Junkyard Find: High Plains Chevette-O-Rama!

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

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
Murilee Martin

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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  • Texan01 Texan01 on Jul 24, 2012

    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.

  • Laserwizard Laserwizard on Dec 28, 2015

    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.

  • Lorenzo Heh. The major powers, military or economic, set up these regulators for the smaller countries - the big guys do what they want, and always have. Are the Chinese that unaware?
  • Lorenzo The original 4-Runner, by its very name, promised something different in the future. What happened?
  • Lorenzo At my age, excitement is dangerous. one thing to note: the older models being displayed are more stylish than their current versions, and the old Subaru Forester looks more utilitarian than the current version. I thought the annual model change was dead.
  • Lorenzo Well, it was never an off-roader, much less a military vehicle, so let the people with too much money play make believe.
  • EBFlex The best gift would have been a huge bonfire of all the fak mustangs in inventory and shutting down the factory that makes them.Heck, nobody would even have to risk life and limb starting the fire, just park em close together and wait for the super environmentally friendly EV fire to commence.
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