The Chevrolet Lumina Z34 Took A Forgettable Family Car And Made It Worth Remembering: Holy Grails

When was the last time you heard someone talk about the Chevrolet Lumina? I can’t even remember the last time I’ve seen one. These family cars of the late 1980s and 1990s are largely forgotten, with most examples likely having long been crushed and disposed of. But at one point, these were among best-selling Chevrolets, and with the Lumina Z34, GM even made a performance version perhaps worth a spot in a modern garage.

Last time on Holy Grails, our Daydreaming Designer, the Bishop, informed us that BMW sold a rare spec of the E61 5-Series. In the short time between the 2008 and 2010 model years, you could buy a BMW 535xiT. It’s very nearly the perfect car that car enthusiasts love to talk about online. The BMW 535xiT is a wagon with a striking design, all-wheel-drive, and a twin-turbo straight six making 300 HP. This wagon was nearly as fast as a BMW 550i and only sweetening the deal is the fact that you could get it with a manual transmission.

A number of readers have asked for today’s grail. This car isn’t a hot rod or a super obscure spec that only hardcore enthusiasts know about. Instead, we’re going to talk about the best version of an arguably forgettable car.

Today, we talk about the era shortly before Bob Lutz arrived at General Motors. In the 1990s, General Motors had some awesome, sometimes ambitious ideas. This was a time when you could buy minivans with composite panels that looked like shuttlecraft from Star Trek. Over at Oldsmobile, the Aurora pumped some much-needed energy into a stagnating brand. The Corvette C4 hit its stride before morphing into the C5, and who can forget the GMC Syclone pickup and the GMC Typhoon SUV? There were a lot of fun and sometimes oddball developments at General Motors in those days.

However, not everything was a striking flagship or a pickup truck with muscle. Some of the cars of the day were boring people haulers that dutifully served families for a decade or two before getting sent up to a farm upstate. That is where you will find the Chevy Lumina. There’s nothing wrong with a Lumina, but it’s probably not a vehicle that most readers here will remember for its excitement. The most vivid memory of my own comes from about 20 years ago when I rode in one that was rusty, clunky and smelled terribly of gas.

GM’s Poorly-Timed Answer To The Ford Taurus

When the first-generation Ford Taurus launched in the 1986 model year, it stunned the automotive press and buyers alike. Ford’s design was fresh and futuristic, while the driving experience was impressive enough to make Car and Driver call it “the shape of tomorrow” before placing it on the magazine’s 10 Best list. The publication wasn’t done, and in 1989, the magazine proclaimed the Ford Taurus SHO to be “America’s Best Sedan!” in all capital letters. In 1986, Motor Trend nominated the Taurus “Car of the Year.”

General Motors didn’t really have a direct competitor. Sure, it had the fourth-generation Chevy Monte Carlo and the Chevy Celebrity, but neither of those cars had the styling and the design of the Taurus. As it was, General Motors was dealing with a disaster of its own. As CNN wrote in 1992, in 1982, GM started development on the GM-10 program. This $7 billion program was intended to replace the Chevrolet Celebrity, Pontiac 6000, Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, and Buick Century. Each brand would get a coupe, a sedan, and a wagon that were largely the same underneath but with differences for their respective brands. GM’s plan was to outfit seven plants to produce 250,000 cars a year each. CNN notes that such output would have equaled 21 percent of the total U.S. car production, which would have beaten Ford’s output.

During the GM-10’s development, General Motors was losing a ton of ground. In its 1984 reorganization, GM’s brands held 44.6 percent of the car market. By GM-10’s launch in 1987, GM struggled with a 36.6 percent market share. CNN explained that in the early 1980s, GM had redesigned its cars to be smaller, more fuel-efficient, and front-wheel-drive. It was a case of bad timing as fuel got cheap again and buyers weren’t all that interested in slow, small cars.

After the 1984 reorganization of GM, the GM-10 program moved to the Chevrolet-Pontiac-Canada group and funding was so tight that the GM-10 cars had to be rolled out over the course of a couple of years. To make matters worse, GM had taken such a long time to get GM-10 cars to market that Ford got an early lead. When the Lumina finally hit the road in the 1990 model year, the Taurus had enjoyed the market for nearly four years without much challenge from General Motors.

The Lumina launched during a continued bad time for General Motors. The GM-10 program, which produced first-generation W-body cars like the Buick Regal, Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, and Pontiac Grand Prix, cranked out lots of cars that weren’t making money. In 1989, CNN reports, GM lost more than $2,000 on every GM-10 car built. In 1990, GM sold 537,080 GM-10 cars across four brands, inefficient compared to the 410,077 Tauruses and Mercury Sables Ford sold out of those two brands.

The Chevrolet Lumina

When the Lumina launched in the 1990 model year, you were able to pick it up as a sedan or as a coupe. The Lumina name was also applied to Chevy’s flavor of GM’s distinctive “dustbuster” vans, which have their own development story of trying to be high-tech vans to outclass Chrysler. Of course, for this piece, we’re focusing on the W-body Lumina cars.

