Since we got the full story about the Chevette’s first appearance in Brazil yesterday, how about a look at the Americanized version, via Road and Track. They tested the top-trim model, a Rally 1.6, with the optional 60hp 1.6 L engine. But that name was typical GM marketing BS. There was nothing sporty about this car, as it was slow (0-60 in 17 seconds) and the Opel’s crisp handling and steering had been blunted by Chevrolet’s efforts to “Americanize” it. Still, R&T was fairly benign in their evaluation, as it did offer some of the benefits of a truly small car to folks who just wouldn’t touch a (better) import.
The one way Chevrolet couldn’t Americanize the Chevette was in its interior room, or the lack of it. R&T said that it was essentially a “two-adults-and-two-kids-arrangement”. And the cargo space was small, unless one flipped the seat down. Which made the two passenger Scooter version almost make sense. Gremlin-like, in other words. The intrinsic downsides of a sub-compact RWD hatchback.
The gearing, with a 4.11:1 rear axle and no overdrive was a not exactly very “American” either. It was pointed out that the 55 mph limit was a blessing to the Chevette, as 65 mph would have resulted in 4000 rpm, and this was not exactly a particularly smooth engine.
Normal driving yielded 27.5 mpg. We’ve come a long way.
Dec 1976 Car and Driver did a long-term test.
“Nothing broke”
In 1978, in a comparison test with Corolla, Rabbit, Fiesta, B210, Horizon, Fiat 128, Civic, Subaru, Renault R5, the ‘Vette placed mid-pack.
The Rabbit came first. I think Civic and or Fiesta rounded out top 3.
Considering this field of cars I would have placed it in a tie for last with the R5.
But then, I may be unfair to the R5 since I never drove or rode in one.
That comparison sounds like a good read and worthy of a CC article of its own.
“Of course, the world of late hasn’t been suffering from an overabundance of rational thinking.”
They were writing this in 1976? I seem to remember that year as being quite rational, reasonably safe, and with an election coming up, actually held some positive hope for the future.
We had no idea how good we had it back then. Especially with the much better Chrysler products only a year or so away.
Syke, 1976 seemed like a good year to you because you were 42 years younger than you are now.
I could dredge up all kinds of nasty stuff about 1976, too, but the main difference between then and now was in 1976, we didn’t have a 24 hour infotainment feed. That affects a lot of folks. Not me, because I haven’t had a TV in a decade or more.
These are great times. Travel has never been cheaper, and we can now communicate across the globe instantly and for almost nothing. One can buy a new car and expect it to give a decade of reliable service. I have more choices for practically everything.
There’s no time like the present, mainly because it’s all the time I have.
Well, last year we had actual gas shortage (stations closed, or long lines) when the Hurricane came through in late August that reminded me of those in the 70’s (well, maybe not 1976 exactly, but 1974 and 1979). Some people don’t care about the price of gas, and of course it is relatively inexpensive today on an inflation-adjusted price, but there’s a big difference if you can’t buy gas, which happened for the first time a couple years before these came out…so even those who would prefer to be in a nice Caprice might have been concerned enough to instead consider the Chevette. Not that small cars are only good for their gas savings…but lots of people bought them for the first time because they were concerned about getting gas (though you might think cruising range would be the primary concern, good gas mileage allows for smaller tank to get a good range….wonder why they didn’t introduce small diesel cars instead of the standard sized ones that came out a year or two later.
I never drove a Chevette, but I think it was partly because my Father had already owned imports for a decade before this…in 1976 he bought a Subaru DL (Subaru wasn’t very well known back then…and his was FWD, though they did have AWD model (I think it was a wagon) even then.
So in my family imports were already “OK” to buy. I bought a used car to go to college that year, but the Chevette was ironically “too expensive” as a new car since it just came out. I remember seeing my first one outside someones home while I was on the school bus ….we went to a consolidated high school in Hinesburg Vt. which several towns poured into, and none of us had a car till we got out of high school….so the early Chevette was actually sort of an “aspirational” car in that it was only a new car at the time. I ended up with a Datsun 710 which I kept though undergraduate studies, probably ended up a better choice than if I could have afforded a Chevette back then.
Well, Hurricane season is starting in a few days…hope we don’t end up with any gas shortages this year…it is scary when you don’t know if you can get fuel to drive…guess we’re a bit sheltered, at least we haven’t (yet) had bad shortages of necessities like food or water (which they say is bound to happen with population shifts to sunbelt states with limited supplies of water).
Just going on memory, but the Chevette, Citation, and the other X-cars, must have accounted for well over 2 million in sales for GM between 1979 and 1981. Add in the disastrous 350 Oldsmobile Diesel, that’s a lot of potentially toxic sales experiences in a brief period.
