Junkyard Gem: 1990 Chevrolet Lumina Euro 3.1 Sedan

During the 1980s, cars with flush glass and body-colored bumpers tended to come from the continent that gave us the metric system, and the marketing types at General Motors figured they could partake of some of that European prestige by adding EURO badges to Chevrolets. On a car as resolutely Michiganic as the first-generation Lumina, this may have been less than convincing. Here's a first-year-of-production Lumina Euro sedan in a California self-service wrecking yard.



We've seen a good example of the high-performance version of the first-gen Lumina, the Z34, in this series. The Euro name went on the cars that weren't base-level, which means that a large proportion of non-fleet Luminas were Euros.



This one is a Euro 3.1, which sounds like a high-performance machine from Stuttgart or Göteborg. In fact, it was built in Oshawa, Ontario.



This car has the 3.1-liter version of GM's versatile 60° V6 pushrod engine, rated at 135 horsepower for the 1990 model year. This engine was standard in the Lumina Euro; the base engine was the unlovable Iron Duke 2.5-liter four-cylinder, about the least European engine imaginable (at least in post-1960 Europe, outside of the Warsaw Pact states).



California has a notoriously difficult emissions-testing and car-registration regimen, and many is the junkyard inmate that arrived due to impossible registration difficulties. This car shows many signs of being one such machine.



"There are two kinds of cars in the world: the cars that really handle, and the cars that handle the groceries."