No Timewasters: Vauxhall Chevette Estate

Every so often a small ad does more than flog an old car. It freezes a whole moment in time. This Vauxhall Chevette estate ad is one of those.

By 1997 the Chevette wasn’t just out of production, it was ancient history. Vauxhall had killed it off in 1984, moved through the Nova years and was already a few seasons into the Corsa B era. The base car here is as ordinary as they come: a 1300 Chevette wagon, decorator’s hack or dog hauler, the sort of thing that had slid from family workhorse to banger fodder. This wasn’t a cheap way into a current model. It was an unloved old box dragged back from the brink with tints, scrapyard seats and a tin of the loudest paint the owner could afford. The shell is dipped in solid, unapologetic pink - not metallic, not subtle, just blancmange-bright gloss. Along the bottom edge runs a Memphis-Milano band of triangles and lines, like someone’s tipped hundreds and thousands along the sills instead of over a dessert.

Look closer and it’s not just "spray it loud and hope". The side glass is limo-black, with the B and C pillars painted to match so the Chevette’s little estate body turns into one long dark strip. It’s a proper driveway designer’s trick, stretching a stubby car for the price of a rattle can. The front door glass is obviously way past legal, but this was mid-’90s Britain: if it looked tough in the car park, that was job done.

Underneath the ice-cream paint job there’s a familiar scrapyard logic at work. XR3i interior. Fiat X1/9 three-spoke Cromodoras painted to match. Odds and ends from whatever was cheap, nearby and looked "right". This isn’t a catalogue build. It’s a lad with a few Saturdays, a local breaker, mates who owed him a favour and parents who tolerated the mess on the driveway.

What I like is that the idea still holds water. Built properly today - shell straight, paint flat, graphics redrawn crisply, sat on air perhaps with a set of currently fashionable wheels instead of the Fiat alloys - it could be an Instagram icon. Reels, sharp edits, sunset rollers, the lot. Back then it probably just sat on the kerb or in a parental driveway, absorbing damp, baffling pensioners and earning sighs from aunties who thought he’d ruined a perfectly good little estate. No sponsors, no YouTube build series, no brand tie-ins. Just a cheap car, borrowed ideas and the nerve to commit to pink.

If you know where this one ended up - Matchams oval, a scrappy’s stack, or still out there making kids stare - I’d love to hear about it. Cars like this weren’t meant to last. That’s precisely why they matter.