Junkyard Find: 1977 Chevrolet Nova Coupe
The fourth-generation Chevrolet Nova sold in huge numbers, wasn’t a bad car by the standards of its time, and stayed on the street in significant quantities well into the 1990s. However, the Malaise Era Nova just never gathered much of an enthusiast following compared to its predecessors— if you want to restore a Nova these days, you’ll get a ’64 or ’70, not a ’78— so the few remaining survivors go right to the scrapper when they die. Here’s a very worn-out example that I saw in California last week.
I’m quite familiar with this generation of Nova, having owned a $50 beater as an extra car in the early 1990s.
Mine had the 250-cubic-inch L6, just like this one. It was slow and plasticky and the ride was nowhere near luxurious, but it worked every time I wanted it to.
This one had factory air conditioning. Turning on the AC on the highway probably felt similar to hitting the parking brake.
Someone grabbed the interior, perhaps for a Seville.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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My mom's first brand new car she ever bought was a '74 Spirit of America edition Nova. I wish she would have kept it but she traded it in for Chevette before I was born. Ugh...
I think this had the ghastly integral cylinder head. Intake, exhaust and head all one big heavy cast piece, always full of cracks.