At my local Rad-era car meetup, Triangle Rad, there’s someone who brings in a beautifully preserved Chevy Celebrity wagon. I see the car, and I appreciate that it still exists and all that, but if I’m honest, all it really does is remind me of how powerfully I don’t give a shit about the Chevy Celebrity. The shits I don’t give about these cars are some of the finest ever crafted by human colons. My apathy is just that intense — a bright, burning intensely beige glow of who-gives-a-shit. That’s because I was surrounded by all manner of Chevy Celebrities growing up, and they were very much the NPC of cars. In the grand salad of the automotive landscape, they were iceberg lettuce. They took up space, filled in the holes, and were the means by which people could start in one place, sit for a while, and end up in another. There was one Celebrity, however, that did sort of stand out, at least a little bit: The Celebrity Eurosport VR. These weren’t great cars, but they’re interestingly revealing cars — odd artifacts that give an insight into the American automotive mind at that time and place. In short, they’re Glorious Garbage.
I guess I should talk about the basic Chevy Celebrity first, huh? I may as well. Built between 1982 and 1990, the Celebrity was part of the GM A platform, its first front-engine/front-wheel drive mid-size platform. They sold over two million of these things in their various body styles – sedans, coupés, and wagons. The reason I felt like I saw them everywhere is because they very much were everywhere. The most common setup for a Celebrity seemed to be the three-speed auto with a 90 horsepower 2.5-liter Iron Duke engine. Not exactly pulse-quickening.
They also came in diesel versions and with 2.8-liter V6 or a 3.1-liter V6 at the very end, but I don’t think most people bought these for the performance or driving dynamics. I think most people bought these because the Celebrity was A Car.
Of course, that wasn’t enough for at least some of the designers and engineers at Chevy, who felt there needed to be a more engaging version of the Celebrity, and, in what I can only read as a strange act of national insecurity, this version was called the Eurosport. Because, I suppose, at the time, Europe was more associated with cars that emphasized performance and driving engagement, the most obvious example of which was likely the BMW 3 series. Maybe some Audis, too?
While generally the same basic shape, the Celebrity was very much not a BMW 3 series, but I think that’s what the designers and engineers and marketing people were targeting. Seeing exactly what was done to the basic Celebrity to “Euro-ify” it is pretty fascinating, because I think it gives a glimpse into what GM’s people felt the crucial differences in American and European car design were. Looking at the result, you’d think the biggest defining trait of Europe was a severe distaste for chrome and a love for black paint.
As you can see, mostly the Eurosport just blacked out all the chrome on the door handles and window trim and bumpers, added some red accent lines around the car and on the seat piping, and, boom, it’s like you’re spending a week in Berlin.
Aside from blacking out the chrome, the Eurosport also got a black steering wheel, heavier-duty suspension, and the option of the 2.8-liter V6 engine making a fiercely adequate 130 hp.
I mean, the blacked-out/red detailing-look wasn’t bad, but I’m not really sure how it equated to European. I guess the Volkswagen GTI did some stuff like this? And, sure, Europe generally didn’t have the same fetish for chrome everywhere that America had – I mean, nobody did, really. Also, they missed out on an easy way to enEuro-ificate the car: add amber rear indicators! But no, GM wasn’t willing to go that far. Don’t forget, on the Vega they put in amber rear lenses and then cheaped out on putting bulbs behind them.
Now, this mild Euro-ization, which added about as much Europe to the car as spreading a bit of Nutella on the car and letting it complain to you about how we don’t appreciate the National Parks System in America, just wasn’t enough. Chevy wanted a halo Celebrity, so they needed to do something more.
GM looked to a smaller company called AutoStyle to help them out, and started the process in 1986 by building a show car called the Celebrity Eurosport RS. This one-off added a lot of body kit plastic to the lower nether regions of the Celebrity, giving it a sort of Euro-tuner look, like what Alpina might have done if they wanted to make BMW feel jealous, or at least a little less secure. The engine was 3.3-liter V6 with an alloy block that never actually made it to production.
Reaction to the show car must have been pretty positive, because starting in 1987 anyone buying a Celebrity sedan – or, significantly, a wagon! (and the next year, the coupé) – could shell out an anus-clamping $3,500 for the VR option package, which was the production interpretation of the RS show car. For reference, back in 1987, the VR package would have cost about $9,500 in today’s money, and this on a car that started at $10,265 (about $28,000 today), so we’re talking tacking on a third more of the whole price of the car for this advanced Euro-ization.
