Have you ever had a really nice beverage on holiday, only to come home and realize it’s actually appalling? I certainly have, and so, weirdly enough, has Toyota. It all boils down to captive imports. After the fuel crisis, American car brands realized they didn’t want to bother with making small cars, so they simply signed deals with the Japanese and the Koreans. Remember the Dodge Colt, Geo Metro, and Ford Festiva? All decent cars, working to get America on wheels. Well, sometimes the whole captive import thing works in reverse. After touching on such weirdness as the Chevrolet Forester and Saab 9-6X, it’s time to give the people what they want: The Toyota Cavalier. Welcome back to GM Hit or Miss, where we sift through the remnants of old GM in search of, I don’t know, a gold star or something.
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Look, in a Jack Daniels-fueled haze during the year National Lampoon’s Senior Trip hit theaters, bringing the Chevrolet Cavalier to Japan may have seemed like a decent idea. As harebrained as that might sound, you have to remember that in 1995, the Toyota Corolla looked like this:
Not the most inspiring sheetmetal in the world, right? Meanwhile, the new-for-’95 Cavalier was swoopy, sleek, and could be had with a strong 2.4-liter engine. GM’s styling department ground their hands to the bone for this shape, and if I’m being bold, it still holds up. The 1995 Cavalier was many things, but it certainly wasn’t frumpy.
Mind you, the Cavalier also wasn’t refined, upscale, sleek, efficient, or any of the traits you’d really want in a premium import. A Toronto Star road test of the badge-engineered 1995 Pontiac Sunfire reported that quality deficiencies were present from new, with the reviewer noting that, “the doors on my test car rattled in their frames on sharp bumps, and a bit of wind noise leaked around the driver’s door.”
You know what door rattles and wind leaks wouldn’t have been acceptable on? Literally any Japanese car of the time. The Toyota Tercel wasn’t as spacious or as stylish as the Cavalier, but it was built like a bomb shelter in comparison. Clearly, the Cavalier would need some finessing if it were to have a hope of surviving in Japan, so that’s exactly what Toyota did.
The most obvious alteration for the Japanese market was the shift from left-hand-drive to right-hand-drive. Yes, the Japanese Cavalier got a brand new dashboard that looked almost exactly like a mirrored version of the American dashboard. Aside from a different glovebox latch, relocated mirror controls, a relocated ignition, and a relocated handbrake this cabin is intimately familiar for many Americans of a certain age.
While the Cav’s interior was equally-unspectacular no matter which continent you were on, Toyota claimed that the JDM Cavalier’s “Pedals and seats have been carefully set up taking into account the generally smaller physical characteristics of Japanese people.” I’m not sure if that’s calling the Japanese short, the Americans fat, or both, but either way, it’s not entirely inaccurate. In addition to interior alterations and subtle styling tweaks on the coupe, Toyota tweaked the chassis tuning to align with Japanese tastes, with claims of improved roadholding, steering, ride comfort, and braking over American counterparts. Predictably, Toyota also opted for the top spec of Cavalier, equipped with the 2.4-liter LD9 four-cylinder engine and four-speed automatic transmission.
Toyota set the lofty aspiration of 20,000 annual units, a figure that seemed optimistic given how the Cavalier clashed with Japanese regulatory framework. See, in Japan, car tax is based on displacement. Because the Cavalier featured GM’s LD9 2.4-liter engine, it sat in the same tax band as the Nissan Skyline and Toyota Chaser, and not in the desirable sub-two-liter tax bracket. This was a problem because the Chaser and Skyline didn’t feel like they were made to punish Arby’s managers for not studying harder in high school. As a result, Toyota sold 36,216 Cavaliers in total from 1996 through 2000, but not without trying its damned hardest. You know where this is going, bring in the TRD Cavalier.
This glorious shitpost-come-to-life asserts its vision of authority with cosmetic add-ons like a deep front fascia, chunky side skirts, a phat rear lip, partial headlight covers, and a wing you could land a 737 on. While it didn’t add any actual gusto, it was brimming with macho posturing, and it wouldn’t be the only time the Toyota Cavalier dipped its toe into enthusiast culture. Let’s take it to the track, with the All Japan Grand Touring Car Championship, commonly known as JGTC.
