yeah, wish I’d a been wise enough to know the “76-7, Vega’s” were “ok”.
Could a got a really good looking one “quite cheap” in “1980”.
I was young, hard headed, clueless at that time. lol
I bought a brand new 1980 Citation, white, no air conditioning. Drove it for 85000 trouble free miles before trading it in. My uncle had a Citation that spent almost 4 months in the shop the first year.
My “81” ran to “69k” ((by “Jan 86″)). Was coming (quickly) undone at that juncture”.
My father-in-law got a new company car every few years. He loved the 78 Cutlass Supreme he had, then he got an 81 Citation with the 4 cylinder engine. He absolutely hated it and it was often in the shop. He considered it the worst car he had ever “owned”. His next one was a Celebrity, which was an improvement, but he still missed the Cutlass. He wasn’t happy until the company provided him with a Taurus wagon with the 3 liter Vulcan. He bought it from the company, drove it for years, then sold it to me with 110,000 miles on the clock. My wife and I drove it until it hit 270,000 miles. A wonderful car.
The Citation was a dog. No good memories at all.
Spectacular find and fine musings. At least in the last picture, the occupant appears to be smiling. She knows why this car is getting your attention, as she scrolls through her phone.
She’s obviously smiling because she is reading and identifying with a tuesday morning essay written by Joseph Dennis…
There’s a Citation II running around Austria . Not sure which motor it has , but it’s in nice shape. A four door automatic, it has a different gauge cluster – five round instruments with the speedometer in the center , and a clock but no tach. Owner also has a Chrysler Vision. Will try to find the mileage.
Well we do get some odd cars here – perhaps because the stigma is not as bad as in the US (although heaven help you if you ever need any part specific to the car). A few years back an X-body Buick Skylark popped up at the Hot Summer Nights meeting in Shopping City Süd, so there’s more than one person who wants them here! There is at least one Corvair somewhere too.
My over 30-year living in North America has seen the constant failure of GM. The company repeatedly has problems to develop new products although it didn’t lack of idea. The executing the idea and developing products are always poor. GM only survived because of its financial management (trick). That led us to know how unprofitable manufacturing is. Now we see the same thing for GE in last decade and now Boeing. That is the reason Apple, the sighting star of US business, does not do manufacturing.
I have driven one Citation and two Camrys in my life, one of the latter a 2012 rental that I drove about two miles and was not impressed. The other Camry was a borrowed first gen sedan that I drove many hundreds of miles, maybe a thousand, on a vacation in the late Eighties. It was pleasant but not particularly memorable. But my one drive in a Citation, which was very brief, was quite memorable. It was a first year Citation X11 with the 135 hp engine, 4 speed manual, and “big” 215/60-14 tires. It was impressive for brisk acceleration and serious torque steer. I was considering it to replace my Ford Fiesta as a Showroom Stock racer; the X11 was very competitive in the SSB class and won several national championships, although beaten by a Renault Fuego Turbo in 1983. No, I didn’t buy a Citation after that test drive 😀
I think most people are not looking for “memorable” in their daily rides, they just want to get in, start it, have it take them wherever and back, rinse and repeat until they themselves believe the car is getting too old instead of the car itself convincing them to get rid of it.
We here are probably a little bit different. Although many contributors with a multitude of very interesting machinery also have a very mundane car with which to do the daily chores in.
That sounds like a second year (1981) X-11; the 1980 X-11 was basically just a trim package, with the same engine, wheels, and tires as the standard car. May have included some items that were normally optional like full instrumentation and sport suspension.
I see one of these regularly around Missoula, MT and I too am impressed to see it still in good shape and being used as a daily driver.
Having had more time to reflect on the Citation and other X-Cars, I’ve rather come to the conclusion that while the Citation certainly had flaws due largely to a premature rush to market, like the ’57 Chryslers, there were other factors too. The biggest one is that while Americans were willing to buy the Citation fastback/hatchback body style because it was the only one available (other than the silly 2-door club coupe) and because hatchbacks were a fad at the moment, that body style wasn’t really what Americans wanted; they wanted sedans, and wagons.