So, what did all that cash get you, exactly? There were the styling changes, most notably, including the new bumper skins with air dams and the other stuck-on ground effect plastics, but most noticeably is the strange grille-delete option. Yes, the grille was replaced with an odd silver-ish blanking panel, because who wants all that superfluous air getting into that 2.8-liter V6? I guess the enlarged under-bumper air intake provided enough cooling, and maybe there was some aero advantage to swapping that grille for a wall.
The engine and suspension in the VR weren’t any different than the normal Eurosport, so we’re still talking about 145 hp and getting from parked to 60 in about 9 seconds. Not terrible, but hardly amazing, even for the era, and certainly nothing to Compuserve-message home about. The VR in came in black, silver, white, and that Code Red color from Corvettes and Camaros. You could get it with a five-speed Getrag manual shifter, or, if you hated yourself a bit, a four-speed automatic, and, if you hated yourself a lot, you could even get a three-speed auto shoved in there.
The Celebrity was never really planned on being a car where people would be shifting their own gears, so there wasn’t a nice big tachometer offered. The manual VR really demanded one, leading GM to make one of the most gloriously half-assed tachometers ever:
Look at that! In the little window normally reserved for the automatic’s PRNDL indicator, GM developed a tiny, tiny LED-based tachometer. You drop about a third the price of the whole car for this VR package, and GM was still too cheap to design a new instrument cluster with a real tachometer? Think how much better a couple of round gauges would have looked in that cluster, with a nice big, graphic tach! As it is, all GM proved is that they’re absolutely loath to let a perfectly good hole in the dash go to waste, no matter how tiny.
So, if we’re re-capping here, what’s the overall take on the Celebrity Eurosport VR? It was a boring-ass car with some kind of silly faux-Euroification and body kit plastic that had some mild performance enhancements, but very little that justified the huge cost of the option package, especially since the regular Eurosport drove about as well. That all adds up to the Garbage part of Glorious Garbage nicely. So where do we find the glory?
I think in this case, all the glory comes from this one significant detail: you could get all of this stuff on a wagon.
A fast (ish) tough-looking wagon available pretty much anywhere in 1980s America was a glorious thing. Hell, it still is! A wagon that was roomy and useful and could do all the wagon things but still let you jam a gearshift around and make mouth vroom sounds when you threw it into a corner, your un-seat-belted children smacking their heads against window glass with screeches of delight and maybe some pain as they slide around that back seat like a hockey player’s teeth on the ice.
Of course, hardly anyone took advantage of this incredible wagon-tunity offered them, since only a bit over 1600 Celebrity Eurosport VRs were actually sold.
There was no way the Celebrity Eurosport VR was ever really competition to the actual Euro cars from BMW or Audi or Mercedes or even Volvo, but in a way, I like that they tried. Sure, it was sort of a Halloween costume for an American family car to dress up like a 3-Series, but if you’re having fun, who gives a shit, right?
The Celebrity Eurosport VR was, objectively, garbage. But, put all that crap on a wagon, and then, somehow it transforms into something magical! Still pretty shitty, yes, but magically shitty. Or at least shitty with an optional rear-facing jump seat.
Thanks for the TriangleRAD shoutout, Torch! The Celebrity wagon Torch mentioned is in fact a Eurosport, and has won the Regular Prize at a TriangleRAD event.
This prize is given to the to the best example of a totally mundane, common, disposable car from the RAD era that has somehow survived in more-or-less factory
condition.
Unfortunately the Celebrity wagon was involved in a front-end collision earlier this year. The owner replaced it with a very nice ’84 Thunderbird, but his brother is currently restoring the Eurosport wagon to its former, ahem, “glory.”
Notice on the tachometer photo that the speedo on this “sportish” model only goes up to 85, and 55 is prominently highlighted. Which was the case for all GM product of this era. It’s not as though some of these cars couldn’t go faster than 85…I had an Impala wagon with the small-block V8 and the same speedo which a radar detector helpfully informed me was capable of at least 98mph…
Not just GM, that was a federally mandated law for all cars sold in the US from 1979-1981 IIRC and lots of cars that were developed during that period ended up with 85 MPH speedos as a result, even after the law was repealed.
Correct there for sure. My wife had a police spec 82 Impala 4 door with the 305.
That son of a gun was equipped with a certified speedo and saw 110-115 several times over our 6 years of driving it.
So I want to clarify a few things that I thing are relevant to why this happened. I recall that the Renault Alliance had a GTA package that emulated the same mono-color white car with the lower body package. Right after that for came out with this new fangled Taurus” jellybean” shaped car that set the world (or country) on fire with something that was similarly priced and bigger volume wise that seemed to be a better value.