GOODSMILE RACING 2023#レーシングミク pic.twitter.com/K8TpAR9t0a
— SA????TA (@w5_sata) February 12, 2023
JGTC is a weird by American standards, mostly because Japan is weird by American standards. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that America is weird by Japanese standards, mostly because America is also weird by Canadian standards. Anyway, show an uninitiated friend a GT 300 race, and you’ll get questions like “Who’s winning?; Who should I root for?” and “Is that a Hatsune Miku-themed AMG GT?” The only response to that last question is “Yes.”
lmao holy shit i just learned this had a turbo 3S-GE and was FWD still. pic.twitter.com/J3MxSdsnFi
— Matt Wood (@mwoodski) May 2, 2020
In 1997, Team Kraft, no stranger to weird race cars, decided to take America’s favorite ‘90s shitbox racing at a national competitive level. Despite withstanding monumental abuse at the hands of American teenagers, the 2.4-liter LD9 wasn’t right for the job at hand, so these cars got Toyota’s 3S-GTE turbocharged four-cylinder engine. Funnily enough, certain JGTC Toyota Supra race cars of the time also got 3S-GTEs, which means these Cavaliers are a bit like the Toyota version of Face/Off, except the Cavaliers were front-wheel-drive as opposed to rear-wheel-drive.
#1998JGTC_round2
60 #TOYOTA_CAVALIER
エントラント #KRAFT#TOYOTA,#CAVALIER,#JGTC,#FISCO pic.twitter.com/7WzNdtyYVm— demodori6 (@demodori6) December 28, 2021
In hindsight, ditching GM’s internal combustion engine of perpetual durability may not have been the right idea. The JGTC Cavaliers were reasonably quick, but also reasonably unreliable. Between mid-pack finishes and DNFs, the Kraft Wise Sports Toyota Cavalier never made much of a name for itself.
With all this failure in one spot, you might think that Japan would just be a nation hostile to imported cars. I can assure you that’s far from the case. From Minis to Lamborghinis, European cars enjoy fair success in Japan. Hell, Mercedes-Benz sales have historically been strong enough to warrant a Japanese branch of AMG long before Mercedes bought out the tuner. Flip through a Japanese car auction run list and you’ll find Alfa Romeos, BMWs, Volkswagens, and Audis lurking between domestic sheetmetal. Even American cars enjoy a cult following in Japan, from the lowriders of Pharaohs car club to the surprise growth of Jeep. Notice common threads here? All the cars listed are either enthusiast vehicles or simply good cars.
This one was easy to call from the start: The Toyota Cavalier was a miss in every conceivable measure. Its legacy is largely the hilarity that GM part number 22649423 is a Toyota badge, although weirdly, it wasn’t the last time Toyota brought a GM-built product to Japan. More on that next week. As it stands, though, the Toyota Cavalier is more than a punchline without a joke, an answer to a question nobody asked, or an odd mistake from a titan of the automotive industry. It’s an excellent example of how universal success is never guaranteed. It should’ve served as a warning, but did anyone at GM hear the alarm bells?
(Photo credits: Toyota, Chevrolet, Mytho88 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)
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You should feature the Saturns they tried to sell in Japan for your next article.
I always liked the styling of these. With my high school years straddling the late 90’s and early 00’s, these were a common sight in the school lot. The base models were crap to drive, though. My sister’s first car was a ‘97 with a manual that felt like you were stirring soup when trying to shift. My buddy’s Z24 wasn’t bad, though.
As a child of the 90s (well, late 80s) let me tell you:
The Cavalier styling was shit then. It was shit in the 00s when they were still sadly on the road. It’s still shit today.
It all comes down to just how lazy the design is. The panels all have nothing but the creases you can see from 20 feet away. There’s nothing sweet or careful or detailed up close. It looks like a low-poly render of itself that then got stung by a bee and swole up a bit.
That pictured corolla? Not iconic by any stretch, but look at the wheel arches or door frames. Careful, subtle detail that shows that every inch was considered, tailored, and crafted.
The cavalier and most gm shit of the era (not really sorry, blazers may have sold like Hotcakes but they look and fit like shit) look cheap and slapped together. They also are cheaply made and slapped together, but the problem is they LOOKED it too.
I find it interesting that the publicity shots (green sedan, red coupe) are all sporting California license plates in very US settings, including the Amtrak train as the background for the red coupe.
It’s also odd that the green four door is sporting a 5-series California plate. That series wasn’t used until ~2005. The 2-series plate on the red coupe is in sequence.
