Final Parking Space: 1984 Chevrolet Cavalier Sedan

This series is all about automotive history as seen in the car graveyards of the land, and today we’re going to look at an early example of one of the best-selling car platforms General Motors—in fact, any vehicle manufacturer—ever designed: the J Platform. J-Cars were sold throughout the far-flung global GM Empire, and the most-produced of them all was the Chevrolet Cavalier. Here’s a bread-and-butter Cavalier sedan, found in a wrecking yard in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

GM sold well over six million Chevy Cavaliers in the United States for the 1982 through 2005 model years, plus millions more of its near-identical siblings bearing Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac badges. The first-generation (1982-1987) Cavaliers enjoyed massive sales numbers, but they have been all but extinct in American junkyards for more than a decade. In recent years, I’ve found more discarded Porsche 928s than I have first-generation Cavalier commuter sedans (and even the final-generation 1995-2005 Cavaliers are becoming scarce).

Since the factory-hot-rod Cavalier Z24 has a small but devoted enthusiast following to this day, enough of those cars have been sitting in driveways and yards for decades that I still run across quite a few examples in the Ewe Pullets of the land. But the ordinary 1980s Cavalier sedans and wagons that most people bought have just about completely disappeared. Today’s ’84 is the oldest Cavalier I’ve seen in a boneyard since I became an automotive journalist.

This parallels the fate of quite a few other huge-selling Chevrolets over the decades. If you go to a car show or cruise night today, you’d get the impression that most 1957 Chevrolets sold were fully loaded Bel Air hardtops or Nomads with factory V-8s and automatics. In fact, most of those cars were daily-driver post sedans with six-banger engines and three-on-the-tree manual transmissions. The same goes for 1965 full-sized Chevys and members of the 1964-1972 Chevelle family.

So, rather than show you, say, a 1989 Cavalier Z24 convertible, I’m giving you the opportunity to admire the kind of Cavalier that was once an everyday sight on American roads and got millions of families from Point A to Point B. 1984 was the best sales year for the Chevrolet Cavalier, with more than 450,000 buyers signing on the line which is dotted, and better than 300,000 of them were four-door sedans.

One of my closest friends during the mid-1980s drove an ex-fleet 1984 Cavalier four-door in the exact same exterior and interior colors as today’s FPS car, and I recall feeling envy that he had been able to get such a nice car so cheaply. Things worked out much better for him than they did for my other friends who foolishly bought new 1986 Yugo GVs or Hyundai Excels; that Cavalier took him all over Southern California for a solid decade. The 110 photo above is the only one I have of that car, because the film-photography era was like that.

GM didn’t just sell J-Cars in North America, of course. I can’t get reliable exact figures for total production of all the J Family members for the 1981-2005 period, but most sources indicate a final total of far more than ten million.

In the United Kingdom, car shoppers could get new J-Body Vauxhall Cavaliers for the 1982 through 1988 model years (prior to that, the Vauxhall Cavalier was based on the Opel Ascona, while the 1989-1995 versions were siblings of the Saab 9-3).

Natürlich, Opel sold Ascona-badged J-Cars on the other side of the Channel.

Isuzu was a GM partner and built J-Cars in Kawasaki Prefecture during the 1980s. Starting in 1990, the Isuzu Aska name went on rebadged Subaru Legacies.

Down Under residents wishing to live J-Body lives were in luck, because the 1982-1989 Holden Camira was a proud J-Family member.

In South America, the J-Body was available as an Opel Ascona with Chevrolet Monza badging.

There were even Toyota Cavaliers available in Japan for a few years.

I prefer the Toyota Cavalier commercials with the ill-behaved husky.

The most controversial J-Body sold in America was, of course, the Cadillac Cimarron. I shot this very clean ’82 in a yard near Pikes Peak recently and you’ll see the full article… eventually.

All North American-market Cavaliers for the 1982-1984 model years were powered by the 122 engine, an overhead-valve straight-four developed specifically for the J-Family. As it turned out, the 122 was the very last pushrod four-cylinder engine available in a new highway-legal motor vehicle sold in the United States; it was installed in the very cheapest 2003 Chevrolet S-10s and Isuzu Hombres.

The 1982 Chevy Cavalier was powered by a carbureted 1.8-liter 122, while the 1983-1986 cars got a 2.0-liter version with throttle-body electronic fuel injection.

The engine in this car was rated at 88 horsepower and 110 pound-feet. Beginning with the 1985 model year, a 2.8-liter V-6 was available as an option.

The base transmission in the 1984 Chevy Cavalier was a four-on-the-floor manual, but very few buyers were willing to live with such an antiquated gearbox by the middle 1980s (to be fair, American car shoppers could get a new Toyota Tercel with a four-speed manual as late as the 1996 model year).

The MSRP of the base 1984 Cavalier sedan with no options was $6214, or $19,239 in 2024 dollars. The three-speed automatic transmission added $395 ($1223 after inflation), while the five-speed overdrive manual transmission cost $75 ($232 in today’s money, and it would have paid for itself in fuel savings within months of purchase).

This car also the optional air conditioning. The price tag: $630 ($1951 now).

Most of the TV commercials for the early Chevy Cavalier showed the sharp-looking two-door models rather than the four-doors.