Chevy’s mid-size Celebrity returned for 1985 with an optional 2.8 liter v6 switched from carburetor to port fuel injection. Also back was the Eurosport option package, offering firm suspension, blackout trim, and other goodies, all for $199. The V6 sold separately for an extra $250.
Video: 1985 Chevrolet Celebrity LaserDisc Promo
As long as cars like this are still in the backs of people's minds, GM is gonna have a hard time in life. These cars aren't that old in the whole scheme of things. I was a kid when they were new, and I'm 37.
If you got one of the fuel injected engines, I thought these were pretty decent cars. They rode nice, had a ton of room inside and the later Eurosports were kinda cool looking.
My 86 celebrity wagon was the most reliable trouble free car I ever owned, with the 2.8 mpfi engine. Never used a drop of oil or had any engine issues. Put 245,000 miles on it and it had all the original parts, tranny, wheel bearings, etc. All I did was change the oil, put on brake pads and tires. It was the energizer bunny X10. Great car.
The X-Cars were the beginning of the end of GM - the Celebrity class products were the ones the dug the grave and started burying the company - truly some of the worst products ever made.
My '86 Eurosport 2.8MPFI wagon was the worst piece of junk I ever owned. The transmission let go twice within 100 000kms. It was gutless to boot. I was such a GM fanboy at the time I never considered anything else though I'm not sure there were any truly good cars to own back then.
That was the problem with GM back then. They were horribly inconsistent. Some models were decent, some complete ****. Even within a model, some were built good, some not. Depended on which factory was doing the work and which day of the week.
I took in a 1989 Celebrity at my first job in the car Biz. It had 99,000 km's and was 3 years old. We used it for 9 years as a Service Loaner without any problems.
Now I hate to say it but Service Loaners aren't treated the nicest, Customer's that use them, don't own a bolt in them, and might be making payment on their own vehicle in the shop at the time.
That car wound up with over 300,000km's as a loaner. The Iron Duke never gave up. And the Snot was driven out of it for those 200,000 km's.
I was swilling the Kool aid by the gallon back then , I remember a year or two after I bought my 2004 Silverado I went by the local Toyota dealer to look at a Tundra ( withdrawal syndrome I guess) and found a Tundra to look at and was going to go on a test drive and salesman went to start it up and it was stone cold dead , my Silverado battery lasted ten years to the day and has never not started or been able to drive , that snapped me
out of it fast .
My first car was a grey 89 Celebrity with blue interior, bench seat, and every option. It was a hand me down, and I drove that thing for 6 years, put over 100,000 miles on it, and it only started going bad at about 180,000 miles. Thing was perfect. Clean lines by the late 80's, smooth driving, good audio, started every time (until the end), had little rust, and was big enough to seat the whole gang comfortably. I loved that damn car, and would drive another one in a heartbeat.
My parents had an 87 Chevy Celebrity Eurosport, in dark blue that actually looked quite nice with the black out trim and rallye wheels. The car rode well, and the V6 was a decent mill for the era. The car was completely trouble free, and only required its normal maintenance. After some 110 K miles of reliability it met an untimely demise in the form of a head on collision. Both my parents emerged utterly unscathed, the car though was a total loss. The A body's are dismissed today,but people forget that both the Cutlass Ciera and Chevy Celebrity held the top spot in sales for their segment in the 80's. The Buick Century soldiered on for quite a while and in its final years, while not exciting or cutting edge, was quite reliable.
From today's standards these seem kind of bland and pathetic, but from my viewpoint and what I remember, they were quite popular and were all over the place back in the day. I particularly liked the "Europeanized" models from each of the divisions.
One of the last models made in the Framingham, MA plant before closure. They were supposed to get the Dustbuster minivans but powerful hack local (town) officials killed it and the plant closed when the model retired. They lost a lot of jobs because of that. Could you imagine the uproar today if a DPW head prevented the expansion of the city's largest employer causing them to close the plant, because he want to keep the land for his new DPW depot. It was a sad day for UAW here, lot of people lost their jobs. Back then it seemed like everybody had a Celebtiry, Cutlass Ciera or a 6000 around here.
The thing that used to get me mad about GM and in particular Chevrolet from this time period is that they were always changing the names of the cars. It was Malibu for a few years, then Celebrity, then Lumina, etc so you were always stuck with an "orphan" which had no trade value. Meanwhile, the Camry name can last over 30 years and Corolla from the 1960's so there was always a resale market and perceived value.
It's impressive to remember how terrible the standard model looked... in my part of Canada easily 80% of the Celebrities around had the "Eurosport" option which was so much more appealing...
I'm a nostalgic kind of guy, and we had a Celebrity around the time I learned to drive, so I have a soft spot for it. But it isn't a bright spot on GMs record, aside from being a big seller. Sounds like it ranged from highly reliable to piece of garbage in GMi member's experience, which makes me think quality at GM was at best random back then. I do recall fit and finish and the feel of interior bits (door handles, window winders, dash trim, glove boxes, etc) being pretty cheap, and plastics peeled and broke and discoloured, which certainly don't help the impression of a model or brand, even if in many cases the guts of the vehicle were solid.
They were so bad that "chrome" painted plastic knobs and switches faded and peeled off about the time the warranty expired. All the plastics, levers, etc were made out of the cheapest plastics possible. And they kept a lot of these parts in service generation after generation of car.
I remember as a kid my mom had a 1978 Pontiac Lemans. I distinctly remember the steering column, turn signal levers, etc. When I got out of college in 2003 I bought a 2002 Camaro. I really liked that car, it was completely reliable for me up until I sold it in 2007 with around 80k miles. But my Camaro literally had the same steering column and switch gear that my mom's 1978 Pontiac had. And it was cheap, cheap, cheap. The multifunction turn signal lever felt so cheap like it was going to fall apart any second. Fortunately it didnt. But there's simply no excuse to re-use parts like that for nearly 30 years.
Probably not a horrible car, but having plenty of space compared to an 80s Camry or Accord only earns so much. The Taurus of 1986 was the game changer. Despite this GM waited a rather long time to fully redesign (and replace with the Lumina nameplate) the Celebrity. A 1987-1988 redesign would've been ideal as was done with both generations of the Lumina. The development funds for the Corsica should've just been rolled into making a second generation of this car. Chevy's competitiveness in this arena kept getting segmented to the point that by the 2000s they essentially had two vehicles competing with the Camcord: the Malibu and Impala.
The development funds for the Corsica should've just been rolled into making a second generation of this car. Chevy's competitiveness in this arena kept getting segmented to the point that by the 2000s they essentially had two vehicles competing with the Camcord: the Malibu and Impala.
Ugh, Corsica is another dim spot for GM. When I took driver's ed in high school in 1992, we drove Corsicas. By this point, my parents had jumped off the GM ship (my parents were very loyal Pontiac buyers from the 1950's when they got married up until their 1978 Lemans). So my dad taught me to drive on his 1990 Toyota Corolla. Driving his car and driving the Corsica at driver's ed was a night and day difference, and not in a good way.
One pet peeve on this Laserdisc - Chevy calling the two door a 'coupe' just because it has two doors. By my lights it appears to have the exact same roofline as the four door sedan.
That would make it a "Two door sedan" not a two door coupe.
Later on four door hardtops with unique rooflines were called "Sport sedans" by Chevrolet. Now they are calling them 'four door coupes' which at least retains the idea that a 'coupe' is 'cut' down sedan roof.
The two door sedan had its own following as - yes - the perfect family car - better than the four door sedan because in the two door sedan junior could not open the back door and step out onto the pavement at speed.
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