1989 Fiat 126p

Launched in 1972 as an eventual replacement for the Fiat 500, the 126 was a tiny city car continuing the legacy of the original Topolino as a basic transportation module for very little money.

Sharing the basic mechanical underpinnings of its predecessor, with an enlarged interior thanks to the new body and the air-cooled 499cc 2-cylinder powerplant enlarged to 594cc and now producing 23 horsepower.

Starting in 1973 the 126 was also produced under license in Poland as the 126p and, in fact, continued to be produced there long after Italian production ended in the late Seventies.

Starting in late '77 the engine displacement was increased again to 652cc and, while claimed power output remained the same, torque was bumped to 32 lb/ft.

While never officially imported to the U.S.A., some dedicated fans have imported them, like this guy, who has an entire YouTube channel dedicated to his 1989 Polski Fiat 126p adventures. 

I snapped it in September of 2024 using an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and a Panasonic Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60mm f/2.8-4 OIS zoom lens.

1989 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser

For the 1984 model year, Oldsmobile discontinued the rear wheel drive G-body Cutlass wagon and moved the Cutlass Cruiser wagon nameplate over to the front wheel drive Cutlass Ciera. This was the same model year that all the GM A-bodies got station wagon versions: Chevy Celebrity, Pontiac 6000, and Buick Century.

Facelifted in 1985 and again in 1987, for 1988 all Olds Cutlass Ciera models got composite headlamps, giving the nose a sleeker look.

The row of little flags under the Cutlass Cruiser fender badge were part of Olds's advertising schtick from the late '70s through the early '90s, showing that Olds was trying to position itself as a competitor against sporty European and Asian competitors and set itself apart from its more traditionally 'Murrican-flavored GM stablemates. A tough sell when all you can really do to distinguish yourself from the herd is minor styling, suspension tuning, and powertrain differences.

The base motor in this Light Beechwood Metallic '89 Cutlass Cruiser would have been the pushrod 2.5L Tech IV, the latest evolution of the creaky old "Iron Duke" four banger, now with a balance shaft and throttle-body injection and making 98 SAE net horsepower. Optional motors were the 2.8L 125 horsepower V-6 or the 3.3L 3300 GM corporate V-6, which featured multiport fuel injection and 160 SAE net horses. (Incidentally, this was twenty more ponies than the 5.0L Olds 307 made in the 1988 Cutlass Supreme Classic, the last of the rear wheel drive G-bodies.)

The 14x6" aluminum alloy wheels would have come with the FE3 performance suspension package on an '89 Cutlass Cruiser, and they weren't available on the '88 model, and in 1990 the front seat shoulder harness anchors moved from the B-pillars to the door frames to comply with passive restraint requirements, so that nails down the model year.

It was photographed using an Olympus E-510 and a Zuiko Digital 12-60mm f/2.8-4 zoom lens in April of 2025.

1989 Acura Integra LS

The U.S. auto market is peculiar in its rigidly-stratified brand price tiers. Non-car-nerd Americans are always surprised when they go overseas and encounter Mercedes-Benz taxicabs with low-rent upholstery and manual transmissions because Mercedes made the decision long ago to only export luxury-trimmed models to North America.

When Honda decided to broach the upper end of the U.S. car market in the mid Eighties, they therefore decided to create a separate brand identity for the bucks-up cars, sold elsewhere as Hondas, and thus was born Acura.

The flagship car for the marque was the Legend luxury sedan, freshly launched in Japan and Honda's first V-6 powered production car. But you can't have a dealership selling just one car, especially when that car is an expensive sedan, so Honda also decided to import the sporty Honda Quint Integra, an upscale Civic derivative, as the Acura Integra. This fleshed out the model lineup at Acura dealers with sporty 3- and 5-door hot hatches.

That first generation Integra was propelled by an undersquare 1.6L DOHC 16V D16A1, initially rated at 113 SAE net horsepower.  Along with a light mid-cycle nose job for the '88 model year, the D16A1 got a compression ratio bump, lighter con rods, an an electronic distributor advance, which combined to boost output to 118 horses. The front turn signals on this one tell us it's an '88 or '89, and the Laguna Gold paint narrows it to a 1989 model. 

