Type-10, or "A Cadillac Cimarron with Cloth Seats

Type-10, or "A Cadillac Cimarron with Cloth Seats"
Sometimes the rarest classic car on the block is a well kept secret hiding in plain sight. Even calling the gray doorstop below a "classic car" would get the blood up of many collectors and aficionados my age. Regardless, behold the tiniest patch of fog in Bay Ridge!

This is a 1987 Chevrolet Cavalier Type-10 in one of five colors GM called Silver Poly that year (itself a damning testament to the automotive landscape of 1987). This is the last year of the first generation which debuted in 1982. As a reliable and efficient front wheel drive compact the Cavalier was popular for its entire run through 2005.

Type-10 was the name given to all 2 door Cavaliers, which included a notchback as well as this hatchback. 4 door sedan and wagon versions vastly outnumbered the Type-10s which makes this a rare beast indeed. As an example just over 6,000 of these were built in '87 compared to over 150,000 of the 4 door. I have a friend who owned a 4 door BROWN Cavalier with a manual transmission back in the day that I loved. At the time I had my '63 Beetle and we even traded cars for a week while living 2 states away. There was something so unabashedly uncool about a 1980s compact sedan that the stick shift made it a secret weapon: the ultimate 90 horsepower sleeper, complete with White Zombie stickers on the dash.
I'd like to point out that this car is missing its front passenger side hubcap. Unlike most, this is literally a small cap to cover the wheel hub itself.

The shape harkens back to the X-Body (Citation, Phoenix) 4 door that bowed out in 1985. This ride is built on the J-Body platform, which brought you such hits as the Pontiac Sunfire, Olds Firenza, and Buick Skyhawk. The Skyhawk and Sunfire offered bizarre power headlights in the form of little doors that lifted up like eyelids while the headlights stayed in place. The Pontiac power headlights were never fully closed, with the lower thirds of the bulbs visible under the doors giving a sleazy, heavy-lidded look.

You can't tell me that this rear end doesn't look like the fabled DeLorean! The gridded multi colored taillights are very similar, as is the long sloping rear window. Those quarter windows have a small black dot near the top edge. This is the pop-out mechanism for ventilation, otherwise this thing would fishbowl so bad in the sun.

For anyone that wants to try and date one of these they might run across in the wild, the word Chevrolet was on the right side of the rear fascia until 1986. The CS designation is a trim level one baby step above the base model. There was a much faster sport version called Z24 starting in 1986 originally only for the Type-10s.

From this angle you can actually see some styling effort. The lower edge of the rear window is inset into the body, and a faux wing indentation above the taillights. It's not much but it's something!

Cavalier is such a funny name for such low-hanging fruit. The main definitions are offhand, indifferent, casual, and dismissive (which sums up this owners parking style). Chevy had a cavalier attitude about delivering the best possible design for the '80s I suppose. The Cavalier was the basis of one of the greatest crimes in recent automotive history though.
 In 1982 Cadillac decided to take its heralded luxury nameplate and shove it into a J-Body sausage casing, resulting in the Cimarron. Widely and famously known as the most egregious case of badge-engineering gone wrong, the Cimarron was obviously a Cavalier with a fancy grill & hood ornament. No matter if leather seats and sound deadening were a part of the package, the Cimarron's disguise didn't fool anyone. Cadillac barely slipped the cinderblock tied to its legs to come back to the surface.

This is the standard GM interior of the mid to late '80s. That pull-out door handle in its plastic square, the flat expanse of the dash and glove compartment, and the tall block housing the gearshift are all too common across the likes of Corsica, Lumina, Beretta, and Pontiac 6000. The factory stereo has a cassette delete in the form of a plastic cover even bigger than the cassette door would've been. This is the interior of my high school friends cars.

Looks like this frumper took a good knock to the jaw at some point, but it's still standing strong. Besides this spot the overall condition is pretty damn good for a 30+ year old car. Most GM products of this era have paint jobs that look like they reentered the atmosphere. This "color" is as boring as it gets, but it is intact.

Well there we have it: a pseudo sporty yawn on wheels from the deepest corner of the Malaise Era. Just for kicks I looked up the current values on this ride and found that it starts at $195 for salvage condition and makes its way up to $5,850 for an absolutely pristine, flawless, museum quality example. In reality there might be 2 mint examples of this ride on earth, and to the middle aged success story who had this as a first car the value might reach 15 or 20 grand (stranger things have happened). If you stumble upon one being sold by the relative of a recently deceased owner who kept it in the garage and serviced it at the dealer I say pick it up! Parts are easy to get, and it will turn as many heads as a Chevelle at most 2019 car shows. Mark my words oh Grumpy Baby Boomer: the J Body will have its day, just as easily as mid-'70s gas crunch rejects are having theirs today.

