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.
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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.