If there was every a moment where I questioned my father’s sanity, it was the day that he suggested that I’d be happy with a hand-me-down 1989 Hyundai Excel three-door hatchback that was in desperate need of valve seals…at least. I knew the car well, it had been his mother-in-law’s car from new and when I got re-acquainted with the car a decade later it hadn’t gotten any better. Compared to the 1978 Chrysler LeBaron that I had been driving at the time, the only positive the steel gray Excel had was fuel mileage, full stop. A knee-jerk reaction to it’s similarity to a beat-to-shit 1989 Sonata that my cousin thought would be a great move for me a year prior wasn’t helping any matters any. The Chrysler, on the other hand, was holding up well, with it’s only major flaws being the lack of power that came factory standard on 318-powered Chryslers that year, a Lean Burn system that hated cold like I did, and it’s ability to wear the right-front tire to the cords in record time.

But as the end of high school was nearing, I started thinking smaller and more mature. In hindsight, this would come to bite me in the ass, but it did make sense to have a smaller, thriftier car. I just didn’t want a gray Excel that was rotting in the quarters and burning half a quart of oil at cold start-up…my Chrysler stalled constantly in the cold, but it didn’t spew blue smoke, either. So I found myself on warm May weekend trolling car lots to see what could be out there, and that’s when I found a car eerily similar to the featured car here: the only difference was that the one I found was one of the 115-horsepower turbocharged Scoupes. Okay, it was small, it was fairly decent, it was turbocharged. Why not give it a shot…I left the Chrysler at the lot as collateral and drove the Hyundai back to the house to get the old man’s thoughts. You would think that he’d be alright with the idea. Instead, he balked harder than any other car I ever presented him. He wanted nothing to do with the car. And that was that.

Considering that I smelled a little burning oil on the way back, I probably dodged a bullet. But over twenty years later, I’m also certain that even with any problem this car could have had, that it wouldn’t have been as big of a pile as the 1999 Blazer that next took up the role of “mature selection”.