Blight as an accidental classic

BLIGHT AS AN ACCIDENTAL CLASSIC

For a car to be officially called a classic it must be either 20 or 25 years old. Some rides are instant classics due to their rarity and/or design. Then there are things like the hooptie below that time defines as classic but the world is collectively waiting for them to just leave the party.

Good grief. What we have here is a 1988-1990 Chevrolet Cavalier in White. YAWN.

This little punk is riddled with damage. The grill is some auto parts store replacement that's committing the crime of being too clean and bright. The side light is long gone. Dents and scratches abound. The paint on the hood looks like it was touched up with White-Out.

This car is standard transportation in every way. 4 door basic, standard wheels, zero chrome, and an utter lack of decals complete the boredom.

Rust is beginning in the strangest way on this ride. It's almost like somebody brushed saltwater above the rear wheel well. The wheel is just sad. For some reason the owner taped a map to the inside of the window. Why?

All the neighbors know this car because it's the worst one on a nice block. Way back when somebody wanted to represent sports radio and a nation with some decals.

Sometimes cars get to a stage in life where they've already had their final trip through the car wash. I believe this Cavalier is in a post washing place in its path.

I knew of one cool Cavalier in my life. It was a 4 door brown (and I mean BROWN) 1985 version with 4 square headlights. What made it unexpectedly cool was that it was a manual transmission. Driving it was actually fun enough that I traded my VW Beetle for the Cavalier for 1 week (back when I was an age where that seemed perfectly normal). The car came with lots of White Zombie tapes.

This has a thoroughly boring inline 4 cylinder engine and is front wheel drive. There was a high performance Z24 version of the Cavalier as well as some sporty 2 door body styles. Then there's this.

Time to back away and wonder why I bothered snapping pics of this slab. I suppose it was the fact that it is 28 or so years old even though it causes zero excitement. When I was in high school in 1990 this would be the equivalent of having a car from 1962. Maybe there are kids today that are fascinated by this utterly ignored ride? Who knows? Eventually anything left on the road from long enough ago becomes somewhat desirable but this still has a ways to go.

A true Hooptie if there ever was one; the Blue J

BLUE J

I was strolling along on the island of Manhattan recently when I did a double take. What was this frumpy beater doing in a tony neighborhood like this?

What we have here is a 1988-1990 Chevrolet Cavalier that somebody painted blue with a brush and some cheap house paint. Absolutely nothing about this car is remarkable except for its condition. You know by looking at it for 2 seconds that this beast knows the city well.

Painting within the lines is so hard! Tape is super handy for these sorts of things, but that's not for Cavalier Owner! Cavalier Owner does what he feels, which looks like a combination of spray paint and brush touch-ups. The foggy droplets built up inside that turn signal sum it up nicely. Somewhere along the line the seal broke on that light and now there's a tiny weather system inside.

Parked in front of a classic walk-up and next to a school this thing really harkens back to earlier days in NYC. I'm sure this block was sketchy at some point in the late '80s when this ride was new.

BLAMMO! Every time I see a proud dent like this one I picture the old Batman TV series with POW! animations backing up the fights. This thing's been knocked around big time.

There's a mysterious wound under the corner taillight. I'm guessing this car was rear ended hard enough to warrant a replacement bumper? Regardless the metal under the lens being pushed in like that had me scratching my head. Hard to tell any repairs because they matched the paint so well.

The damage on this little ride is comprehensive! No body panel is spared. From the angle of the back seat it looks like someone got in and ripped it open to gain access to the trunk at some point. 

The Cavalier was built on Chevys J platform, which included such forgotten flops as the Oldsmobile Firenza, Buick Skyhawk, and Pontiac Sunbird. Perhaps the most infamous of all the J cars was the Cadillac Cimarron which was basically a Cavalier with leather seats, different grill and taillights, and Caddy badges. The hit to Cadillacs reputation was almost fatal before they upped their game with the mildly better Catera and CTS. 

The lines aren't really terrible for an '80s Chevy. A friend of mine had a rare Cavalier that was actually pretty fun to drive; it was an earlier model with 4 square headlights, 4 doors, BROWN as can be, and best of all a 5 speed manual! Never saw another one since.

Oh man this one has the auto trans alright, sticking up out of a pile of garbage. Aftermarket cassette deck hanging out of the too-big opening is a nice touch. The seats are just nasty. I'm not usually in favor of hanging perfumed trees from the rearview but if this was my ride I'd plant a whole Vanillaroma forest. *I like that vent under the dash pointing directly at the drivers crotch though!

Aww, I feel kinda bad picking on lil' Cavvy with its sad eyes and assortment of random lights. 

How fitting that this bus was passing when it did, as Reliant Transportation is the reason you still climb into this blue Hooptie day after day. There's something to be said for a car that's evolved into something else that can be parked in even the worst neighborhood at night though. If you took this car and drove it up to Westchester you'd end up with a kite tail of cops just waiting for your license plate light to go out, but here in the Big City she's another able donkey. Keep on keeping' on Cavalier!