Junkyard Find: High Plains Chevette-O-Rama!
Easily overlooked among all the Nashes and Willys of the Brain Melting Colorado Junkyard were the many Chevettes scattered across the landscape. The owner of the BMCJ has had a soft spot for Chevettes for many years, and he has acquired dozens of the little Opel-designed subcompact. Here’s a few that I photographed during my visit.
With the smell of wildfire smoke in the air and the ground choked with prickly-pear cacti, the mid-apocalyptic environment of this place made simple, rear-drive econoboxes seem quite sensible.
There’s this Limited Edition Chevette four-door, featuring… luxury?
Yes, luxury.
How about a snazzy Chevette GT?
The steering wheel and instrument cluster look of the Chevette GT appear very Vega GT-ish.
The Chevette Scooter was the stripper low-cost version, for those who wanted basic transportation a (small) step above a moped.
No collection of Chevettes is complete without an example powered by the same diesel engine used in the I-Mark Diesel.
Here’s a selling point for the Chevette that became less relevant as the Malaise Era ground on: “If you drive a foreign car, you could find yourself in foreign territory!”
By 1984, the best GM’s marketing wizards could say about the Chevette was that its design hadn’t changed during its run.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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My grandmother had a 79 Chevette. It was a 4 speed car with AC and an AM radio. To 12 year old me, it was a fun car to ride in, and I thought it was fast based on the noise it made. I ran across one in the junkyard and realized how tiny they were.
After having survived a 500 mile trip in a rental Chevette, I can attest that there was never a worse product than this heap of excrement. It was so slow that my friend and I timed it from a standing stop at a toll booth and it hit 60 miles per hour AFTER 20 seconds had gone by. Yes, it was an automatic and had four doors. I think the license plates were the best part of the car.