And when the Celebrity appeared in 1982, very much an X-car under the skin (with a revised steering gear, also then shared with the Citation), it was much more palatable.
I don’t have the stats, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the Camry sedan sold much better than the hatchback, which would be ditched for the second generation.
The Buick Skylark, with its sedan body, had much more stable sales figures than the Citation. It also seems to have had fewer quality lapses.
One more detail to keep in mind: that 1980 sales number of 811k was of course a very long sales year, as the X-Cars were introduced in the spring of 1979, right into the maw of the second energy crisis, which of course fueled its sales.
Am I defending the Citation? What’s happening to me?
Yes the sedan was king, the Camry did ditch the fastback but added the wagon for the next two generations (as you know), neither of which sold nearly as many as the sedans yet were certainly welcomed (and still appreciated), then the Highlander took over for that part of it. Of course there was no shortage of A-body as well as J-body wagon options. Perhaps it’s sort of weird that there was not a Citation wagon…
You ARE in fact defending the indefensible! You’ve changed, man, you’ve changed! (of course I’m joking, and the Citation has its fans as well as people who apparently had good experiences with them, but whatever the cause of its issues, it did leave a lasting stain on the company’s products. On paper it could well have worked out very well, it’s the execution that was the issue.
I think GM knew it had a problem back in 1979 and had the Cavalier and the Celebrity at the ready. This is another reason why sales plummeted after two years – there were non-Citation Chevrolets available quickly. Our fleet of lemony Citations was replaced by Cavaliers and J2000s by the Denver Chevy dealer who wanted to keep our fleet business.
Were those better cars? I don’t believe they were as bad, but then, I was given a new Ford Escort and later, a Fox Mercury Cougar sedan, which sold me on Ford. What I do remember was not liking the low classic GM driving position in the Cavalier and finding the interior as inferior as the Citation.
i went from watching my new Citation rack up more miles being towed, than on its own in 1982, to watching my fiance’ 1988 Baretta interior turn rancid. In both cases, Chevrolet, at least, had the worst cheapest materials I’ve seen in a car before, or since. The plastics warped, cracked and snapped off in use. Headliners lined our heads. Velour seats crinkled and defoliated after a few years, Grilles warped after flaking off their chrome paint – the Citation lost its chrome within a week of driving. Doors fell out of alignment, engine mounts broke, and both the 1982 Citation and the 1988 Baretta had the same huge 2.0 4-cylinder that outlasted everything around it.
I’m a domestic auto supporter, but it took me decades to even consider another GM product besides Saturn. I’ve always thought Chevrolet made very attractive cars – but I never stopped thinking about how many problems we had with them.
From the outside, the Citation was a decent looking car, and I think its many initial buyers were probably convinced during a time of economic uncertainty that a hatch was the path to big car function combined with good fuel economy.
I blame the General for souring Americans on the diesel, and souring the country on hatches by ensuring that millions of Americans had a stink bomb hatch in their garage.
Pumping out the A-Body with a reasonably generous trunk allowed the General, and Americans, to move on.
Ah, the X-body Citation. The comparison with the 1957 Forward Look Mopars is a good one and the poster child of what was wrong with GM that endures to this day, and a fitting start for the Roger Smith decade at GM which saw a 10% drop in market share over his time.
The truly sad thing about the Citation is how much promise it held for GM. On paper, it was golden. But in real life? Well, everyone now knows how badly it had been engineered and one of the best (worst?) examples of GM releasing a brand-new vehicle and expecting their customers to be the beta-testers for it.
Not to rehash the myriad woes of the X-body, but two of the biggest were the lack of a proportioning valve which meant the ease and frequency of the quite dangerous locking-up of the rear brakes, and a steering rack that was inexplicably mounted on the firewall.