The ’99 Chevy Prizm saved my wife from the Cavalier that her “you’ll buy ‘Murican or nothing at all” father tried to hassle her into when she got her first car. Thank goodness he never looked under the hood – so many Toyota and Denso labeled parts. I can’t picture any reason someone in Japan would have voluntarily chosen the opposite road…
I remember that Prizm getting absolutely rave reviews. Maybe budget compact cars had a low bar that was easy to clear, but everyone seemed to like the Prizm. Even David E. Davis of Automobile Magazine (at the time) said that the car “Really knocked our hat into the creek”.
They really weren’t bad – at one point I had a 2001 Corolla to go with her Prizm ( god as my witness her old man never noticed the family resemblance…) and we liked them. The 01 would kick its tail out around turns, everything always worked, etc. The next generation (we traded the Prizm in for an 04 Corolla) didn’t have the same charm and subsequent ones got progressively more boring.
This must be viewed through the political lens of the times. The US auto industry was reeling from the rising import tide and had repeatedly pushed the government to restrict Japanese imports in the 80s. The argument was that Japan wasn’t a fair market because their restrictive regulations would not allow US cars into the Japanese market, which was partially true. However, everyone knew just how well American cars would sell outside North America.
I think this was Toyota’s giant middle finger to GM.
“Here, we’ll import one of your fine quality cars. Let’s see how that works out.”
The interior of these Cavaliers may be one of the worst interiors of all time.
Those seats man. As a kid, my aunt rented one in the early 00’s for a 4+ hour drive that I went on with them. In my entire life, those were the only seats I, and my cousins begged to stop along the Thruway for reprieve. Those seats were hard as freaking rocks. I was used to being hauled around in a weird variety of vinyl clad wagons built in the 80’s, and I still thought the backseat of the Cavalier sucked the most.
I spent much of my childhood sleeping on a concrete floor in our dungeon-like basement with a sleeping bag and a throw pillow (the videogames sequestered down there). The backseat of the Cavalier was less comfortable. I know a lot of people around here commend the Cavalier for being a cockroach vehicle for running poorly, but forever. But I contend GM only built these to force people into higher margin, larger vehicles. If you didn’t, your punishment for GM loyalty was a Cavalier.
I think blind loyalty was the only thing keeping old GM afloat. I became a Honda fan-boy about 45 minutes into owning a Civic. I maintained that if Honda could somehow get all those GM loyalists to drive an Accord or a Civic for a few hours, it would put GM out of business.
I became a Honda fan-boy about 15 minutes into sitting in a Fit that I still own 9 years later.
Even now, the stories I read about other car companies that aren’t Toyota or Honda seem like a cautionary tale.
My mom had an ’85 Sentra 5-door as a company car, and while it was actually a decent car in our opinion, the rear seat cushions were so uncomfortable that they induced sciatic pain in my leg. I was only 17 and otherwise fit, but those seats made me feel like an arthritic 70-year-old.
Not going to lie, I think it would be pretty freaking hilarious to snag a TRD Cavalier and import it back to the US. RHD JDM Chevy!
Meanwhile, in 1995 Europe, GM was still selling the Opel Vectra badged as the Vauxhall Cavalier in the UK with 2.0 16 valve engines including a 200 bhp turbo version.
I used to yearn for a GSi2000, it seemed like it would be quiet and comfy and they all seemed to be driven flat out by total bastards, which was very much my driving style at the time.
There was also a very sleek coupe called the Calibra. Cd of just 0.26. Same car underneath.
The same platform (GM2900) was also used by Saab 900, 9-3, 9-5, and, I’ve just googled, the Saturn L-series (which was introduced when the platform was already 11 years old).
Late in 1995 the Vauxhall Cavalier was replaced by the new Vectra. I briefly had an early Vectra company car in 1999 and it was awful. Great ride on the front axle, sporty handling on the rear, meaning that it was an under steering mess in the corners and would batter your spine with every bump from the rear wheels. I once drove it 500 miles in a day after in went in to limp home mode, hoping it would finally die.
Anyway, it seams GM sold the wrong Cavalier to Toyota.
I happen to have a 1993 Opel Calibra 16v for 16 years now, with the unmolested C20XE engine, on its factory alloys. I am quite sure one of the last ones around in this configuration, as most of them were ‘tuned’ (destroyed) a long time ago 🙂
Cool!
I’m amazed any of them survived the Max-Powering of all interesting cars from the 90’s. Standard cars from back then are really rare.
I met a guy a few months ago who has what might be the only standard S14 Nissan 200SX left in the world. At least the Calibra was spared going through the cheap drift car cull.
These are such pretty cars.
