Cavalier: memento of mediocrity?

The Chevy Cavalier has become a cultural phenomenon.

Washington Post

Phil English, N;The Cavvy wasn’t even bad enough to be a joke, like the AMC Gremlin, or a kitschy embarrassment, like the Chevette. It was just the mutt of the midsize rental fleet at the Airport at the End of the Mind, the joyless perk of the junior sales exec, the Motel 6 of the American automobile. By the late 1990s, the company was reportedly losing $1,000 on every one sold from the GM factory in Lordstown.

It was “the car that deservedly got GM in trouble,” says Paul A. Eisenstein, publisher of the Car Connection, a popular automotive Web site.

Something is going on here, something on the darker edge of American possibility, something scary in the back aisles of AutoZone. Why would teenagers, young men, all in search of hipness, devote themselves to such mediocrity?

You know what?

Cavalier guys love this. Go ahead, yuk it up. They’ll take a used Cavvy for five grand and get in the garage and turn it into something that’ll shame your 20 grand store-bought Civic, or anything else you saw in “The Fast and the Furious.”

“When I drive by, I want people to look at me and say, ‘Wow, that’s a Cavalier,’” said Josh Detorie, a Cavalier owner from suburban Baltimore.

He won something like a dozen trophies at car shows last year. The car is candy-blue and silver. It’s gorgeous.

“I have a couple thousand pictures of my car from what it looked like when I bought it until now. It wasn’t blue and silver originally. It was black and silver, but the black got to be so much to keep up with. Oxidation kicks in a lot faster. I was working so much I wasn’t able to keep up with it.”

He produces several hundred pictures of the car on his iPod Touch.

He’s reworked just about everything but the taillights. His Web page lists more than 50 modifications, including: tires upgraded four sizes; new suspension; a GM performance supercharger under the hood; a 1,200-watt Sony amplifier; flat-screen television in the trunk; television monitors mounted in the visors; racing seats; custom-made sliders; triple engine gauges, like eyeballs, on the driver’s side of the dash; neon blue lights under the car and inside, too.

Of course it has remote start.

The Cavalier was once the best-selling car in America, and that alone makes you wonder whatever happened to this country. It was 1984 and 1985. It was priced to sell — like, for $14,000. It came in a three-door hatchback, a four-door, a coupe and a convertible. There was the Z-24. The car was updated three times over the next 13 years, and then GM lost interest. It died in 2005.

There is no real national organization to the Cavvy phenomenon.

There is a J-Body Organization out of Arizona (named for GM’s framework for the Cav, the Pontiac Sunbird and such), and Clubcav.com and V6z24.com and the Cavalier page at Cardomain.com. The latter has more than 9,000 Cavalier owners listing their hyped-up vehicles — more than any other car except the Camaro, which is, like, a real car.