As I dig through my old film negatives and slides from the 1980s and 1990s, I find some interesting automotive stuff— 110-film shots of Southern California junkyards, 35mm images of an Olds Custom Cruiser road trip, and so on, and the latest find is a trio of photos of the worst, most miserable automobile I have ever experienced in person: a final-year-of-production 1984 Pontiac Phoenix two-door.
This car was owned by a guy named Ben, my friend and neighbor in the UC Irvine on-campus residential trailer park, inherited from a deceased relative when the car was one year old. With just a single year and a few thousand miles on the clock, this Phoenix (which was a Pontiac-badged Chevy Citation) had a clunky, balky four-speed manual transmission, clattery Iron Duke four-cylinder engine, an amazingly uncomfortable interior, and an AM radio that struggled to pick up stations five miles distant. Before it was two years old, both its engine and transmission failed.
If Ben's Phoenix had been just slow and unpleasant, it would have been acceptable as basic transportation, in the same way that slow, unpleasant Warsaw Pact cars survived primitive Eastern European roads in the 1960s. Unfortunately, it was slow, unpleasant, and extremely fragile, with frequent problems cropping up in every system. I shot these photos in 1992, when Ben's Phoenix had about 50,000 miles, and it was completely used up at that time. Perhaps other GM X-bodies weren't so bad, and this Phoenix was just an aberration, the result of a rough day on the assembly line... or maybe we should just pretend these cars never happened.