Both of these defects were corrected by 1982 but, by then, the damage was done and, as stated, had given Toyota the edge they needed to assume the role of a dominant player in the US domestic market, a direction started in the seventies with the Corolla. Lots of former GM customers looking for a reliable, mainstream car made the switch and never looked back.
I knew the Big 3 had permanently lost their dominance when my conservative grandparents bought a Camry in the mid-80s after half a century of driving American cars.
That Austrian Citation II was actually in Switzerland. It showed 45,624 on the odometer (14 years ago) and had automatic, power windows, locks, tilt wheel, cruise control, rear defroster, AM/FM stereo, and A/C. It was a four door hatchback , and may still be on the road.
In 1979 my Dad was the fleet and lease manager at the local Chev-Olds emporium, and it’s hard to overstate the hype when these came out. People were lined up to buy them, all it MSRP plus, and at 1979 interest rates. The subsequent anger and disappointment from those customers is also hard to overstate. Not everyone had trouble, but the ones who did had plenty. If I recall most of the complaints driveability and fuel economy related, but there were steering and brake issues as well.
GM sold these cars to the public (and the dealers) as the salvation of the domestic industry, and those 811,000 units turned out to be poisoned chalices instead. Combine this with the noticeable cheapening of the rest of the product line for 1980 and you have the formula for the rapid decline of GMs fortunes. Customers who had been buying from this dealership since the ’50s just never came back. Dad pulled the pin just as the ’81s were rolling out. His ne job came with a company car… A 1981 Accord hatch. He never owned another GM product if I recall.
What could have been indeed.
“Rushed to market” as the primary cause of the Citation’s ills? I disagree. They started in ’74; and it went on sale in April of ’79. About five years of “development”.
GM actually bragged about how much money they spent (wasted?) developing the Citation, and that they drove more miles of “preproduction testing” than any vehicle in Chevy’s history. It was part of their advertising–“The most thoroughly tested new car in Chevrolet history”. (see photo, attached.) Note that they did not claim that the car PASSED those “tests”.
I believed that 2/5 of that total was spend “developing” the car, and 3/5 was spent carving all the quality/durability/reliability back out of it in order to shave pennies from absolutely every component in the vehicle. In other words, the bulk of the money was spent pursuing cost-cutting/profit over product quality. The extensive “testing” was done to assure that the car would fall to pieces all at the same time, hopefully outside of the warranty period.
The money GM spent on this car wasn’t really wasted as the 1982 A-bodies were rebodied Xs. The fact those were built until 1996 and were selling on their dependability and quality at the end speaks to the engineering actually being good. If only they could rein in the cost cutting and its’ “lost profits” mindset that took the initial sale (and the customer’s eventual return to buy again) as a given.
The styling’s a bit challenging, almost nobody else combined a forward-thrusting front hood with a fastback on top of FWD proportions with long front overhang and short dash-to-axle before or since. It’s not so much the rear hatch which looks much airier than the formal-roof Oldsmobuicks that helped them I think, as their front styling where the grille/headlight fascia leaned back from the bumper to help blend in that front overhang.
Oh, I’m glad you said that about the styling. I agree: the only other example I can think of is the Renault 20/30, with forward-sloping front and much overhang, and to most folk, it’s a peculiar-looking device.
To go further than you, I also think the hatch is skewiff. Had GM not seen a Lancia Beta, or Citroen CX? The gawky curve of the beltline upwards to the rear upsets any balance, where a pretty-much straight line to the corner would’ve been fine (especially as the hatch opens well below that imaginary line).
The rest of the details are so bland – and with the grille, chintzy – that I can’t help but conclude the thing physically resembles the incompetent cobble that it turned out to be as transport!
The Pontiac version of the car (linked at the bottom) actually has that straight beltline.
