Edmunds dealer partner, Bayway Leasing, is now offering transparent lease deals via these forums. Click here to see the latest vehicles!
Options
Popular New Cars
Popular Used Sedans
Popular Used SUVs
Popular Used Pickup Trucks
Popular Used Hatchbacks
Popular Used Minivans
Popular Used Coupes
Popular Used Wagons
Comments
I bet resale on the final year Citations was pretty bad, it would have looked pretty old in just a couple years.
When I ordered the car, the salesman told me the aluminum wheels (same style as Citation X-11) were on backorder. I said 'if they're not on the car, I'm not buying it.'. He made the mistake of telling me he got a status update on ordered units every Monday a.m. He also told me 'six to eight weeks'. It came in the twelfth week. When I picked it up, it didn't have the floor mats that I ordered and were on the window sticker. He acted like I was bothering him to ask! It was from Tim Timmers in Norcross, GA. Don't know if they're still there or not.
How did that Celebrity hold up? Unrelated, I know, but my dad had a S-10 Blazer of the same year, and it was pretty junky. An aunt had an 86 Celebrity, she was admittedly neglectful when it came to maintenance, but it was looking more than the worse for wear by the early 90s.
Those "glass house" Impala/Caprice coupes were cool in their own way, unique styling trait anyway.
Shame about that dealer...I think the internet has put an end to some of the ineptitude, now if you are wronged you can tell the world in just a few minutes. Cool you had a special order though, I don't remember anyone in my family doing that - always off the lot for us.
It did corner very well...had Goodyear Eagles from the factory. I remember driving a friend's '84 Monte Carlo V6 and taking a corner like I would have in the Eurosport. The Monte felt like it was going to roll over!
A couple small things I liked: the optional gauges looked like instruments on a high-end stereo receiver back then...very thin needles...and since I ordered the highest-end factory radio at the time, there was a little emblem on the dash that said "ERS" and underneath it said "Extended Range Sound System".
http://answers.edmunds.com/question-Did-rear-windows-1974-Pontiac-Grandville-rol- l-part-way-146909.aspx
Thanks!
I thought it was a bit odd that if you got the cheaper Catalina, you got roll down windows, but the more expensive Bonneville and Grand Ville (Bonneville Brougham for '76) were stationary. But, by that time, I think the attitude was starting to become who cares if the back windows roll down? It has air conditioning!
I remember as a kid, I really didn't give a second thought to the stationary rear windows in Mom's '75 LeMans, '80 Malibu, or '86 Monte Carlo coupe, although my Grandparents' '82 Malibu Classic wagon always sticks out in my mind! Nor, did I pay any attention to the fact that they were stationary in my other grandparents' '77 and 81 Granada coupes. Their '75 Dart Swinger was a hardtop, but I don't remember it that well.
Honestly, it wasn't until I bought an old '69 Dart GT hardtop, in 1989 when I was in college, that the memory of roll-down rear windows and true hardtop styling came back to me. Most of my friends, who weren't used to riding in something that old, thought it was pretty cool, too.
The '78 Malibu sedans, with rear windows that didn't roll down--that, plus, the 'donut' spare tire--I had a hard time getting over though.
When did the B and C-bodies go to compact spares? I know my grandmother's '85 LeSabre had a compact, but I guess they switched over sometime between '77 and then? Maybe 1980, when the B/C bodies went through another round of weight reduction?
'80 is probably right, although I don't know for sure. My parents' '77 Impala had a full-size spare tire. Matter of fact, my '93 Caprice Classic had a full-size spare although it was optional at extra cost.
I guess it might be easier/cheaper to just get a cooler that's not quite as tall. :P
Also spotted, out on Interstate 97, a '76-79 Volare coupe rolling along. Silver with a burgundy landau top, which gave you those oddly shaped, square opera windows. It looked like it was in pretty good shape. No visible rust, paint still fairly shiny, top in good shape.
