[00:04] This is a 1988 Chevy Sprint Turbo and it's the 1980s hot hatchback that you never knew about. There were a lot of iconic hot hatches that came out of the iconic hot hatches that came out of the 1980s, but this this one flew under the
[00:17] radar. Certainly one of the more obscure. And today I'm going to review this Chevy Sprint Turbo and show you all of its quirks and features.
[00:32] Chevy Sprint Turbo is currently for sale and it's being auctioned live on Cars and Bids. This is an exceptionally rare car and this one is shockingly well
[00:44] preserved for what it is. You won't find another like it and you can get this one on Cars and Bids. So once you finish watching this video, click the link in the description below to visit the live auction for this Chevy Sprint Turbo
[00:58] where you can bid on it and buy it only on Cars and Bids. All right, time for the quirks and features of the Chevy Turbo Sprint. This is a very interesting
[01:10] and quirky car and let's start with an explanation of what exactly it is. So in the 1970s there was a fuel crisis. You don't have
[01:22] to know the whole story but the basic situation is that the fuel crisis marked the end of the era for the big old American cars of the '60s and 70s and started the American consumer down the path of the smaller more efficient cars
[01:37] that started to show up in the 1980s. Now, when this all went down, General Motors wasn't particularly well positioned to be making smaller, more efficient cars. So, they decided to buy a stake in Suzuki, a Japanese automaker,
[01:52] who already had these cars in production, could instantly get them on sale in the United States with General Motors badging so they could compete with other Japanese brands. It was a decent idea. And this was the very first
[02:07] car that was born out of that General Motors stake in Suzuki. It was called the Chevy Sprint and it came out in 1985. It was manufactured in Japan by Suzuki and sold there as the Suzuki Cultus. The Cultus was never sold here
[02:24] in the States, but the Chevy version was the Sprint. And in 1987, the high-performance Chevy Sprint Turbo debuted. That's this car. Now, to be
[02:36] clear, high performance in this case was relative. The base model Chevy Sprint relative. The base model Chevy Sprint had a 1L 3 cylinder engine that made had a 1L 3 cylinder engine that made just shy of 50 horsepower. It was pretty
[02:50] low performance. The Sprint Turbo actually improved upon that pretty significantly. It added a turbocharger to that 1 L 3cylinder. So that's this engine, a turbo 3 cylinder, and it made
[03:04] about 70 horsepower, which at 20 more than the base engine, a 40% increase, that's actually a pretty significant number. But it was still only 70 horsepower. Not exactly muscle car territory. Although this car didn't need
[03:19] a lot of power to be fast because it only weighed around 1,600 lb. Clearly, this vehicle wasn't exactly optimized for the American road trip. It
[03:31] was really a Japanese car built for Japan that General Motors sort of repurposed in order to have a fuelefficient entry-level vehicle in the 80s. It made sense at the time, but it was definitely more Japan than United
[03:46] States. Now, with that said, because of the car's Japanese origins, it actually had a fairly advanced powertrain situation. It has electronic fuel injection, which wasn't always a given for entry-level cars in this era, some
[03:59] especially in the early to mid80s when the Sprint first came out. The turbocharged engine is also intercooled. You can see the intercooler is mounted right here. That also wasn't a given of turbocharged engines in the time. And
[04:14] they were so proud of their intercooler that there's actually a little panel cut out of the front grill with a sticker, a decal placed on it that reads intercooler. That's where air is supposed to enter in order to get into
[04:28] the intercooler to help cool turos. They that this turbocharged engine was intercoolled. No one probably knew what that meant, but it did sound pretty
[04:40] neat. Now, obviously you can tell from just looking at this car that there are going to be many other interesting exterior quirks beyond just the intercooler opening. But let's start with the wheels, which you can see have
[04:54] many, many holes. There are eight larger holes in the center and then a whole group of smaller holes around the outside. Even though it's a four lug wheel, doesn't need all those holes. It has them because it wants to. Now, you
[05:09] can see the wheels, which obviously are hubcaps, are painted white, their body color, which was a pretty common trend in the mid80s to make a car seem sportier. If it was white, you gave it white wheels. It sort of added the
[05:22] sporty high-performance flare. And of course, an iconic performance car such as the Chevy Turbo Sprint would include painted wheels. Now, in addition, you also had a body kit on this car, which sort of sticks out a little bit more. or
[05:36] down the rocker panels, but most importantly, everything was painted white. Most entry-level cars in this era had a lot of plastic trim or sometimes even chrome going around the outside, two-tone stuff. Not here. Everything was
[05:50] white painted in order to again emphasize the sort of sporty and also higher class nature of this car compared to a standard low-level Chevy Sprint. Of course, as you can see, there's also badging. It says turbo and then sprint
[06:07] down the side on both sides. Just to emphasize again that this isn't the low-level regular sprint. And speaking of badging, you also had it on the back. Chevrolet over on one side and then again turbo sprint in large print over
[06:23] how cool this car was with its turbocharger, which actually would have made it pretty cool in the day. Most cars are turbocharged now, but back then adding a turbo was really kind of a source of pride. Not too many cars were
[06:38] this was something you wanted to brag about, hence the rather large badging. Now, other interesting items around the back. For one thing, you can see the rear body kit, which is on the rear quarter panels to sort of add a little
[06:52] depth to the side of the car. But it ends abruptly around the middle of the rear end in order to make way for the rather large exhaust. That's all the exhaust you need when you have a one L 3 cylinder, but it doesn't
[07:09] performance credibility. So, while the exhaust is smaller than maybe it should be, interestingly, something back here is a little larger than it should be, and that would be these big warts on the back, which pop out from the tailgate.
