1987 Chevrolet Caprice - Tonawanda

 

With the rare exception of some full-size, regular cab, short-bed pickups, I have no appreciation for the aesthetics of trucks and SUV's. Sure, I think their utility is great but I have little use for them otherwise. Somewhat ironically, while I loathe four-door sedans, I'm almost as much a fool for station wagons as I am for pony, sports, muscle and personal luxury cars. Almost. Let's not get carried away here. I even find much to love in post-1976 GM B-body wagons like this 1987 Chevrolet Caprice. 

Adding to my state of confusion, when I was a kid, I thought the bone-stripper, rental-grade 1968 Ford Ranch Wagon my father drove the cringiest thing in town. Well, compared to the family across the street who had a '68 Country Squire it was, but today I appreciate it for its simple grace and a working-man's simplicity. Another "what-the-hell" was that my father was a struggling white-collar executive - I've never figured out why he bought that thing but I digress. 

Station wagons hit two ice bergs in the early to mid 1980's that slowly but surely doomed them to oblivion. First was the "Griswold's Wagon Queen Family Truckster" from National Lampoon's 1982 "Vacation" that not only lampooned but harpooned "dad's" old steed. Then, the head shot - Chrysler rolled out their car based mini-van in 1984. While, frankly, dorkier looking than any woodie wagon, the mini-van was literally and figuratively a better mouse trap and family's beat their way to Chrysler's door. 

Therefore, by the time our '87 here was new and shinier, it was already a marked (family) man. Fun facts, GM had worked on a X-body (Chevrolet Citation) based mini-van in the late '70's\early '80's but scuttled the project because they believed it would impact their station wagon sales. Ford had one in the pipeline too and yanked it for the same reasons. Whoops! 

This car is part of GM's 1977 downsized full-sized line that went through few wholesale changes until it was redesigned for model year 1991; it sank for good after 1996. Seeing the 1980's weren't that far removed from the 1950's and 1960s and "planned obsolescence", that GM pushed out the same car for fourteen straight model years was either an indication that they had gotten the design right or that something was very wrong. Seeing the problems GM had en masse back then, something tells me it was the later and not the former. 

So, by 1987, this Chevrolet Caprice, that's mercifully not an "Estate" version with the simulated wood paneling, seemed like the Titanic's cruise director planning a shuffleboard tournament after midnight on that fateful night. It doesn't seem nearly as dated now as it did back then but, trust me, it wreaked of "old". What's more, if you had to have a "wagon" back then, Ford had their Taurus and Mercury Sable wagons that were infinitely hipper looking and better familial transportation conveyances. 

Thiss silver bullet here is a fairly special family truckster because in addition to not having simulated wood grain on its flanks, it's got power windows, locks, a dual power, 55/45 split front bench (rare!) and cool (but deadly) rear-facing rear jump seats. 

Oh, but wait. There's more. The 4.3-liter V-6, (Chevrolet or Oldsmobile) 5.0-liter V-8 it was born with was tossed into Lake Erie for this "454 by Tonawanda Engine", 7.4-liter V-8. Hope they drowned the 2004R transmission the V-8's came with (the V-6 would have had the TH200) as well because this thing will twist out north of 370-foot pounds torque at a John Wayne low, 2,800-rpm. Otherwise, say buh-bye to the your turbine hub or worse. 

All Chevrolet "big-block" V-8 engines were built at the Tonawanda factory outside Buffalo, New York, the last one coming off the assembly line in December of 2009. Seeing this one appears to have a carburetor, if it hasn't been modified, I'd guess it makes in the neighborhood of 230-horsepower. Nothing to write home to mom about but old school "big-blocks" were all about torque anyway. Seeing it has exhaust headers, some work may have been done bumping up hp somewhat. Torque might be a little lower but there's so much of it to start with a few pound feet missing wouldn't be a big deal. 

