#j-body

This piss-weak four banger is built so poorly that you could hang an entire Netflix comedy special off of repeatedly pointing at the dashboard and wiggling your eyebrows. Its handling dynamics are best described as “worrisome,” and once my passenger side door card fell off while I was trying to crank the stereo loud enough to drown out the persistent rattles.

And yet, somehow, I miss it. I don’t know if I miss that specific car, or something in how it felt to shift, or just that period in my life. Maybe it’s the absolutely unkillable cockroach motor with compression low enough it could run with the bores half full of floodwater (I tried). Whatever it is, I now find myself getting secretly excited whenever I see a Cavalier.

It’s shameful: I cannot even yell out in excitement when I see a minty Ecotec Sunfire to my long-suffering travelling companions. Even though they have grown used to my other automotive indiscretions, I know that admitting this to them would finally be the nudge they need to call up the funny farm and have me euthanized.

I do not know yet how I can get this terrible obsession out of my veins. Last week, I registered a shell company in the Maldives. This way, I can keep anonymous my purchase of a cheap J-body and prevent it from hitting my registration and insurance, which would come in handy when I finally come to my senses and leave the car lawn-darted into a ditch with thermite burning on the valve cover about eight miles down the road.

There is a snag, however: over the thousands of bad cars I have owned, I have struck up a kind of odd friendship with the local registry agents. Even if I were to visit as the catspaw of a shadowy international corporation, they’d still know and they would definitely judge.

“Unkillable.” That’s what General Motors’ own internal documentation said about the third-generation Chevrolet Cavalier, when accountants were questioning why people stopped buying new cars altogether instead of driving their mid-90s cars into their third decade of life. Anyone who says they will only buy a new car once they’ve run their current one into the ground should still consider making an exception for this J-bodied wunderkind and its cockroachy ability to keep running through such minor foibles like complete head gasket failure and “elevated risk of pelvic injury” (IIHS).

Originally developed as a response to wartime rationing of independent rear suspension, the J-body chassis features a torsion beam setup, similar to a lot of other cars that you should have purchased instead. This allows the Cavalier to skitter uncontrollably through virtually any configuration of corner, with loss of grip exhibited in both on- and off-camber roads.

The third-generation Cavalier’s famous neck-snapping torque is delivered by either a 115 horsepower 2.2L pushrod engine, or a future-technology-for-1982 2.4L twin cam. Later, GM management contracted with Lotus to develop the Ecotec engine, forcing them to put together an anemic, un-fun lump of aluminum out of spite for their engineers.

During the era that the Cavalier was developed, uppity, recalcitrant, politically-challenged, or otherwise unlikeable engineers were placed to work in the small-car program as punishment for their poor behaviour. This does not particularly explain why everything else from early-90s GM also sucks.

As a peace offering to the Japanese for holding back from totally obliterating them in the mid-1980s, Chevrolet allowed Toyota to brand and sell a right-hand-drive version of the third-generation Cavalier in Japan. Nearly identical to the existing American Cavalier, but with Toyota logos, it is unknown who approved the car for sale, although xenophobic Japanese nationalist groups have attempted to take responsibility for it ever since. One sits in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, next to a scale-model replica of Little Boy.

In a prescient decision by General Motors, the Cavalier corners so poorly that the driver’s seat is canted towards the middle of the car, to give the owner the impression that they are no longer doglegging after the car’s fourth major collision tweaks the frame, rendering the vehicle incapable of driving straight and only mildly increasing the speed of rear tire wear.

There is in fact no third-generation Cavalier in existence today with a functioning rear exhaust hanger. The bouncing muffler that results is a pleasure to police officers the world over, who thrill to the concept of popping equipment violations on demand whenever they don’t like the looks of a Cavalier driver.