[07:23] They are there for the license plate lights. There's one on each side, and they are unusually and unnecessarily large, or at least that's how I view it now. The license plate light warts are much larger than
[07:37] the exhaust, which isn't something you necessarily see today, but that was the situation back then before LEDs and other lighting solutions. As for the cargo area, pretty easy to get back here. You just open up the handle, pop
[07:51] in, and you can see the cargo area. Not exactly huge back here, but also not particularly small given that this is a really tiny car. 50 horsepower base model, only 1,600 lb. At least you had some cargo area. It was relatively
[08:05] practical. And obviously the goal here was efficiency, small size, good fuel economy. One interesting thing in the cargo area is you have caps here over the suspension. So you can pull them off and then get access to the strut, which
[08:17] you see in kind of more modern performance cars to adjust the suspension. You don't typically expect to see it in a car such as this, but at least the caps made it pretty easy to access the suspension. This car was all
[08:30] about easy serviceability and economic build and construction and caps to access the suspension in the trunk certainly proves that point. As for interesting quirks in the interior, there are a few. Let's start with the
[08:44] seats. You can see the design on the seats. Very 1980s. This sort of fading red to yellow to orange pattern on both front seats. Looks kind of cool and it does look a little sportier than maybe a standard boring gray. But the seats
[08:59] least they don't have much bolstering that I can tell. So, even though they had kind of a sporty pattern, they weren't what I would call sport seats, and they certainly don't seem very aggressive or high performancey. In the
[09:12] center, you can see 5-speed manual transmission, which I presume was the only way the Sprint Turbo came. As you can imagine, not a lot of great info out there on the Sprint Turbo. This was an obscure car even in its day, but
[09:25] especially now, basically, nobody still remembers it. Probably my favorite interior detail is the steering wheel. A few things about the steering wheel. Right in the center, you can see it says turbo. Instead of a Chevy badge or the
[09:38] Sprint badge, it says turbo to really emphasize just how cool this turbocharged car was. Now, going along the edges of the spokes of the steering over on the right side, just sort of your typical horn button, but then you
[09:52] go down to the middle, the bottom, and they took that same button and just flipped it. And then on the other side, same deal again. Same button, but flipped. Now to the point where the horn icon is completely upside down. This
[10:05] takes why make three buttons to a whole new level? Because it really shouldn't be like that. But they wanted to save costs and pass those savings on to the efficient car. And this is how they did that. My favorite quirk though of the
[10:20] steering wheel is that it's leather wrapped, but in this ridiculous way where you can actually see where they've put the cut leather over the plastic vinyl steering wheel with sort of open ends just showing on all of the spokes.
[10:34] They couldn't figure out a better way to do that, I guess, back in the day. And so they just sort of leave it there. It does not look high quality or OEM like an automaker did it, but it's the best they were going to do back in the 80s.
[10:47] You were lucky you had any leather in this car and you should be thankful. Now, as for instrumentation, the gauge cluster looks very Japanese car of this era. Again, this was built by Suzuki and it very much looks like that in here.