Asking price on this one is a "you've got to be kidding me" $10,000 - that's nearly $6,500 above average retail. No doubt the inflated asking price is because of the engine transplant. Now, I don't mind paying a little extra if the value proposition makes sense but, in my opinion, on this thing, it doesn't. Sorry, pal. I'm not paying a super-premium just because someone did some heavy lifting for me. Please. I will take it for a test drive and stab the gas hard as I can. I feel that my god given right as not only an automobile enthusiast but as an American. 

Much like my 2009 Toyota RAV4 Limited V-6, that's stupid fast, I love a sleeper. And an old station wagon sleeper so much more. I'm just not gonna pay for it but somebody no doubt will. Are we there yet? 

1976 Chevrolet Caprice (two-door) - Where Did the Hardtops Go?

I know my appreciation for full-size, two-door, 1971-1973 GM hard tops defies reason, logic even. They're too long, wide and heavy. They don't handle particularly well, they're not especially powerful, inhale gas, shudder and shimmy, even the most expensive of them have interiors with the soul of a Tupperware bowl and they're sloppily assembled. Through my foggy goggles, though, the big brutes have a larger-than-life quality to them; there's an elan or "Hollywood" about them that's transcendental, cool and mysterious; were these really created by a team of mere mortals? Same goes for their "family-sized" convertibles. Above is a 1971 Chevrolet Impala Sport Coupe, looking magnificent even trimmed with a damn vinyl top.  

Sadly, during my wretched wonder years, whether it was looming government roll-over regulations, that never came to fruition, '70's fashion trends or a combination of both, hard tops started disappearing, replaced by clumsy "colonnades" like this 1976 Chevrolet Caprice. Along with the five-MPH "safety bumpers", all that was alluring about hard tops of yore went out the proverbial opera window. 

The term "hardtop" is oxymoronic since not all cars that aren't convertibles are "hardtops", technically anyway. In automobile vernacular, by definition, a hardtop is a vehicle with a fixed roof that lacks a center-post or pillar that emulates the look of a convertible with its top up.  While somewhat stiffer than a convertible, "hard tops" are sheer fashion statements; the lack of a center post doing the vehicle's structural rigidity no favors. I liken my father's 1972 Cadillac Sedan deVille to having the backbone of a cardboard box. A soggy one too. 

Hardtop styling dates as far back and the mid-nineteen-teens but General Motors spurred its popularity after World War II with their 1949 Buick Roadmaster Riviera (above), Oldsmobile 98 Holiday and Cadillac Coupe deVille. The motif that combined the open, airiness of a convertible with the "performance" of a fixed roof car trickled down to Pontiac and Chevrolet for 1950 and hard tops, pun not intended, took off. 

Hard tops became so popular that by the mid-Fifties, every manufacturer not only had two-door hard tops, but four-door and even station wagon hard tops. The wagons, though, fell out of favor by the mid-Sixties, above is a 1961 Dodge Polara. Knowing how much a two-door hardtop can shimmy-shimmy, I can't imagine what a rattling soda can these things must have been. If not fresh out of the showroom, then eventually. 

Although for years cars with center posts or pillars were sold alongside their hard top brethren, and were typically lower priced, for model-year 1974, the GM "C-body" Cadillac Coupe deVille, Buick Electra and Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight two-door hard tops were replaced by two-door sedans with a fixed, center post. Above, left is a frumpy and dumpy "colonnade" 1975 Oldsmobile Ninety Eight, to the right a 1973 Ninety Eight resplendent in hard top glory. The B-body, or shorter wheelbase version of the C-body, Pontiac Bonneville and Chevrolet Caprice (like our red '76 here) got a similar post "look"; perhaps a (misguided) notion to convey the exclusive new aesthetic of the tonier C-body's? 

Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac offered a hybrid post\hardtop design on their 1974-1976 B-body LeSabre, 88 and Catalina, respectively; above is a 1975 Pontiac Catalina. While I applaud the effort, through my bifocals, the look doesn't work. It's far too fussy, there's too much going on especially dressed with a vinyl roof. Leave it to GM to even try such a thing and partially succeed in doing so. Ford tried something similar during this time and fell flat on their five-mile-per-hour safety bumpers. 