Vauxhall built a fairly successful rally version of the Chevette with a twin can 2.3 engine, top end was a clocked 135mph on gravel forest stages when one appeared in NZ second fastest behind 450 Benz coup’es, but the regular version locally assembled was 1156cc of fury and though they handled well not really very fast.
GM had a couple of V6 Chevette prototypes. Imagine if one of them had made it into production.
In our family for a long time, slant six valiants and darts were the basic “aunts cars”. They were the day to day commuters, shoppers, town cars that got handed down to myself and the cousins. In the 70’s the Chevette became the replacement.
They operated the same. Basic, anvil tough hand me downs that would finally die of overwork and overrust.
For that they were good cars and I still miss them.
In 1974 I bought a new Audi Fox, a pretty good car, certainly MILES ahead of this car, and it cost $4,000. For the cost of the sunroof my car had, I could have had the A/C this car had and perhaps a few dollars change leftover.
I didn’t realize these cars were so slow.
Nowadays they would easily be beaten to 60 by few models of mopeds currently on the market.
Ahhh, the lowly Chevette. At my family’s garage, the Chevette was always the car that got no respect. They’d filthy, full of trash and barely running, but new plugs, oil and filters and they’d run again just fine.
I am looking at the Rock Auto website. Brake pads for a Chevette list as low as $5.81. The “good” pads are $10.00. An alternator is $42 with an $11 core, so it’s actually $31.
The Chevette wasn’t, in my personal experience, a particularly reliable car, but they were so simple anyone could work on them with a set of spanners and a socket set. The basic motor was quite durable, even with shoddy maintenance they went for decade or so. Repairs were really cheap, even if they were pretty regular. By ten years, a Chevette was in need of things like wheel bearings and new bushings, but as I said before, it was all cheap and easy to fix.
As soon as that decade was up, the cars kind of disintegrated into a lump of smoking goo.
Driving a Chevette was always an experience of torture for me. The steering wheel jutted to the left. Mentioned in the article, the seat actually was convex-you sat on a crown, making it hard to stay in place, not to mention how uncomfortable it was. The motor was rough and noisy and the brakes took a strong leg muscle.
Hockey moms all over Canada drove them for years. I remember the final years, the Chevette five door was selling for $5995 and GM sold loads of them. Now Kia and Hyundai own that market in Canada, but the Chevette was often replaced by the equally Canadian cult classic the Pontiac Firefly.
It would probably be a tossup between the Chevette/Acadian and the Hyundai Pony for the Canadian market new car sh*tbox of the 80s.
Hey, I loved the Pony! They also ran a long time!
Almost $21,000 when adjusted for inflation.
That’s top-of-the-line Fit territory. That’s quite a dramatic difference in vehicles.
Adjusted for inflation, a Fiesta ST would have cost $120 more in Dec 1975.
The depths GM sank to in the late 70’s-early 80’s! To this day I bemoan the fact that I helped my wife (then fiance) buy a used ’76 with the 1.6 liter as her first car….the next thing we did was put a very expensive clutch in it. The guy who rear-ended her 4 years later actually did us a favor!
“It is made in America… it is important to a good union man”.
My have the times changed. Many “foreign” cars today are assembled in the U.S. by American workers, using more American part content than many “American” cars. Yet at least as this pertains to some members of my own family, these facts don’t matter. A GM car assembled in Canada will always be “American” while a BMW assembled in South Carolina will not be.
That’s politics today, facts don’t matter.
Once again, American car makers “dumbed down” an already good European designed vehicle. The Brasília/German version of the Chevette may have been a better seller than the one we got. At least, it was better looking, and available in a sedan version.
Why couldn’t they have put decent seats in these things? I mean, how much would that actually have cost over millions of units produced? These weren’t known as “Chevy shit boxes” for nothing, they were the definition of penalty boxes.
I once read that, traditionally, two of the main places where auto manufacturers cut costs are the seats and brakes. It makes sense since no one will figure out how bad either really are during a brief test drive.
I do know that, to this day, although they’re usually quite good in other areas, the longevity of brakes on Hondas has always been low.
R & T complained about how noisy the Chevette was, I never drove one but heard from lots of people that over 55mph it turned into a buzz box. I remember Brock Yates in one issue of C & D called the Chevette a “shitbox.” Enough said.
Patrick Bedard called the Chevette the “American Skoda” in C/D. GM was not at all happy about that.
“American Skoda” really sums the Chevette up nicely. They may have been penalty boxes, but they were simple with rudimentary mechanical systems, so when something broke, it wasn’t all that difficult to get them back and running again.
These things were literally “The Model T’s” Of The 1970’s. I’ve previously expressed my dislike for them, but to be perfectly honest, they fulfilled a need in a difficult economic time. After the oil shock of the early 70’s, inflation was high while wages stayed low and car loan rates soared into double figures for those with the best credit ratings. Times were hard, and money was scarce.