That original Saturn L-series was the the first time that people started to question the venture. Saturn customers had been clamoring for a larger car to upgrade to, and the whole point of Saturn was not to badge-engineer any crappy GM cars. But GM was not about to invest a few more billion bucks for Saturn to engineer an all-new midsize.
Ultimately I think Saturn using that Opel platform was a decent solution. It was unique to North America, but it didn’t break the bank to develop. I owned a 2nd-gen L300, and it while it wasn’t groundbreaking in any way, it was a spacious, comfortable midsize for not much more than a compact — and it was vastly better than a Malibu of the same vintage.
Seems as well suited to the Japanese market as the Subaru Traviq – a rebadged Opel/Vauxhall Zafira people carrier which was also too wide and had an engine over 2.0l when it was available as a 1.8 in Europe. Clever folding third row though!
Well, once over the 1695mm width the engine size had less impact. Might as well go the whole hog.
I taught Engrish in Japan at the close of the 90s both in Odawara and in Tsukuba. One of my students at Tsukuba was a Texas Instruments employee with a long standing America fetish and an all around agreeable guy who was inordinately proud of his Toyota Cavalier. Before seeing it first hand I was pretty sure he’d gotten the names mixed up or had just suffered a stroke: nope. Since then I’ve wondered “did I imagine that Toyota sold the Cavalier in Japan” which is an understandable concern. Thanks for reaffirming that I’m not demented.
I was based in Japan in the early aughts as a young Marine. Stumbling toward the train station in the early morning sun, conservatively 3 sheets to the wind, I saw a Cavalier in a parking lot across the street. Having been a teenager at the start of the millennium, I was well acquainted with Cavaliers that invariably had a big box of subwoofers rattling every panel. I stood there for a good while wondering why anyone would go through the hassle of importing one of these, when I finally saw that it had a Toyota badge.
So many questions ran through my head. Is that some meta-humor ironic badge swap? Did Toyota accidentally make a car that looks exactly like a Cavalier but, no doubt, better quality? Did I drink absinthe some time in the last couple hours?
I could see the marketing now – the Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic may be superior machines, but if you like driving, and I mean really driving, step up to the Cavalier, Imported for Toyota Motor Sales. It features dual outside mirrors, cup holders, and durable plastic dashboard to prevent fall-apart.
They should’ve used the Saturn S-series instead
Those were sold there, too, mainly as a marketing stunt for US domestic audiences (hey, if the Japanese are buying them, they must be good), I think they sold more RHD S-series to rural mail carriers than they did in Japan. A young Jim Gaffigan was in one of the ads touting the Japanese export sales
I remember those commercials. It also amused me that they were advertising to a US audience their right hand drive Japan model. I seem to recall him going through a drive-thru and other shenanigans.
Hey, a tweet from Matt Wood(ski)! He used to be a Turbobricks regular. Always envied his black 945T in particular.
I initially wondered why GM didn’t bother engineering a Quad 4 that displaced juuuuust under two liters (edit: or as amoore100 noted, using a Toyota 1.9xx-liter engine), then realized the Cavalier’s also slightly too wide to be a 5-number car – but surely they could’ve shaved an inch from each side mirror?
Alas, the width doesn’t include the mirrors. Ford’s Japanese distributor put the Cortina in a giant press, squeezing the rear fenders by 7mm to get under this threshold.
It’s kind of sad how foreign companies go on about Japanese trade barriers but never did the least bit of research in how to meet local requirements. Like how Smart designed their car 4cm too wide to be classified as a kei car, requiring a redesign (including narrower track) to fit the category.
It’s no Toyota Lexcen…another “wonderful” GM alignment with Toyota.
Can’t wait for next week’s Toyota Voltz article! More to the point, why didn’t they just put the 2.0L 3S (or other <2.0L variant of the S) into every JDM Cavalier? Selling a 2.4L ‘compact’ in Japan is total market suicide, though I guess spending all the money to put a different engine in would be no guarantee of better sales anyway.
Engine size is only part of the “small car” requirements – it also has to be shorter than 4.7 metres and narrower than 1.7 metres. I don’t think you could make it 3cm skinnier without significant sheet metal changes.
Japanese cars that straddle the categories usually fit larger bumpers for the bigger models, which is why some Toyota Crowns have US-style bumpers and some don’t.
My best friend had a Sunfire in high school. It wasn’t a bad little car for a teenager, and I spent many hours in the passenger seat. I remember the engine had the most dreary note I’d ever heard from a car before, a rough sort of grumbling noise that said “fine, I’ll do it, but I’m not happy about it.”