Giving credit where credit is due, the funky dog legged roof on the B-O-P's (subjective) is most certainly more handsome than our dowdy Caprice here. Curiously, Chevrolet sold an "Impala Sport Coupe" in 1974 and 1975 that was a true "hard top". For 1976, the "Sport Coupe" was gone, buyers stuck with the only the box-on-box "Custom Coupe" or one of these if they opted for a full-size, Chevrolet two-door. These cars do have their fans, though. For more, read my soliloquy on "Glass House Donks". 

There was never any clear-cut data gleamed that definitively found two- or four "post" sedans were safer in roll over than a hard top was. Again, "post" sedans were less expensive than hard tops, buyers literally paying more for less, and the same is true today. I found this "triple-red" Caprice on Facebook Marketplace recently for sale down in Nashville with a reasonable (I guess) $7,500 asking price. Just 76,000-miles on it too. If it was a 1971 or 1972 hardtop like the car featured in the video at the top, seeing the shape this is in, it would command two- to three-times as much. That makes me believe I'm not alone in my sentiments. 

 

1977 Chevrolet Caprice - Who's Buying These Cars?

Going on ten years ago I blogged about a '78 Chevrolet Impala that was for sale near my home here in Cleveland, Ohio that had an asking price of $4,200. If I thought that asking price pie-in-the-sky, imagine what I think of this '77 Caprice for sale on Facebook Marketplace in Minneapolis with an asking price of $10,000. 

Granted, this Caprice has slightly less mid-west patina than that Impala had but still, the hell is going on here? An argument on the Facebook group that featured this car was that if this goes for ten-grand it bodes well for all of us who have a "classic". And he wasn't referring to "classic" as in "Caprice Classic" either. 

Well, if we happen to have Grand dad's old car in the garage and we have nothing "in it", then I'd tend to agree with that sentiment but for the rest of us who own a "classic", I fail to see how that bodes well for us. It's kind of like housing prices exploding in your neighborhood. It's all well and good your home has increased in value, but if everyone's home as increased in value - where are you going to move to take advantage of your lottery-esque found booty? 

And then there's the risk of deflation. You drop ten-grand on this and then it's value plummets due to either a cratering economy or things finally returning to "normal". Then what do you have? A 1977 Chevrolet Caprice you blew ten-thousand dollars on. I sure hope you really like this car because as an investment it might be as bad as it gets. Seriously, I can't believe anyone would pay that kind of money for one of these. 

GM's class of 1977 downsized full-size cars were heralded as watersheds of engineering and design efficiency. I've always thought that fairly whimsical given that all they did was shrink-ray their existing designs back down to what they were back in the early to mid-'60's after a decade or so of inexplicable bulking up. These cars did nothing to advance the state of the art of automotive engineering seeing they all but used the same mechanical ethos they'd been using going back to before World War II. Front engine, rear drive with a live axle, full-perimeter frame. Where was the real advancement? 

And the designs, in my humblest of opinion's, were decidedly mixed. Nothing terrible like what they did with the intermediates come 1978 but certainly nothing great or, ahem, "classic". Of the gaggle of '77's, I'm least ambivalent towards the Buick LeSabre coupe meanwhile I find these Chevrolet's as appliance like as a Chevy Cruze. A 1961 GM bubble-top coupe these most certainly weren't. 

But how to explain the asking price on this bomber? NADA pegs these on the high end at just under six-grand, average price of around $3,300. Which seems about right for this. And in line with the ambitious ask on Grandma's Impala from a decade ago. 

Who knows. Maybe they'll luck out and someone will pay them what they're asking. That, incidentally, would not bode well for anyone but the seller. 