So, the Chevette was a lot like a can of generic baked beans. Not very pleasant but cheap and it satisfied your basic needs even if it left you uncomfortable.
The Chevette was a sales disappointment (like the car itself) until the *second* oil shock in 1979 and its fallout in 1980 and after. Interest rates didn’t spike til 1980. That’s when the cheapest, most fuel efficient car that 6000 Chevrolet dealers sold and GMAC financed found its moment in the sun, before it scurried back behind the woodwork. It was worrying, to anyone who cared, that GM couldn’t or wouldn’t make and sell a competitive small car at a competitive price in the 70s, but the rest of GM’s business boomed until 1979 except for the actual period that gas was hard to get around 1974. For example, the Carter Administration is the all time peak period for Corvette and Cadillac sales volume. When GM made a good small car in 1979, the Citation and its siblings, that car was red hot until people found out that it was a well designed turd. The Citation alone sold at several times the rate of the Chevette til the chickens came home to puke their coolant in the driveway, despite being significantly more expensive.
The Model T analogy is appropriate. More than a few Model T’s did double duty as a farm implement, and I could sure see a Chevette in that same mode. The silver lining of the Chevette was that, like the Model T, it was about as sophisticated as an anvil, but also as reliable.
Yeah, you could spend more money and get a small car that had better driving dynamics by any metric, but when something broke, well, you’d pay more and have a harder time getting it fixed than a Chevette. It was like a car built from off-the-shelf parts from Tractor Supply.
I wouldn’t have insulted Skoda like that…
I remember how quiet my ’82 Chevette was – but that was in comparison to the ’79 Chevette Scooter I had been driving so he bar was set pretty low.
Lol…as someone who put a lot of miles on an Acadian here in Ontario on our 401 super highway, one thing you never had to worry about when you got up to speed was falling asleep!
Between the seats and the racket it was never boring!
My very first demo in the car biz. Got an orange Chevette Automatic with Saddle Vinyl, and about 6,000 miles. Within a month I had found a home for it and made salesman of the month. Got a new Monte Carlo Landau… and didn’t get another Chevette for about 5 years. In ’83, ALL salesmen and managers got a Chevette Diesel as a demo (there’s a story there, to be sure).
This manager went over to our Ford store and bought a new ’83 T-Bird Heritage. Our Used Car manager went down to his brother’s dealership in the Valley and bought himself a new Coupe deVille. The Service manager dragged his ’64 Impala SS out of his garage and used that as a DD. Yep… we were all pretty impressed with the Chevette. The diesel was just the icing on the cake.
*after 20 years, you’d think someone would invent a satire font for posts!
Little red Chevette, baby you’re much too slow…..
Two friends and I drove one from the South Side of Chicago to Lakeside, Montana spring break 1980. The damnable thing about the car was that nowhere in the car – and this was the stretched 4 door – could young man of 6′ find a place where he could extend his right leg enough to prevent cramping. It wasn’t even possible angling oneself across the rear seat. Two of the three of us – the over 6’ers – had this exact same problem.
Despite otherwise adequate performance, I never forgave the car for that.
In Europe GM launched the Opel Kadett “City” back in 1975 as a contender for the VW Golf Mk1 which was introduced in 1974.
Shocked by the Golfs major success, the necessary changes to turn a two door sedan into a hatchback were hastily conceived, poorly executed and lead to much less practicability compared to the Golf (very flat trunk floor thanks to rear wheel drive, thus less cargo capacity). Just have a look at how high this blue bottle of detergent is placed on the trunk floor 😉 In a Golf you would probably have only seen the white cap of it from this angle.
Until 1979 they sold slightly more then 200.000 units which was considered a major flop back then.
When Opel introduced the front wheel drive Kadett D in 1979 they manage to keep up with the Golf.
“…Opel’s crisp handling and steering had been blunted by Chevrolet’s efforts to “Americanize” it.”
Even if somehow the 1971 Vega used an Opel design, it would still have been Americanized, i.e. softened. But then at least no ‘potato chip’ engines?
I young lady with whom I worked had a 1964 Chevy 2 door as a first car. It came from her Grandma. She was stilling living at home when she bought a new white Chevette. She would boil water in a pan while she ate breakfast then throw it on the windshield to remove snow and ice. The glass never broke. I don’t think she ever washed it, but it kept on running.
A fellow employee bought a 4 door. He was six feet plus and his wife was 5 foot 10. When you have no money, you might have to sacrifice some comfort.
“You’ll probably be seeing front drive under the Chevette by 1980”
Or maybe not.
I drove a brand new ’85 from Cleveland to Philly, damn car scared the crap out of me. Just a terrible excuse for a car. Felt like it would blow over every time a semi passed me (which was more often than not as slow as that turd was). Horrid seats, noisy, poor ergonomics, I could go on. The world will be a better place when the Chevette is crushed.