When I started my job in 1988 I could get a Celebrity, or a Taurus. I chose the Taurus, and needed to wait another like 5 months longer than if I had gotten the Celebrity, only to get the 4 cylinder no one knew how to work on, cause everyone (but fleets apparently) bought the V6.
Folks who bought the Eurosport weren’t doing so because they didn’t want a Volvo or VW Quantum (both of which still had a fair bit of chrome on them – at least pre-facelift for the Quantum)
They bought it because they couldn’t afford the Pontiac 6000STE (Which also had no tachometer) – and it was a whole lot better than the Dodge 600SE.
My first car was a 1984 6000-STE. I bought it in December 1985. And it definitely had a tachometer.
STE was introduced in 1983 with no tach. A digital tach was added to the right of the new digital LED-bar speedometer in ’84 – where the “Driver Information Center” used to be next to the long sweep analog speedometer.
One of my high school friends had a woody version of this… or was it the Olds version, the Pontiac? It’s really hard to tell them apart. He had a nice car for nice car stuff, so at 16 he basically had a station wagon as a toy and we beat the ever loving crap out of the thing. Off railroading down snowmobile trails, towing my Samurai out of snow banks, drifting down dirt roads, tray slides, smashing through snowbanks. It was the perfect “Send it” car before that was a phrase, it was worth nothing and no one really needed it to to get anywhere. We spent like two years trying to kill the thing through our stupidity before his Dad traded it in for a Z24 convertible.
I had a high school friend with a base wagon version of the Celebrity. Smoked a lot of weed in that Celebrity.
Kids didn’t have to be unbelted to get pretty well bounced around the back seat—it was lap belts only back there, with I believe only the last-run ’90 wagons (after the sedans had been discontinued) getting outboard shoulder belts. The center belt didn’t have an inertia reel, too, so it was a great weapon for whacking one’s brother with the heavy metal buckle…purely hypothetically speaking, of course.
The Taurus may have been getting all the press in ’86, but the best-selling car in America that year was the Celebrity. My dad’s ’86 Eurosport wagon was gold over brown, with rally wheels and a third-row seat.
Back seats! Pish! Kids were meant to ride in the cargo area.
*nods in riding on the package shelf of a Dodge Rampage*
Or standing on the transmission hump in the back, hands holding on to the front seat!
My grandmother had one, rarely left the garage. It was in mint condition when she sold it because she didn’t drive anymore. If I had been a few years later, I would have made that my first car. It was a white one like in the first image.
Keep it up torch! I personally liked the Pontiac version, the 6000 STE. It really looked nice, digital dash etc, all still in that little “strip” on the dash. Could get a 5 speed but I can count on one hand how many ordered that lol
I had a coworker who bought an STE new. I don’t recall if it was a MT or not. It was the first car fire I ever witnessed. He left work slightly ahead of me and a couple blocks later I caught up as he was tossing all his favourite cassette tapes and other belongings on to the grass at the side of the road as the engine immolated itself. He never found out the cause of the fire, but for a while after we would always refer to his then ex ride as the Super Thermal Edition.
When Pontiac started with the “Builds Excitement” campaign, I always thought of that.
Edit: Forgot to mention he had GM Stockholm syndrome and went and replaced the car with a used Corvette. We were disappointed he didn’t buy a Firebird or Firenza. But, at least with the Corvette we always knew where he parked by the puddle of transmission fluid left behind.
Pontiac was always kind of aimed at European competition, GM bean counters kind of made it hard for them to really compete I think. But it is interesting that at the end of the 70’s going Euro was to put a big upright chrome grill on just about everything Ford and tell the customers to think of it as a Mercedes.
yeah, having owned a few pontiacs, ’89 Sunbird SE, ’93 Grand AM GT (HO quad4 baby), they felt a bit more upscale/euro. agreed the beancounters kind of ruined that plan!
My Mom had a Eurosport wagon when I was a kid. Not a VR though. It replaced a Cavalier Wagon. Had the 2.8 and was a pile of junk. Replaced with a 91 Cherokee sport, which was significantly more reliable.
The Celebrity has to be one of the most incongruous names ever. I know automakers like to name even their most basic models with aspirational flair, but geez, is Celebrity ever a stretch for that thing.
Can’t say much for the Celebrity specifically, though I did spend a fair amount of time in some pretty beat Centuries and Cutlass Cieras in the 90’s. Knowing those cars, the premise of someone spending all that extra cash to gussie up a Celebrity is pretty hilarious to me. Nationalism can be a hell of a drug.
