These were never quite the apple of my eye although I wouldn't kick an '84-'87 (non-Aero coupe) Monte Carlo SS out of my garage. Still, you don't see these every day even at car shows so let's take a minute or to kick it's fourteen-inch wheels , dry-rotted tires and dorky AF wheel covers.
Us "spotters" have a hard time with these because Chevrolet did little year-over-year to distinguish one model year from another. I tried to check the VIN but it's sun blasted away but based on what I know about these cars and no CHMSL this is for certain a 1981-1985.
I could call the number painted on the windshield to find out for sure but what's the point of that? If I was a betting girl I'd say it's an '82.
From the looks of it you would never know there's just 79,000 miles on it's thirty-nine year old ticker; this is one tired looking automobile. I should have taken pictures of the front tires; they show signs of a front end seriously out of alignment. The seats appear ok but the dash, carpet and headliner are shot to pieces and the exterior speaks for itself.
I didn't see any rust on the body so it does have that going for it but I didn't peak underneath. "Pennsylvania cars" tend to be much cleaner than Ohio cars so they go for a bit of a premium over here but holy smokes, $6,000? That asking price has more to do with the current over-inflated used car market than about the car itself.
Seriously, do people actually drop this kind of money on "non-classic" old cars in this kind of condition? NADA guidelines peg '82 Monte Carlo's low retail at $2,100, $4,375 for average retail and $6,975 for "high retail." Have they not updated their values in these odd, sort-of post-pandemic days?
For $6,000 I'd want this car to have at least a mirror like finish and run better than the day it first left the factory. If beaters like this have asking prices this high the end is truly near. This is a $1,500 car in my humblest of opinions.
Maybe it's a sleeper and there's a 383 or an LS1 lurking under it's patina-rich bonnet. Highly doubtful but for six-grand there should be something more interesting than, at best, the optional "Chevy 305".
This could quickly become a money-pit and it's too damn expensive to buy as just an "old-car". Redoing the interior, good luck finding what you need, and a decent paint job will run you $4,000.
Throw in whatever power train work it needs or you'd want to do and you're pushing ten-grand on top of the very high asking price. This thing worth the dark side of $20,000?
High retail on a 1986 Monte Carlo SS is $9,750; that tells me everything about this car I need to know.
General Motors got way fewer high-fives for their 1978 circa downsized intermediates than they got for their 1977 full-size models. More like up-sized compacts than intermediates, the worst-of-the-worst of them, in my humble-est of opinions, was the 7/8 scale, 1973-1977 Chevrolet Monte Carlo.
Chevrolet did a pretty good job of cleaning it up for 1981 but whether it was that GM's class-of-'78 "personal luxury cars" were off-putting or not, by the early '80's, "influencers" and taste-makers began to make transportation-fashion statements elsewhere.
The bloom was off the rose on personal luxury cars; or in this case the hood ornament. Chevrolet built these cars through 1987.
Still, took the better part of thirty-years to finally deep-six these things if we bookmark the end of the personal-luxury-car era as the day Chevrolet pulled the plug on the Monte Carlo after model-year 2007.
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