I had a 2002 Chevy Cavalier as a work car, my ’86 Toyota truck daily had been deemed NSW. I bought the Cavalier from the company cheap at the 5 year mark as my daily driver. Basic OHV, 5 speed car, by that time GM had the bugs worked out, decidedly cheap, but no rattles, reliable, invisible, rust finally killed it at the nine year mark with 260,000km. I’d say it was a good, cheap, basic car, that served it’s time well. Do I miss it? No, but it was the cheapest car out there with the manufacturer discounts in those days and it should be taken in that context. The Toyota Cavalier was nothing other than a political trade-off.
I visited New Zealand back in ’19 and while driving around Christchurch I spotted a Toyota Cavalier parked on the street. I was unreasonably excited to see it but couldn’t stop to take a photo, and when I went back to the same area later that day to find it again and take a photo it was gone. I was genuinely crestfallen to miss it, something that probably only a handful of people in this world could claim haha
Yes, we had a few down here as used Japanese imports. Used Japanese imports are quite big down here meaning we have an interesting mix of Japanese export and domestic market cars.
It should be illegal to use weapons of mess construction, too.
Cmon GM tried to make some bucks by offering their small car trash to a market that knows small cars that had options for quality build. That is why after Toyota said f off GM approached Isuzu bought 20% and forced them to use gm parts. And basically almost destroyed them. If not for big trucks. GM couldnt make good small cars asked Japan to do it under their badge then tried to tell them they were doing it wrong. Nkw japan looks at GM sales etc and thinks they must know something. They didnt. If japan manufacturers combined together and sold against big 3 we would have a auto industry like Britain.
Why? Why couldn’t Toyota make a Mitsuoka version of the Tercel or Corolla and call it good? Something says that this was half-baked at NUMMI or some Toyota exec lost a bet.
Given that some of them are just getting to the magical age of 25 years old, will anyone import one back into the US? That is of course if there is any left…
Try Australia or another Pacific Rim nation that imports older Japanese cars once they can’t pass shaken anymore.
Seen plenty of JDM cars in Australia but no one is dumb enough to import a Cavalier espcially when you could import a FIAT multipla or Renault Advantime. However we had our own GM badged as Toyotas with the Holden Lexcen.
I still see the odd one in New Zealand. We have a heap of used Japanese imports down here.
Toyota Lexcen, now that’s a GM hit or miss topic…
dang meant Toyota Lexcen but got confused with the Holden donor.
I’ll grant that the new Cavalier wasn’t exactly frumpy. But the styling has never failed to put me off. It’s like GM was trying to blend Ford’s overly blobby, egg-shaped style with GM’s more dart-like shapes of the period, and it just came out like a slightly malformed mash-up of both… in all the wrong places. But to be fair, it probably came out of the same styling teams that had re-skinned several other 90’s GM designs with similar results, taking them from pointy and aircraft-like, to visually chunkier.
I was once issued a new Cavalier as a loaner car, and I swore I’d never get behind the wheel of another, ever again. It somehow managed to feel cheaper and more slapped-together than a mid-80s Cavalier. (The air leaks and door rattles were there in the sample I drove, too, bringing back memories of J-cars past…) Ergonomics, which GM had been crowing about before the cars hit the showrooms, seemed questionable at best. After all the hype, it was a huge let-down.
A friend of mine had a 90s Pontiac Sunbird at the time, with the last round of interior and exterior facelifts. Aside from the 90s Pontiac slightly baroque plastic body cladding, it was a more attractive car with a better interior. And no door rattles.
I actually like the styling of these Cavaliers… right up to 2002. The ’03 facelift was genuinely uck-fugly, and I’m surprised GM even bothered.
Ugh, that awful looking refresh face. I remember when that came out and asking, even at 14 years old how on earth GM was only refreshing the Cavalier at that point. It wasn’t a great product in the mid-90’s but by 2003 it was laughably uncompetitive. And then they finally replaced it with… the Cobalt. Yuck.
This definitely completes the ideal three-car garage of questionably badge-engineered GM shitboxes no one asked for.
Daily: Toyota Cavalier
Camping rig: Saab 9-7X
Weekend cruiser: Buick Cascada
Needs more Daewoo!
Maybe a Suzuki Verona or Reno/Forenza as a LeMons car? The former has a straight-six, like a BMW, and the latter (badged as a Lacetti) proved its worth on Top Gear’s test track. (Edit: The implications, of course, being that they must be fast!)
no Chevy Forester? 😛