Here’s a photo of the Pontiac Phoenix. It’s a subjective call, but FWIW, I prefer the slight upkick of the Citation better. The problem with the straight line of the Phoenix is it tends to make its butt look slightly drooping, whereas the Citation’s butt looks perkier, from the side, It’s a optical illusion thing, but it’s a reality, at least for me.
As the the rest of it, like the bland grille and such, there’s a tendency for folks in Europe and Australia to judge these cars from the perspective of European cars in its size and engine class but were in reality much more expensive. The Citation replaced the ChevyII/Nova, which was a very basic low-end cheap car. The Citation was designed to be the cheapest way to transport a family in the US, and as such, GM was under massive pressure to keep the cost down. They obviously went a bit too far in its interior materials on the base version, but the economics of building a completely new FWD mass-production family car at low-end prices really was a huge challenge.
It’s rather unfair to compare it to more expensive cars, and let’s keep in mind that the Camry too was considerably more expensive back then. Who in Europe, Australia or Japan was selling a 2.8L V6 large family/executive car (by European standards) for the price of a Golf or such? It was a huge amount of car for the money, by European standards.
It wasn’t an “incompetent cobble at transport”; it was mostly a surprisingly capable car with world-class space efficiency hobbled by some glitches that were the result of rushing it to production and cost cutting and quality lapses that were so common in the US in a brand new line of cars. Do you speak from experience? Did you ever drive an X Car?
No X came here, but hang on: I’m going on the many, many, many whinges published here (and elsewhere) over many years (and including under this very post), even from readers who had a perfectly reliable one from later. I’m going on the Oz and UK reports from the time – I was most interested in the X then – which basically said “these have a fair way to go”. I’m going on styling that is, at best, clumsy (particularly in light of a hatchback’s difficult rear glasshouse issues already resolved for GM by Euro makes earlier), especially when the very same company had the ability to make the cohesive, elegant Cavalier hatch in Europe not three years later. I’m going on interiors that are demonstrably visual crap, and engines that are hardly the best (and I have felt the unpleasant feels of an Iron Duke, in a Fiero, oddly enough). The end result screams of a compromise, things put together unevenly, and as is clear from history, badly made in that vital first year, and the various mismatches seem mightily like a cobbling and the unreliability seems like it amounts to incompetence as transport for the buyer. However, it is entirely true I’ve never driven one, which does matter.
As it happens, I didn’t compare it to Euro cars – though why not, when GM’s own Euro division could make very decent cheap cars, like the aforementioned Cav – but I’ll agree that it’s easy for outsiders to misunderstand the gigantic size of the US market, let alone its unique consumer demands. That huge size alone means extraordinary price pressure, on every good imaginable, and doubtless, that pressure drove some of what seems to be the inbuilt ordinariness of the Chev.
However, none of this really excuses the results when the producer is the world’s biggest and richest.
Those tires are probably 185 80 R13. I had them on my 84 Cavalier back in the day. Tall tires that made it better for snow, also a better ride on Michigan roads with all that sidewall.
By the time the A body was introduced for 1982, the Citation went to the cradle mounted steering rack and shared the cradle with the A body. The A body was little more than an X body with longer front and rear clips. People on forums said the dashes will even interchange. You could make a Citation wagon from an A wagon if you wanted. You could also make an A hatchback if you wanted. It would be interesting to see a Pontiac 6000 STE hatchback. Heck even make one in AWD like someone did with an Omega.
Why GM went through the work and expense to redo the dash for 85 before canceling it, who knows, but it’s no lone incident for GM. The nose on the 88 Firenza, the slowest selling J body. The 88 Fiero.
I’m guessing when the decision was made to redesign the dash, the Citation was planned to be offered into 1986. There was a year-long gap between the discontinuation of the Citation and the intro of the Corsica that replaced it.
The Citation did indeed use 185/80R13 tires, but I recall the Cavalier used 175/80R13’s as standard equipment. They did in 1982, may have changed by 1984. Both of these sizes are pretty much unavailable today.
