Car News Articles

At the end of the 1977 model year, GM discontinued the Chevrolet Vega. For 1978, the General would depend on the Vega-derived Monza to occupy the “compact” spot in the Chevy lineup. Needing a station wagon version to have a complete line, GM fitted leftover Vega wagon bodies with the “Monza S” front clip to produce the Monza Wagon.

I had one, and it was the worst car anyone in my family ever owned.

My father acquired it in 1980 from someone who worked at
the Lordstown Assembly plant where it was built. The day Dad brought it home, we found an ice scraper in the glove
box, an artifact of the previous owner. It was red, with a GM Assembly Division logo, and had a mysterious
inscription: “GM LORDSTOWN MANAGEMENT TEAM - LET’S GET 150!”

It looked harmless enough. As late-1970s domestic cars go, the Monza Wagon
was actually rather attractive.

Ours was a pleasant shade of dark brown with a beige interior, a
combination that came off better than it sounds. There was chrome
around the windows, but not too much. It had managed to escape the
factory without being subjected to the indignity of optional vinyl
woodgrain side trim.

The front buckets were pretty good for OEM seats. The rear seat was
small, but livable. The cargo area was big relative to the car’s
overall size. If you folded the rear seat down it was positively
enormous–and anything that still didn’t fit in there could be lashed
to the handy roof rack.

To point out these virtues is not to damn the Monza Wagon with faint
praise. That would be letting it off easy. The Monza Wagon deserves
nothing less than full-throated condemnation–or perhaps excommunication would be more appropriate. The car was a gasoline-powered mortal sin.

Let’s start with build quality. Well, actually, it would have been nice if someone at GM had
started with build quality. Rather early on, I noticed that every time
the car hit a pothole or rough patch of pavement the dashboard rattled
and shuddered like it was falling off. This was Northeast Ohio, circa 1980-81, and rough pavement was the only kind we had. This made for a lot of rattles.

The panel covering the Monza’s wide-screen horizontal speedometer was
held on with either six or  eight small screws, I forget
the exact number. To be more precise, it was supposed
to be held on with six or eight screws. This one was held on with two;
the holes for the others still had some plastic “flash” which gave mute
testimony that the screws had never been installed.

A trip to the hardware store and quick work with a screwdriver solved
the immediate problem. Over the course of my relationship with this
car, it developed many other squeaks and rattles and odd noises in the
interior as things worked loose. In every instance, the problem could
be traced to fasteners that had never been fastened.

I knew dozens of people who worked at GM’s Lordstown assembly plant.
They were friends of my father, neighbors, the parents and older
siblings of my schoolmates, some of the non-college-track kids from my
high school. They were good and decent people. It distressed me to see
just how poorly they’d done their jobs, at least on the interior of
this one little station wagon. Would it have killed you to put all the screws in?

The Monza’s problems went beyond a few dozen missing screws. There
were two major weak spots in the powertrain design, the engine and the
transmission.

The engine was a 3.2-liter pushrod V-6, an optional upgrade from the
base model four-cylinder 2.5-liter Iron Duke. History records that the
V-6 produced 90 horsepower. The Iron Duke produced 85 horsepower. That
is to say, increasing the engine displacement by 28%, and adding the
complexity of two more cylinders, resulted in a whopping 5-horsepower gain. The
V-6 did, however, use a lot more gas!

The V-6 produced more torque than the Iron Duke, 165 foot-pounds versus
123. You might reckon that the increase in torque would make some
difference in performance. Ah, but you would have reckoned without the
transmission, one of GM’s ubiquitous 3-speed Turbo-Hydramatics.
Whatever additional twist the V-6 may have generated compared to an
Iron Duke was soaked up by the slushbox and never got to the rear
wheels.

As a result, on level ground, with the horsepower-sapping air
conditioner shut off, using brake-torque launch technique (in which you
hold the brakes on while revving the engine to get the torque converter
spun up), the Monza Wagon could be made to do a frenzied 0-60 dash in … wait … here it comes … almost there … about 14 or 15 seconds.

Yes, my friends, the six-cylinder Monza Wagon combined the raw
pavement-burning muscle of the four-cylinder Iron Duke with the frugal fuel economy of
a small-block V-8! There were VW Super Beetles that could’ve smoked it.

It may have been slow off the line, but at least the handling was … almost adequate. Being young and foolish and a sports-car wannabee,
I tossed it down twisty back roads at speeds that would have deeply
concerned both my Dad’s insurance agent and the local constabulary, had
either of them caught me doing it. The Monza’s road-holding was probably
competitive with other 1978-vintage compacts, but it was a bit
tail-happy, and the power steering insured that none of that
annoying “road feel” made it to the cockpit. Like most any rear-wheel-drive Detroit car made in that decade, it was extremely skittish in snow.