[11:00] Couple of interesting quirks. Number one, the speedometer only goes up to 85 m an hour, which was a thing in cars sold in North America back in its day. too high, and they were supposed to emphasize 55 in red. that was the speed
[11:15] you were supposed to be driving. In this car's case, I think 85 is actually a pretty ambitious target. Uh, more interesting though is that there is a little light that comes on in the tachometer as you are accelerating that
[11:29] says turbo and it pops on when you're really accelerating getting on the linked to the turbocharger. I think it's just there to emphasize the turboness when you're accelerating. But it does say turbo and it pops out, shines in
[11:43] your face to remind you that you're not just driving a fast car, you're driving a turbo in case you forgot to look in the center of the steering wheel. Now, the rest of this interior is very minimalist Japanese car from this era. A
[11:57] lot of plastic, a lot of right angles, a lot of functional stuff, and nothing particularly kind of weird or quirky or any strange details. Again, it was all about economical, making it cheap, making it functional, but not making it
[12:10] attractive or weird or interesting in any way. That was true of a lot of Japanese cars from this era and certainly of this car, too, which is essentially a Japanese car. And that's also true if you go into the back seats.
[12:23] You flip the front seats forward, the back seats have retained the same cool color scheme that they had up front. So, the red to orange to yellow, it's all on there. It all looks cool. It's actually surprising to me that they decided to do
[12:35] it front and rear in this car to sort of add that sporty flare even in the back seats, but they did and I like it. The rest of the back seats though, very, very basic situation. You have venting windows, so you can open up the windows.
[12:48] They don't roll down, but they vent for a little bit of air flow, which is nice. You also have a storage cubby, but only one. The passenger side of the rear seat has a storage cubby. The driver's side of the rear seat, no storage cubby. So,
[13:01] driver's side and you want to store an item, you have to ask the person on the passenger side nicely if they will store it in their cubby. Although, it's unlikely that you will be sitting in the back seat in this car because I noticed
[13:15] this little label in the door jamb that tells you not to exceed 688 lb in the vehicle. That's the payload capacity. And I did the math and 688 lbs means you
[13:27] can only have four 170 lb people in this car. Any more and And that's assuming that none of them have any luggage with them. You add in 50 60 lbs of luggage and you're down to like 150 lb people. Again, obviously
[13:44] this car was made for a different market than America. Think about four lightweight people in it at the time, but that's how it was. And you really wouldn't want to go for deep with adults in this car. So, you might be wondering
[13:57] what happened. What happened next? Hot hatches were such a thing in the 80s, the early9s. Did this car continue? And the answer is no. Absolutely not. It wasn't a sales success. But beyond that, the performance hatchback kind of
[14:12] distracted from the original purpose of GM's stake in Suzuki, which was to bring a lot of economical Japanese-built fuelefficient cars to the masses. The high performance car wasn't really part of that whole thing. And so when this
[14:26] car was redesigned in 1989, the performance version went away. Now, interestingly, when it was redesigned in '89, Suzuki actually brought the car to the United States under their own badging for the first time. That was the
[14:40] Suzuki Swift. And General Motors used the redesign to launch a new brand, which was called Geo. And the very first Geo was called the Geo Metro. And it was
[14:52] the next generation of this car. So, originally the Chevy Sprint and then later became the Geo Metro. And of course, Gio was GM's sort of entrylevel Japanese fuelefficient brand that existed throughout the late 80s and all
[15:06] through the 90s and even through the early 2000s. It was supposed to be kind of this fuelefficient entrylevel car line. It also gave us the geo tracker, the Geo Prism, and other models. But that whole thing basically started here.
[15:20] Unfortunately, a performance car hatchback version never really made another appearance. And this car, obscure in its day, has really faded away from anyone's memory. It's even more obscure now. But this one's here.
[15:35] It's shockingly well preserved, and I'm curious to see what it's like on the road. So, let's get behind the wheel and drive the Turbo Sprint. All right, drive the Turbo Sprint. All right, driving the Turbo Sprint. I love this.