That seems like a logical assumption, about an ’86 MY, but ’85 sales were quite weak, down to 62k.
It is quite a decent-looking car actually. Not up to Vega standards mind you, but even GM can’t be expected to hit a home run every time.
My ’80 Citation X-11 wasn’t the wor$t car I ever owned-my PO$ ’76 Chovette wa$-but it was in the err…”running”. Ultimately the X-11 was a definite di$$appointment. 🙁 DFO
The only place where a Chevy Citation story is really about a Toyota Camry. Go figure.
Well, it IS in the title…
My dad had an ’81 Skylark, 4-cyl auto.
He hated that car; it was always in shop, and it was, in his opinion, ‘garbage”.
He traded it for an ’83 Chrysler New Yorker (based on the K-car), with a 4-cyl automatic. Not sure that was much of an improvement.
it was largely dependable, but it was a slug. After his ’78 Buick LeSabre, he always seemed to pick disastrous cars.
The spacious interiors for compacted-sized and economical cars, should have been the highlight of the Citation, and the X-Cars. But in base form, the interiors looked and felt cheap. Nicer, and more inviting interiors, and these would have been even more popular that first year.
The Citation holds a special place in my heart as the car I learned to drive stick in. My uncle Jack spent a summer visiting his mother (my grandmother) and as we were both bored, he offered to teach me to drive a stick. He drove us in his Citation several miles away to near downtown Cleveland and found a back street mostly devoted to warehousing and light industry. So traffic, but slow-moving and not a lot of it. I’d spend an hour or so driving back and forth on that street, learning the finer points of manual technique. After we got home, sometimes I’d detail the car for him and got it looking pretty nice. I later realized that Uncle Jack was sick and had come to see his mother before he died. He went home that fall and I never saw him alive again.
Apparently GM bought several Lancia Beta sedans as test mules for incognito “powertrain testing” for their new FWD X-platform, tho’ they surely wanted to study the rest of their engineering as well, and of course the styling influence is obvious. Too bad they didn’t learn/copy more from those Betas and/or refrain from second-guessing what Lancia engineers had done there.
For just one example, whereas the Beta’s powertrain was mounted on a subframe rigidly mounted to the unibody chassis, I gather GM added rubber bushings to those mount points for NVH isolation… which allowed the suspension and steering geometry to change slightly under varying dynamic loads, causing sloppy and somewhat inconsistent handling.
Lancia hadn’t even bothered to patent the Beta’s elegantly simple IRS setup — twin parallel transverse arms for each side, with the anti-roll bar mounted on hinges to serve double-duty as a trailing link — which many other mfrs. later copied, but not GM. “Not invented here”, I guess.
Yes, but then the brief for the Beta (a genuine Italo-European sport sedan) and the Citation were a bit different. With that rough 2.5 L Irob Duke four and American’s desire for quiet and smoothness, a separate subframe is hardly surprising. But yes, they didn’t get it quite right, which allowed the subframe to move too much under acceleration, creating a whole new genre of torque steer.
I rather suspect the Lancia’s rear IRS would have cost more. GM was under huge cost pressures with the X Car program.
I think GM used the Betas because they were the right size and configuration so that they could add and test their own drive trains. Chevy did that with the Corvair too; used a Porsche 356 as a mule to test the engine and transmission. Must have been a bit tail heavy.
That moveable subframe thing still makes me gobsmacked. This was the biggest carmaker in the world, with its biggest launch, and yet somehow, no-one (who was listened to) picked that up? Perhaps that failure is the best summation of the approach taken, a most basic matter not attended to.