Hello:
Ford Aspire (1993-1997) is holding on line 2 for you!
Check that:
His twin Ford Festiva is also holding on the party line.
British friends of mine back in the day were livid over the Festiva name. “NO, it’s NOT a Fiesta…THAT is an actual good Ford!”
Ha yes, I suppose the Aspire is the worst example of this. Ford really cut to the chase with that one.
“When you threw it into a corner, you’re un-seat-belted children, smacking their heads against the window glass with screeches of delight…” hehe. Great stuff!
At least those windows would roll down so there’s a chance to save the dentition. My parents 1978 Buick Century wagon had windows that would not roll down at all. GM 70’s thing.
My parents had not one, but TWO Celebrity wagons when I was a kid. Mom got a new ’85 after her Cavalier wagon was totaled, if I recall it was the TBI 2.8L. First car I ever drove, at 13 years old. In ’90 or so the local car dealer my dad new was selling a clean ’87 Eurosport. Mom got this one, dad got the 85. Both were white over blue. The 85 had a split front bench, the 87 had buckets with a console shifter and the rear facing 3rd row.
I learned to drive in the ’87, by the time I got my permit mom had upgraded to a Pontiac Dustbuster, dad had the 87. Not gonna lie, I have lots of fond memories of the Eurosport. It had the multiport EFI 2.8L, that car would bark the front tires and the 2.8L actually sounded kind of mean. The thick steering wheel and console shifter seemed sporty, and it had the cool steel rally wheels with relatively wide tires. I had a lot of fun hooning this car on dirt and snowy roads, it’s a wonder I never put it in a ditch.
It was never “my” car, but dad would let me borrow it pretty much whenever as long as I put gas in it. I had a truck I was working on, but it only got 7mpg and was apart more often than not. A few years later dad finally got the “nice” vehicle, a 2 year old Ram, and my brother got the wagon around ’00. He drove it a few years until corrosion made it unsafe to drive.
The thing was actually quite reliable, the main thing I remember was that it would go through an exhaust every few years since this was before stainless was so common. I think my dad and I changed a steering rack on it once too. It had close to 170K on it when they had to scrap it.
I give it credit for surviving two teenaged male drivers. I’d be happy to have a minty one today.
For a hot minute though, the automotive press loved the A-bodies, or at least the Pontiac 6000, and compared it quite favourably to the European competition. I’m sure plenty of it was down to careful tailoring of the options list that didn’t translate to what was on dealer lots, but the potential was there, at least until the Taurus came and made it look outdated.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison-test/a15112441/escape-from-baja-mexican-sports-sedan-torture-test-archived-comparison-test/
Now, my grandma had a Lumina Euro for a few years as her last car before giving up driving, and while the Euro name was goofy (see also the Olds International series with fantastic multi-flag’d badge), the aesthetics weren’t bad. Although, the gauges kind of spoke to the internal conflict that must’ve been happening within GM even after the afterthought tach on the Celebrity. Same dashboard flatter than Saskatchewan, but with a proper set of gauges wedged into the space clearly meant for a big strip speedometer (hers also had the bench seat and column shifter, for even greater incongruity.
yeah I always liked the 6000 STE, looked pretty mean for the time. I doubt many ever had the 5 speed.
If you de-badged all the cars in that article, it’s interesting how the 3-boxes design similar they all look.
I would bet that there were some hidden improvements with that option package. GM will usually slip in little tweaks, like a faster steering ratio, a quicker final-drive ratio, stiffer springs, or slightly bigger brakes. Sometimes there would also be auxiliary coolers for the oil or the trans fluid.
Of course, this could be purely just a sticker job, but I’d be curious if there were any “hidden” changes.
The VR package was purely cosmetic. All the Euros got a faster steering ratio, stiffer springs, and a beefier sway bar. Surprisingly you could get a Euro, even V6, with the small brakes. To my knowledge, all the V6 cars had the same final drive.
“A wagon that was roomy and useful and could do all the wagon things but still let you jam a gearshift around and make mouth vroom sounds when you threw it into a corner, your un-seat-belted children smacking their heads against window glass with screeches of delight and maybe some pain as they slide around that back seat like a hockey player’s teeth on the ice.”
You remain a gifted if manic wordsmith, Torch.
We need to talk about that first ad. Towards the end, GM used rising American birthrates as their final point for why you should buy the Eurosport. Not the performance, not the styling, not even the value. They cited our love of raw-dogging as a reason to buy the car. You know what? I respect that. Every minivan and 3 row SUV ad should incorporate someone staring at a pregnancy test with dread, or a broken condom. “The rubber let you down? The 2024 Sienna has your back!”