[15:49] This is such a dug car. It is so unbelievably obscure. This is the kind of car that producer Shawn will only let me get away with filming a video of like twice a year, maybe three times if he's not paying attention. No one will watch
[16:03] call from Shawn. You know, you know, Doug, we we really have to keep our views views high. You know, Doug, Doug, you know, you know, you can't you can't be doing cars like this. Well, I'm doing it, producer Sean. Take that. I don't
[16:18] the driving experience of this car because none of you will ever drive one because none of you will ever drive one of these or see one of these. Um, I remember as a kida as a I came out the same year as this car 88
[16:33] uh of the womb. I mean, not the closet. I remember as a kid occasionally seeing these around the the regular Sprints you'd see here and there. the Turbo Sprints. I mean, I remember vaguely that it was a thing and that it existed, but
[16:47] I mean, these are these are faint memories from 30 years ago, let alone world. It's like an unbelievable situation. I have no respect from the guy with the M8. Oh, okay. Well, we both have
[17:02] Whatever. I love 80s hot hatches generally. Uh, this one is a is a warm hatch more. Maybe the the horsepower rating is not unbelievably strong. It does look pretty cool on the outside. Or at least
[17:17] relative to a regular Sprint, they did a good job of dressing it up to make it have just been a cosmetic trim package and instead it has like 40% more The unassisted steering is actually pretty nice. Manual steering feels good.
[17:32] I like a light car with manual steering. Generally, I don't love manual steering that much cuz it's so much work at low speeds. But when a car is this light, it's not that much work at low speeds. It's more just sort of entertaining and
[17:44] exciting. This is a little car. No two ways about it. Little cheap car. You performance car, a performance car, but ultimately it was based on a very cheap car. And so you have very cheap car sort of feeling, little interior, uh, you
[17:59] know, crashy ride. Uh, this is not a nice car by any stretch of the imagination. That was never the point. Uh, it's actually kind OF ENJOYABLE TO OH, LITTLE UNDER STEER, but it's actually kind of enjoyable. The the
[18:14] heavy the manual steering is nice and heavy. Wow, this car is quick. And I rev range, a light comes on that says turbo. You're using the turbo, even if you're not. Oh, THIS IS GOOD STUFF.
[18:32] THIS CAR IS ACTUALLY surprisingly fun. It's pokey and silly and it's actually kind of fun. I don't know. It's not like my It wouldn't be my first choice in my
[18:44] garage. But back in the day, if I wanted some performance and also had to have like a cheap little economy car type thing, there's something cool about this. Now, anybody who actually wanted that would have chosen a GTI, you know,
[18:57] or whatever in the day. there were a lot of other options. Uh, this was sort of wanted something performancey, but you couldn't afford a GTI or whatever.
[19:12] it's not fast, but it's also not slow. The car feels like it's got a lot of pizzazz because it makes a lot of noise. It's low to the ground. It's little. Um, around. It's not go-kart like in the sense that it's like a quick steer or
[19:26] handler, but it's go-kart like in the sense that like it's little and buzzy sense that like it's little and buzzy and you can kind of do a lot with it.
[19:40] Oh man. I don't even know what to judge this against in my mind as I review it. Like I guess an early GTI, although it's been ages since I drove one of those. been ages since I drove one of those. Other stuff though I I mean
[19:53] this is a threecylinder. Like you can't compare it to a 205 GTI or something it wasn't intended to be, but it was like this little sporty thing that is actually surprisingly fun and surprisingly engaging and and kind of
[20:08] cool. You show up at a at an event in this, a radwood type event in this, and people are going to say, "What is that? This is the kind of car that stumps even is just so obscure and it's actually surprised nice. And I got to be honest,
[20:21] this car is 30 years old, almost 40 years old. I'm beating on it and it's There's no there's no like spotty section in the acceleration, some engine issue. There's no like suspension clunking. Like this car feels I I
[20:35] suspect this car feels a lot like it did uh back when it was new. I don't know. It's not so bad. It maybe isn't a GTI and it certainly isn't as practical as one, but I think it's more fun than I was expecting that it would be. More
[20:49] buzzy, more engaging, quicker to quicker to accelerate, honestly. What a silly little obscure car. Fun for sure. Uh, very quirky, very obscure, very weird.
[21:01] Kind of a lot of things that Doug likes. And so that's the 1988 Chevy Sprint Turbo. One of the most obscure hot hatchbacks in existence. This is weird
[21:13] and quirky and interesting and kind of fun. Just the type of car I love. And if you're into this stuff, well, you can buy this one on Cars and Bids. Anyway, now it's time to give the Sprint Turbo a Doug score.
[21:34] 100, which puts the Sprint Turbo down here in the lower half of its sporty contemporaries. That makes sense. This is surprisingly fun and engaging for what it is, a 40-year-old car with a three-cylinder engine, but still not
[21:47] amazingly fun and engaging compared to sportier options like a Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX or an NA Miata. Still, the Sprint Turbo is more exciting than I was expecting, and it's wonderfully obscure and quirky intercooler.