I agree about the sizing for the Beta mules – and above, I’ve said they should looked twice at the Italian’s styling, too – but if the subframe issue exemplifies the GM attitude on the Citation, the same device has a cruel role in the story of the Beta, for it was the very thing (all beautifully mounted, no doubt) that literally began to fall out of English Betas after not many years because of outrageous rust. Even in the early ’80’s, Lancia agreed to buy back cars, it was so bad. Sales collapsed after this saga, and, the UK being a big market for Lancia, it helped destroy the brand. Just like, it seems, the Citation’s sins helped to result in a broke GM by 2008.
Obviously, the lesson is don’t fit a subframe…
Millions of GM FWD cars to come (and other brands) used the same subframe. I assume it’s still there in the current Malibu, although I haven’t looked. Yes, it was mounted a bit too softly, for that maximum reduction in NVH that is so important to Americans. But it wasn’t exactly as bad as you make it out to be.
I had a 1980 Buick Skylark V6 as a company car, so I’m quite familiar as to how that subframe affected it. Every morning commute when the green metering light at the freeway entrance came on and I floored it (just for fun) there was a slight sideways crabbing effect. But in reality it was no worse than other fairly powerful FWD cars that also suffered from torque steer at the time.
Keep in mind that comparing this issue to the great majority of European (or Japanese) FWD cars is a bit of an apples to oranges issue, as extremely few had a high-torque 2.8 L V6 with a torque-amplifying torque converter automatic. It was hard to get this effect with the four, or the stick shift.
So once again, I feel like I’m having to defend the X Cars, but this issue was not noticed by 9x% of American drivers who didn’t floor their V6 X Cars at takeoff. It’s hardly an issue to be gobsmacked about, and these cars did benefit from the subframe with reduced NVH that would put any European FWD car to shame. It was a trade-off, and the problem was soon fixed with fine tuning the rubber mounting bushings as well as the new steering gear that came in 1982.
Agreed that torque steer was still a thing on just about every front-drive car then, subframes or no, and I’ll ofcourse take your word on how bad it was(n’t) on the X-car.
But hell, a FWD Renault 30 from 4 years earlier, with lumpy PRV 2.7 V6, was noted for low NVH without any mention of funny subframe effects: so such things could be done by proper tuning, and weren’t, and I’d say that’s because hubristic GM looked only up their own fundamental orifice and found only themselves to be the font of all knowledge (including all things about rear brakes!) I’ll remain smacked about the gob by that.
Toyota transitioned to FWD really well, Chevrolet should have done better, it wasnt that new of an idea by then.
Absolutely.
It really should not be remarkable to see a live example of a car made amongst 811,000 copies, even if they all arrived 44 years ago, and the fact that it IS possibly says all that’s needed about the quality of those originals.
Why is it that some old cars are so unlikely to be seen any more that they become an interesting artefact if they’re espied out and about, even if the object itself cannot have been improved by time’s movement, yet another of similar vintage and rarity is just a rubbish old car? This Chev, which, I venture to suggest, could possibly have been caught in the felony of mid-escape FROM the junkyard where it rightly belongs for its sins rather found visiting, clearly falls into the first category. Is it the historical significance and failure that makes it so? I’m not sure.
For contrast, if I saw some deranged loony happily seeking parts for, say, a still-extant very early 37 y.o. Hyundai Excel, I would take photos only for the assistance of those authorities who arrived to remove the owners and the social pollution the car represented. That is, it too could be said significant, when one looks at Hyundai now, but I couldn’t bear the sight of any example of that hateful car. But why?
I think the J car should have been used to replace both the RWD H and X car platforms and ended up closer to the European models with the lighter weight and OHC engines. The X platform should have been held off until it was time to replace the 1978 RWD A bodies.
My boss sold a bunch of these at the used lot I worked at in every different color like the Impalas.Your basic transportation nothing special.May have been one with power windows and door locks.One X-11 showed up on the lot and I had fun shifting gears taking it to get smoged.Reminds me of a little Dodge Shadow turbo we sold that was automatic tho.Fun times working at the used car lot in the mid to late eighties.