1994 Chevrolet Caprice Classic - Baby LT1

 

I felt like a kid on Christmas morning that summer day in 1990 when my new car magazine arrived with a first road test review of a new-for-'91 Chevrolet Caprice (our subject here is a 1994). I hadn't even seen a glimpse of what these were going to be except reading oh-so-vague teases about the wonderful design innovations Chevrolet had in store for the first major update of the venerable Caprice since 1977. I was put off by the lack of a coupe but the fact that Chevrolet was coming with a new, rear-wheel-drive, V-8 powered Caprice was enough to make me feel as though I was living through the glory days of GM and it was 1960 all over again. In a good way. 

                                                                                  

Talk about being led to believe Santa's was bringing you a puppy and you clothing instead. These things hit Chevrolet showroom floors in late 1990 with a profound thud. 

Heralded at first as GM at it's finest with regards to design and engineering, their much bally-hooed 1977 downsized full-sized cars had grown very long in the tooth, make that very, long in the tooth by the time they finally updated them starting with the Caprice (and Buick Roadmaster) for 1991. 

Unlike GM of the '50's and '60's with a near revolution of design of their wares seemingly every year if not two and no longer than three, changes to the "class of '77" were incremental if not anecdotal over the years. And then 1991 came around. 

Looking somehow larger than they actually were, they were only about an inch longer than the 1977-1990 Caprice's they replaced but they were almost two inches wider. The jokes started flying immediately about how much they looked like whales. Beached whales.

Nicknamed "Shamu" after the famous killer whale, Chevrolet did their best to alter the appearance for 1993 by removing their most distinctive styling detail, the pseudo-rear fender skirts that made the back ends look like '49 Nash's. Careful what you wish for. 

You'd think the revised rear quarters would have resulted in a Caprice resembling a 1992 Ford Crown Victoria, as if that would've been a good thing but it would have been an improvement, but if you notice, the rear axle didn't line up with the fender opening resulting in making a wonky design amazingly even more wonky. Doing it "right" would have required a major design and engineering reboot of the rear of the car; a costly and time consuming process that got nixed no doubt because General Motors was going to harpoon these things anyway come model year 1997. 

Under the hood things actually got interesting for '94 as General Motors slipped in a somewhat detuned version of  of the venerable "LT1" engine first introduced on the 1992 Corvette; please note that's "LT1" not "LT-1" of early 1970's Chevy engine fame. In the Caprice, Buick Roadmaster and Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, it was fitted with iron heads and different intake and exhaust manifolds, purportedly to make less noise, and made 260-horsepower and 330 foot-pounds of torque. Not quite the 300-horsepower the Corvette engine made but it was quite the upgrade. Contemporary road tests clocking the "LT1" Caprice from zero-to-sixty in 6.6-seconds.  That's ho-hum today but thirty years ago that kind of performance in family-sedan was borderline hedonistic. 

However, not all Caprice's of this vintage were created equal. Our black-on-maroon Shamu here is powered by the "L-99" version or what's referred to as the "baby LT1". Displacing 4.3-liters or 263-cubic inches, with it's shorter stroke and smaller bore, it made 200 horsepower and 245 foot-pounds; about what the engines it replaced made - the throttle-body fuel injected 5.7 making in horsepower and the 5.0 making in torque. 

The "L-99" was a bit of an odd and unique duck, or whale, with its mission either to provide better fuel economy than the bigger 5.7 did or was an excuse to charge more for the bigger engine. Spend money to make money, I guess. It was only offered on the Caprice. 

The larger 5.7 engine was featured in the big dog Impala SS Chevrolet made from 1994-1996. With it's lowered suspension, meaty tires and monochromatic paint and finish schemes, the funky, skirt-free rear quarters worked quite well aesthetically. The smaller rims, standard suspension and chrome trim on the Caprice doing updated '94-'96 Shamu's no favors. 

While the '94-'96 Impala SS is one of the rare '90's sedans, domestic or foreign, that's actually appreciating in value, Caprice's like this are languishing. This one here, despite it's near immaculate condition, is for sale with an asking price of $6,995. An Impala SS in this kind of shape would have an asking price north of twenty-grand if not more. 

