Launched in 1987 with a rollout to fleets and rental car agencies before going on sale to the general public, the Chevrolet Corsica sedan, and its coupe twin, the Beretta, were on the new L-body platform. Essentially a stretched J-body, the L-cars replaced the old Citation in Chevy's lineup, slotting in size and price between the smaller Cavalier and larger Celebrity.
I was selling Chevrolets the year the Corsica hit the market and I remember being fairly impressed by them. We had a fairly strippo four-cylinder five-speed demo car with an AM radio and roll-up windows on the lot that we used for errands and it was reasonably fun to drive. Of course, anything would look like a rock star replacing the Citation.
The Corsica/Beretta twins were unusual in two respects. First, they were Chevy-only. There were no rebadged versions sold by other GM divisions. (Well, they sold a couple thousand in export markets as the Pontiac Tempest, but you get what I'm saying.)
Second, they went the whole ten model year production run with almost no serious changes, so they were probably pretty well amortized by the time this 1990 Corsica LT in Malachite Metallic rolled off the lot.
We can tell it's a 1990 by the fact that it has the fender badges for the 3.1L V-6 and front seat shoulder harnesses mounted to the front door frames.
Prior to 1990 the Corsica used either the 90hp 2.0L inline four or the 130 horse 2.8L Multi-Port Injected V-6, so the 140hp 3.1L V-6 was a definite upgrade. Also, starting in 1991, the Corsica got airbags for the front seat occupants, so the shoulder harness anchors were moved to the B-pillars.
Considering that the made more than 1.6 million Corsicas over a decade-long run, you don't see many still on the road, so I was unreasonably stoked about seeing this rather vanilla Chevy sedan.
I photographed it with a Nikon D300 and a 17-55mm f/2.8G zoom lens in May of 2025.