Had it merely been an underpowered compact with indifferent build
quality and middling driving dynamics, it wouldn’t have been such a bad
little car. Where the Monza Wagon truly failed was in the area of
durability. Not to put too fine a point on it, it had none.

In the two years in which I was the primary driver of this vehicle,
it suffered a series of breakdowns that would have made a Fiat or
Triumph hang its head in shame. I got to know my father’s favorite
mechanic, a man named Lenny, quite well. There is not space enough to
list all the troubles this car gave me, so I’ll confine myself to the
more “exciting” incidents:

• The V-6’s oil pump suffered a sudden “epic fail” mere days
  after its last oil change. One minute, all was normal. In the space of
  three or four seconds, there came a series of unpleasant thumps from
  the engine bay, followed by a very loud bang as the engine threw a rod.
  At that point, the “OIL PRESSURE” light came on, in case I hadn’t
  gotten the hint. Lenny found a replacement 3.2 V-6 in a salvage yard,
  dashing my hopes of an engine upgrade.
• The replacement engine’s water pump had a pinhole leak in the main
  casting. Not enough coolant ever escaped at any one time to leave a puddle, but over a period of a few days, the losses added up. You’d be
  zinging along the highway without a care in the world and suddenly the
  car was overheating and the radiator and surge tank were bone dry. Let it
  cool down, re-fill the radiator, toss in some Stop-Leak, wait a few
  days, repeat. Lenny replaced hoses and gaskets and such several times
  before he was finally able to isolate the problem.
• While the cooling system had problems with dehydration, the unibody
  suffered from fluid retention. One Sunday I discovered that the left-rear quarter panel was half full of rainwater that had leaked in around
  the window seals. Some clever person in GM’s engineering department had
  designed drain holes into the bottom of the body panels to let wayward
  rainwater out. Unfortunately, some other clever person in GM’s
  engineering department had specified that the inside of the quarter
  panel be stuffed with a horsehair insulation that deteriorated in
  water. The soggy insulation had sagged down and plugged the drain
  holes. It took a half-hour’s thrashing with a screwdriver and other
  long pointy implements to clear the clog.
• The last straw came in the spring of 1983. I noticed a nasty
  grinding sound when the car was started. By now I was fully sensitized
  to the Monza’s self-destructive tendencies, so I went directly to
  Lenny’s garage. “Sounds like the flywheel,” Lenny opined. He put it up
  on the rack and set his crew to pulling the transmission. They loosened
  the bolts on the flywheel, and the flywheel came apart in their hands.
  It had cracked into three pieces from metal fatigue, and the bolts were
  all that were holding it together.

At this point, we had lost all confidence in the car. It wasn’t
rusting yet, but that was only a matter of time. I was about to move
out of town to start a new job, and the last thing I needed was a car
that was always a heartbeat away from a call to Triple-A.

We put an ad in the paper. Someone showed up and offered me
something less than the asking price. I took it, grateful to be rid of
the beast. Lenny was the only one sorry to see it go–the repair work
he’d done on that car had provided his kids with three years of private
school tuition and new bicycles at Christmas.

The saddest thing about the Monza Wagon was its wasted potential.
The basic design wasn’t bad. Had it been screwed together properly, had
it had a better engine and a five-speed, had someone drained the
Novocain out of the steering gear, had it been able to go for more than
a week without a breakdown, it could’ve been one hot little sleeper.

When I cleaned it out before turning over the key to the buyer, I
left the red ice scraper in the glove box, the one that urged Lordstown
managers to “GET 150!” It had come with the car; it seemed only proper
that it should go with the car. I never found out what metric “150″ was
the target for, but unless it was something like “missing screws per
vehicle,” I suspect they didn’t achieve it.

The top and bottom photos are from the GM H-Body Registry, which is maintained by the Monza Homestead. The brown ‘79 wagon is owned by David Trott, and the bottom wagon with the slick wheels is owned by Bill McClaskey. The catalog illustrations came from the website of the H-Body Organization,
another group of owners and fans of the Vega, Monza, and their
badge-engineered siblings. They seem like nice people in spite of their
irrational affection for Vegas and Monzas, and they’ve compiled a lot
of good historical and technical information. H-body Organization
member “Monzawagon1320” is restoring a beige ‘78 Monza Wagon, and the photo comes from his project journal. I can’t understand why anyone would want
to restore a ‘78 Monza Wagon, but he’s doing a good job and seems to be
enjoying himself, so who am I to judge? Best of luck to him.

–Cookie the Dog’s Owner