I'd have a hard time dropping that kind of money for a '94-'96 Impala SS - they're still mid-'90's GM junk inside but that's just me. However, if you've got a hankering for the bad old days of '90's General Motors, comment below and I'll do my best to hook you up with this Caprice. I've seen these were someone has attempted to make them into Impala SS clones and most of them look like what they are; my advice is to keep it as it is and drive it for what it as such. 

1985 Chevrolet Caprice Estate Diesel - Highway Robbery

Although by 1981 GM had all but worked out all or most of the kinks in them, the bottom line was any car back that was diesel-powered was a dog. And by 1985 when this impeccable Caprice Estate was new and shinier, gas prices had flattened negating most of the value proposition the improved mileage of diesel engines provided. "No-go but good mileage" worked only as long as gas prices seemed to be headed to five bucks a gallon.  

At first glance it would seem that General Motor's soft-balled development of their diesel engines as there were so many issues with the first batch of them made between 1978 and 1980. For the record I'm referring to the Oldsmobile 350 cubic-inch V-8 and not the later 4.3-liter V-6's (there were two versions; one for rear-wheel-drive cars, the other for front-wheel-drive). The V-6's, while hardly powerhouses, were much better engineered and assembled than the early 350 V-8's. Fun facts, there was also an Oldsmobile 260 cubic-inch V-8 (1979 only) that had much of the same maladies the 350 had.

Truth was development of the diesels, done by GM's long gone Oldsmbile division, began in 1973 and there was copious R&D done on them; just not enough. Couple that with GM's inherrant cost-cutting and undertrained dealership service departments and GM had a public relations fiasco on their hands right up there with the Corvair. A second generation Oldsmobile diesel 350 was introduced for 1981 but by then the die was serverely cast; diesels meant "bad". So bad that there wasn't a domestic automobile powered by a diesel engine sold in this country until 2015 when Chevrolet made a diesel engine optional on their Cruze. 

How this "oil-burner" has made it to 2021 in what appears to be original condition is a bit of a head scratcher. 

This is a shot of the odometer and, again, from the looks of things this appears to be the "right-mileage". Perhaps no-one wanted to use "grandpa's wagon" after he passed because of the diesel engine; yet no one wanted to part with it. That's as good a tale as I bet the real story is. 

Grandpa's wagon here is for sale outside Pittsburgh at one of those "sign-now, pay-later" lots with an asking price of $9,995. You know those dime-a-dozen lots dotting street corners in every rust belt town from Buffalo to Detroit; they're fronts for high interest used car loans. Hey, as long as it's legal. But asking ten-grand for this seems like, warning, pun incoming, highway robbery to me.  

We take engine performance for granted today but back in the 1980's if a car had good power, and we're talking "good-enough" power not today's over-powered "power" that even Nissan Versa's have, it was hedonistic. Figure zero-to-sixty in this thing would take roughly eighteen-seconds and that's about as slow as the Society of Automotive Engineers (S.A.E.) would allow a vehicle to accelerate back then. More fun facts: the Cadillac Seville diesel of this era takes the cake as the slowest-to-sixty vehicle ever sold; 19.5 seconds. The catalytic converter on my son's 2003 Chevrolet Malibu wore out recently clogging exhaust flow and while the engine ran fine, its pick-up reminded me of slow cars from 1980's. 

Somewhat similar to the rush to "electric's" that we have going on today, the diesel engine option on these things wasn't cheap. And amortizing the extra cost of the diesel engine over time, to me what with the drivability of these cars so relatively severe, has never seemed worth it. So, what's to become of our Caprice here? Part of me wishes I could inherit it and put a crate engine in it; this would be a bad-ass sleeper. However, dropping ten-grand or so to purchase it and then spend another five-to-six- to make it what it "could-be" sounds as foolish a spend as someone in 1985 opting for the diesel option on this thing in the first place. Sorry, grandpa.