Prompted by a discussion I ran across on Facebook that was, thankfully, not political, I decided to pitch this one to the BangShifters. The real name of this one is “Would You Rather, Set It On Fire and Push It Off a Cliff Into a Valley Filled With Giant Boulders, Atop Which Sit Full Five-Gallon Gas Cans (SIOFAPIOACIAVFWGBAWSFFGGS) Edition: Ford Tempo vs. Chevy Cavalier.” Given that, the premise is probably pretty self-explanatory, but I truncated the headline in the interest of simplicity. Because I know that even the proverbial Beater This Heater has some value, consider this all a good-natured jest at a couple of otherwise-forgettable American-built appliances. But the question remains: Which would you rather push off a cliff to its explosive demise?
This is a 1994 Ford Tempo. My first car was a Mercury Topaz, the “upscale” badge-engineered version of the Tempo. I can tell you first-hand that despite the fact that many of these linger still like super-immune cockroaches, the experience of driving them is thoroughly unpleasant. The 2.3-liter “High Swirl Combustion” is really just a Ford Straight Six with two cylinders lopped off and then kinda balanced. It drives with the (lack of) smoothness you’d expect from such an endeavor. This particular Tempo walloped Bambi, freeing the owner to own something less horrendous now. Like a Yugo.
And we must have a Ford-Chevy rivalry, so let’s look at this 1993 Chevy Cavalier with a blown head gasket and a hood that maybe caught on fire? Like the Tempo, the engine in the Cavalier from this era is also a relic; this one also has a pushrod four-cylinder, although the 2.2-liter version GM used made a bit more horsepower than the meager Ford engine. Believe it or not, the Cavalier in 1993 was still two years away from the ubiquitous “jellybean” redesign, which it should be noted also still had the pushrod-four after the car was made to look better.
So if you’re on a cliff edge with both cars and you only have the means to send one compact-sized inferno into the gasoline-rilled canyon below, which is it? The venison-making Ford or the literally gutless Chevy?
You can find the Ford Tempo parts car here or the Chevy Cavalier parts car here.
The Ford! it really says something when you put a vehicle next to a 93 cavalier and it turns out to be even uglier than said cavalier. Plus, it runs…or might run. Brick that pedal and give it a flying start.
Bought my daughter one of those Cavaliers back when, 100k but had a supposed fresh engine. What a horrible horrible car that turned out to be, everybody hated it. It wound up back in my lap and I eventually took what was a sorta-nice-looking car to the scrap man, was all it was good for. I kept the seats which were the best part of the car and bolt right into an early Camaro. A fresh head for it sits stored away somewhere, more scrap I suppose.
Dude… cut them in half and make one freak out of the two.
Or make the cavalier a sleeper…. Nobody expects a cavalier….
I like the way you think.
I can get behind this. Now the question is, after frankensteining them together do you do the same with the bad ends? If so which do you shove off the cliff and which do you keep for a bit, then shove off a cliff? 🙂
Tempo vs. Cavalier? That’s like the blind leading the blind! Chain them together and both can take a leap! They won’t be missed.
Out of those 2, the J-body needs to go. Oddly enough though the Cavalier was a decent looking car for its day, the v6 versions were the ones to get however. Another fun fact, the tempo was actually available with AWD and a v6 too. However the styling just wasn’t there, especially when compared to the Z24 versions of the Cavy.
I always had this odd desire to find an AWD tempo, swap a Taurus SHO Yamaha v6 into it, paint it black and have a Tempo sleeper. Could be fun, but its still a tempo….
I’ve wondered about compatbility with the Tempo and SHO before. The later Tempos used the Vulcan V6 from the base Taurus and some of the Taurus fleet cars in the mid-80s used a 2.5-liter version of the Tempo’s engine. The automatic SHOs used the same four-speed auto as the base-model Tauruses, but it was a different one from the Tempo’s three-speed.
That said, the Tempo three-speed theoretically bolts up to the Vulcan and, knowing Ford, the bolt pattern is probably the same for the four-speed and, by the transitive property, probably the same as that of the SHO 5-speed. This has been my reasoning that it should work.
The AWD system on the Tempo was only designed with the 2.3-liter in mind and only available with the automatic transmission; the SHO motor would turn all of it into shrapnel.
Its a Tempo at the end of the day, so regardless of it being compatible its all dumb. I’ll stick to my my cars.
My first job out of college in the early ’90’s was with Enterprise and we rented lots of both of these sleds along with their Pontiac and Mercury counterparts.
Crappy rental sleds, both.
My first real job was Budget rent-a-car in 1983. I remember both of those cars when they replaced the Ford Fairmonts for our mid-sized fleet. The Cav would easily out-run the Tempo, plus it was better looking. The Tempo looked like a turd on wheels.
How about a tug of war over a canyon? The loser goes in and in a final poetic justice drags the other in with it.
Two things about those Cavaliers:
1. I knew a girl in college that had a similar vintage Cavalier sedan. It’s claim to fame was that in the rare event that you hit 80mph, the engine would just shut off. You would have to coast to a stop to start it again, and it would start right up. I think that was a “feature”.
2. The steering wheel in these is a sporty 3-spoke design that’s completely out of place in these. We used to snag them from the junkyard in put them in other, more deserving Chevrolet products.
That said, I vote the “weld the fronts together and get a friend to see which side will forcibly tear itself from the other first” route. Take all the chunks that are left and kick it over the cliff! Except for that sweet Cavalier steering wheel, of course.
It would be impossible to feel bad about pushing either car off a cliff, but I actually found a couple of nicely modded ’93 Cavaliers online–as opposed to practically no nicely modded ’94 Tempos–so I guess I’d send the Tempo into the abyss…
They team up…shove a Topaz and Chevette in…then they run off and get married.
The Cavalier off a cliff into a pile of cracked Cavalier heads. None car guy friend had one and that thing ate heads
The Tempo. I owned one for about 30 minutes. It was given to me, I started to drive it home and the engine blew. I pulled it over, called for a ride and left the god darned POS on the side of the road….I assume it was picked up by local law enforcement but who knows….
The Tempo hands down. I actually had to drive one those steaming piles as a company car for an insurance company I worked for back in the 90’s. A lovely dark gray accented with a whore house red, crushed velour interior. Best day at work ever was the day another driver made a left turn in front of me at a light resulting in my piling into him, crushing the front end. I got out, looked at the damage and honestly wanted to toss a match onto the pool of fuel and fluids under the car just to make sure that the car would be totaled. To call the car a POS doesn’t begin to describe my feelings about that car.