One thing that really struck me as how odd this car looks, by today's standards. Normally, the 2-door looks better than its 4-door counterpart, but by this timeframe, often it was just the opposite. I thought the same thing with the Ford Granada/Mercury Monarch. The 4-doors have a handsome, somewhat modern look to them, but the coupe just seems more dated, with the opera window cliche.
I think the difference is even greater with the Aspen/Volare, as the coupe rode a 4.7" shorter wheelbase, and was noticeably lower. Meanwhile, the 4-door version might have represented the birth of the trend towards taller, more upright cars that persists to this day. I think this coupe would have also looked a lot better if it didn't have that landau roof.
I understand that the Chevy 2.0 4-cylinder was prone to head gasket failure, so you did well. What condition was your Corsica in at 108,000?
That's impressive! Did your friend's Citation have the Iron Duke 4 or the V6? Either way he beat the odds.
I've known a few people with Cavalier Z-24's, with the 2.8 V-6, and those things tended to blow a head gasket by 80-90,000 miles, it seemed.
It was a slam dunk decision to junk the car at that point because just a couple of nights before the engine died the friend of the teen ager who lived across the street backed into my driver's side door.
I understand that the Chevy 2.0 4-cylinder was prone to head gasket failure, so you did well. What condition was your Corsica in at 108,000?
Worst thing about it was, the paint was beginning to look a little thin in one place on the car, below the left part of the rear window...maybe a fifty-cent piece size. People besides me wouldn't have even noticed it. But, no paint flaking off at all. A/C still cold. Ran fine. I wanted another car.
I'm pretty sure it was a 2.2 liter four, not 2.0.
Actually, I had '90, '97, '02, and now '08, 2.2 liters. The first three all had well over 100K miles. Never had head gasket issues in any of them.
I know someone who had a Cavalier, although the year eludes me now. Late 90's, at least. I think it made it to around 120,000 miles, when something went bad in the engine. I think it was the head gasket, but not sure. The car was still driveable, IIRC. I remember the mechanic telling her that it was actually pretty rare for those engines to fail that early on. Usually, the rest of the car would fall apart around the engine. And, since they tended to have bad resale, if they got traded in, they were often wholesaled off or simply junked.
For cars with the reputation as disposable, I still see a bunch of em, '95 and later, around here being used daily.
Similar results were found on Chevy's Chevelle SS-396 as sticks outnumbered Powerglides on this series in 1966 but then yielded to the slushboc when the Turbo Hydra-matic came out in 1967. Still, there were a lot of stick SS-396s (and later 454s) with the Turbo 400 accounting for 60-75 percent of sales in most of those years. This despite the fact the Chevelle with stick had the lousy Muncie shifter rather than the much-better Hurst shifter that came standard on all GTOs and Oldsmobile 4-4-2s with floor-mounted 3- or 4-speed sticks.
Olds 4-4-2s, surprisingly because of Oldsmobile's more upscale image than Pontiac or "Chevy, were also sold with the majority of them sticks with Hurst shifters in 1965 and 1966 (all '64 4-4-2s had the 4-speed) rather than the 2-speed Jetaway automatic (similar to the GTO's 2-speed). In 1967, when the 4-4-2 got the Turbo Hydra-matic as the shiftless option, automatics outnumbered sticks in this series by an even wider margin than in GTOs or SS-396s.
Corvettes for years had the greatest majority built with the 4-speed manual, while the 2-speed Powerglide and the standard 3-speed manual being the minority - mainly because the Corvette was a sports car and the fact the PG was only offered with the base engine and none of the optional mills. In 1968 when the 3-speed Turbo Hydra-matic replaced the PG and made available with almost all engines, including the big block 427s - the ratio of manual/automatic Vettes went to about 60/40 and then 50/50 for 1969-70 before the automatic began dominating sales in later years.
Let's face it---for most folks, driving a full size Pontiac in the 60s or 70s as a 4-speed was a chore. The purists loved it but for most people, rowing that truck-like gearbox on a car was wide and high as the Queen Mary couldn't have been much fun day after day in traffic.