“Didn’t pull out in time?
The 7-passenger 2024 Honda Odyssey has the fastest 0-60 time among all minivans on the US market – Helping you pull out with confidence.”
It’s a shame that they stopped making the Dodge Journey. That was the official car of the pull out method and “Christian family planning”, AKA spray n’ pray.
Soccer, bratwurst, apple strudel and…
…Opel – Hej!
What was with 80s Chevy names? Celebrity? Citation?
Could be worse. They could have sold a car called the “Probe” and even sold it in brown…
I mean they had a very long lived Ford named after Hidden Prostitution….the Escort.
Because alliteration helps people remember names:
Ford Fairlane 500
Chevrolet Caprice Classic
Dodge Dynasty
Mercury Monterey
Toyota Tacoma
Meghan Markle
See how easy it is to remember them?
What kind of machine is a Meghan Markle?
At one point she was a Briefcase-Carrying FemBot.
Trying to find the 2 manual wagons ever made will be quite like piecing together a document from a stadium sized pile of shredded paper, but in this metaphor, the paper is crushed metal.
I always wondered if those were intended to compete with the whalish looking MerKur XR4Ti? Possibly they were working on the LQ1 for these but the lack of demand made GM hold off for the swoopier Lumina for that?
Apparently the reason the GM10 lineup (including Lumina) was delayed to market because GM needed to redesign from a boxier original design to something more aerodynamic after they finally realized the Taurus/Sable was eating their lunch.
The Merkur XR4ti was really trying to be more of a bridge between the Mustang across the showroom floor and 3 Series, Audi 80/90 and Saab 900 across the street.
You really have to link to the ridiculous Celebrity sales training video, where a successful business executive spends the entire day on a golf course trying to talk his junior protégé into buying a fancy Celebrity like his, so he can properly impress their firm’s clients.
The arguments against the competition are presented as:
Ford Taurus: costs slightly more, really isn’t that much more modern than a Celebrity
Mazda 626: is Japanese
They had nothing and you could tell they knew it
What always got me at the time was how different the interiors were – Ford really tried to produce a modern Euro-style gauge pod dash setup, whereas GM seemed to just take its basically ’60s setups and remove chrome/add plastic.
Sure, not as dramatic a difference as the exteriors, but you were reminded of the indifference every time you got in.
My first car was a rusted-out Eurosport wagon. Not the VR, but with the 2.8 V6, the fetching monochrome black with red accents paint scheme, and my favorite part, GM’s awesome rally style steel wheels (as seen on the Olds last week).
The interior was almost comically opposite – you can see it a little in the pic in the article, but medium tan vinyl and the most ’70s terrible meets ’80s modular dash possible: a giant horizontal speedometer, a fuel gauge, and…that’s it.
She was fairly quick though, esp. off the line, and could embarrass plenty of the more “sporty” glorious garbage domestics like regular Dodge Chargers and the base models of the pony cars.
“As you can see, mostly the Eurosport just blacked out all the chrome on the door handles and window trim and bumpers, added some red accent lines around the car and on the seat piping, and, boom, it’s like you’re spending a week in Berlin.”
Berlin, North Dakota that is:
https://static10.esciudad.com/ND/berlin_north_dakota0.jpg
I saw the original concept at the 1985 Chicago Auto Show. I was almost 18 and I was in love with the “Euro” design. After a ride in a girlfriend’s parents regular Eurosport and regular trips in my dad’s Ciera wagon, I knew how bad it could be. I dug out this photo that I took of it then https://scontent-lax3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/373675052_10227003463250432_5712096748033517979_n.jpg?_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=efVkXHqX3CYAX98AWiF&_nc_ht=scontent-lax3-2.xx&oh=00_AfACgj4dkoAgJmpyjkYfVfQsn7GH3yHQ5xwgSilEUi1e9A&oe=653AD3C0
Another angle! https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10227003463850447&set=oa.828464645591296
Unrelated, but from the same roll of film. https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10227003460570365&set=oa.828464645591296
Cool shots – thanks for sharing!
But yikes on those wheels. I love basketweaves as much as anyone, but the weird 3D nature of these is offputting.
I was in middle/high school when these came out. I loved the way the Eurosport looked, especially the sedan. Wagons weren’t cool back then, but nowadays, I would rock that Eurosport wagon.
Surely that could be warmed over these days. It would probably need essentially everything under the skin to be changed, but it could be fun.
East or west?
Depends on how poorly running that Iron Duke is. If it’s smoky and rough enough you’ll swear its a Trabant.