The Lumina was an instant hit right out of the gate, with The Truth About Cars stating that Chevy sold 300,000 Luminas in 1990. Of those, 278,000 Luminas were sedans and nearly 46,000 of them were coupes. When the first-generation Lumina tapped out after 1994, Chevy managed to sell over a million of them. Why were buyers just scooping these up? Sadly, I couldn’t find any written reviews, but I’ll let MotorWeek‘s John Davis show you around a Lumina in a fantastic review from 1989:

A highlight of that review was Chevy’s marketing ploy. Chevrolet pitched the Lumina as the value-oriented family car and GM teamed up with Disney for adverts showing Disney characters riding in Lumina sedans and APV vans. In fact, when Disney opened up the MGM Studios theme park in Florida (now Disney’s Hollywood Studios), the Lumina was the official car of the park.

In terms of performance, the review noted that the largest engine was a 3.1-liter V6 making 135 HP. This was good for a 60 mph sprint in 9.8 seconds, or slightly faster than a Ford Taurus with a 3.0-V6. In the end, MotorWeek concluded that with the coupe and minivan versions on their way, GM was set to have a solid lineup of affordable family cars with few compromises.

The Grail

What if you wanted a car to take the kids to school and have a little fun along the way? Readers ColoradoFX4, greatfallsgreen, and Jack Trade all nominated the Lumina Z34 as a bright and rare spot in this era of General Motors. Honestly, those were just the comments that I was able to find. I remember seeing the Lumina Z34 suggested a couple of more times in non-Holy Grails articles. In fact, Jack Trade and greatfallsgreen also nominated the Chevy Corsica LTZ and the Beretta Z26. Those latter two might be worth a retrospective of their own. Clearly, a number of our readers like these cars!

In 1990 for the 1991 model year, Chevrolet rolled out its performance version of the Lumina.

Available in just the coupe, Lumina buyers could opt for the high-performance Lumina Z34. In opting for the Z34, you got the FE3 sport suspension package, a body kit, sporty, overstuffed seats, and a dual exhaust. Under the hood sat a 3.4-liter V6 making 210 horses and 215 lb-ft torque. That was bolted to a standard five-speed Getrag manual or to an optional automatic.

Regardless of transmission choice, shifting a Z34 was handled from the floor. Normally, saying something like that would be weird, but standard versions of the Lumina had automatic transmissions shifted from the column and no center console.

What did this give you? Well, Car and Driver performed a shootout of the Lumina Z34 against its biggest rivals, the Dodge Spirit R/T (a previous Holy Grail entry) and the Ford Taurus SHO. The Lumina reached 60 mph in 7.1 seconds, making it slower than the 5.8-second Dodge and the 6.6-second Ford. However, it was the only coupe of the three and finished second overall. I’ll let Car and Driver take the mic:

Okay, so close only counts in horseshoes and hydrogen bombs. But Chevrolet deserves a chorus of applause for its new Yankee clipper. The Lumina Z34 finished a mere two points overall behind our winner. And it’s a bargain to boot.

There’s a lot to like about the Z34, beginning with its new 60-degree 24-valve V-6. At 3.4 liters, this is the biggest engine of the group. It churns out 215 pound-feet of torque at 4000 rpm and 210 horsepower at 5200 (the horsepower drops to 200 at 5000 rpm with the optional automatic transmission). This is a flexible powerplant: It pulls strongly from rest, revs smoothly to its 7000-rpm redline, and makes the kinds of exciting mechanical sounds that immediately cause a first-time passenger to ask, “Hey! What kind of car is this, anyway?”

The Z34’s fully independent “Sport” suspension is as adept as its engine. Wearing 225/60R-16 Goodyear Eagle GT+4s (which help deliver 0.79 g of grip), the chassis showed us nothing but impressive, predictable moves on the Ohio twisties. And it tracked down the Interstate so cleanly that we didn’t miss a joke on the Pryor tapes cackling away on the stereo.

The Z34 is an easy car to drive hard; the chassis signals its limits with lots of safe, steady understeer. And almost nothing upsets the suspension’s composure. Stab the brakes or lift off suddenly in the middle of a turn and the Lumina just tucks itself in neatly. (Such poise helped the Lumina win the slalom test decisively.)

Car and Driver‘s testers also adored the Z34’s style, describing the coupe as something of an antidote to Europe’s conservative aerodynamic designs. Basically, the louvers and spoilers all over the place screamed “America!” to the testers and apparently, one stranger even said, “Damn, that’s a beautiful car!” Unfortunately, the Lumina came crashing down when it came to the interior; none of the testers liked it in there. The cabin was described as “aberrant,” and the buttons were described as feeling like they came from a hobby shop model. And yet, it still scored better than the Dodge.

Here’s how MotorWeek felt about the spicy Lumina:

Just Common Enough To Find Today

The Lumina would get a second generation in 1995 which lasted until 2001. That car would be a sedan only and would not see a performance version. Well, that would be only technically true. The coupe version was renamed the Monte Carlo. The Z34 did make a return and in its best form, you scored a legendary Buick 3800 V6 making 200 horses, but a manual transmission wasn’t available at all.

In terms of rarity, there were more of these produced than most of our other featured Grails. General Motors produced 1,055,795 Lumina sedans and coupes between the 1990 and 1994 model years. Of those, enthusiasts estimate that there are between 38,753 and 46,037 Z34s built. Put that as a percentage and it’s between 3.6 percent and 4.3 percent of total production. So, a fraction of Luminas ever sold is one of these.

The good news is that while there’s no telling just how many of these are left, some people are preserving them. I’ve found a couple near me and one that’s in good shape won’t cost you anywhere near $10,000. I suspect that after my wife and I move into a house you will see one of these in our expansive fleet.

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