Car and Driver tested a 1986 Integra LS model, which ran zero-to-sixty in 8.8 seconds and managed a 16.2 quarter mile at 82mph. It topped out at 117, circled the skidpad at 0.78g, and stopped from 70 in 194 feet. Price as tested was $12,334, which comes to $34,750 in today's coin. Curb weight was only 2,396 pounds and the car had a 96.5" wheelbase and 168.5" overall length, making it about the same size and weight as a 2016 Honda Fit.

The one in the picture was snapped with a Ricoh GR Digital II in February of 2017.

 

1989 Jaguar XJ-S Convertible

The XJ-S grand touring coupe, which launched in '75 to replace the XK-E, didn't get a convertible version until '83, and even then it was only sort of a quasi-convertible. The XJ-SC had a targa bar and longitudinal rails above the side windows, so that even with the windows down and soft top rolled all the way back, it wasn't much more of a convertible than a Citroen 2CV.

If you wanted a full convertible, the aftermarket firm Hess & Eisenhardt, better known for armored limousine conversions, fabricated a couple thousand for Jaguar in the mid-'80s. They were spendy because the conversion process was so involved, basically disassembling the car to weld in support structures and replacing the single large fuel tank with a pair of smaller ones with the well for the retracted top between them.

It wasn't until the '88 model year that a full convertible became available straight from the factory, with an engineering assist from German coachbuilding firm Karmann. Like the "basket-roof" XJ-SC and the Hess & Eisenhardt conversions, the folding factory convertible top cost the car its rear seats.

The quad round headlamps on this Solent Blue Metallic car tell us it's a 1988-1990 model, before the XJ-S got a facelift and lost its hyphen. Under the hood...or bonnet, as the Brits call it...would be the 326 cubic inch...or 5.3 Litre, as the Brits call it...SOHC fuel-injected H.E. V-12 that had powered the coupes since 1981, backed with a three-speed automatic transmission. By '89 it was making 262 SAE net horsepower, which had to deal with 4,184 pounds of big cat.

When Car and Driver put an '88 droptop XJ-S through its paces, it laid down an 8.1 second zero-to-sixty run and a 16.2 quarter at 90mph on the way to a top speed of 141. Price as tested was $56,300, or a bit over $151k in today's dough.

This one was photographed in May of 2023 using an Olympus E-5 and a Panasonic Leica D Vario-Elmar 14-150mm F3.5-5.6 Asph zoom lens. 

1989 Mercedes-Benz 560SL

The primary market for Benz's SL roadsters had long been the US, so it was something of an irony that the best versions of the third generation R107 were, for many years, only available here via gray market importers. All through the Malaise Era, we were officially saddled with low-compression smog motor 450SL and 380SL cars officially, and if you saw a 500SL swanning about at the local country club, it had entered the country via the back door.

That changed in the '86 model year when the 560SL hit showrooms. The top of the line Mercedes two-seater (technically a 2+2 but the rear "seats" were vestigial) now boasted a 338 cubic inch SOHC fuel injected V-8 with a 9.0:1 compression ratio rated at 227 SAE net horsepower at a zingy 5,200 rpm.

1989 was the final year for the R107, capping an eighteen year long run, and Car and Driver put one of those last 560SL Benzes through its paces, recording a 7.1 second zero to sixty time and a 15.6 second quarter at 90 mph. The big V-8 pulled all the way to 136 on the top end, too. The car circled the skidpad at 0.78 g's and stopped from seventy in 178 feet, which figures weren't too shabby considering it weighed in just shy of 3,700 pounds.

Even in 1986 terms they were big bucks, of course. Price as tested was $65,780, or more than $167,000 in current 2024 dollars.

The one in the photos was snapped using a Nikon D7100 and 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR zoom lens in October of 2024.

1989 Renault 4 Savane

The Renault 4 (or R4, for short) launched in 1961, replacing the 4CV which was their postwar everyman's mini car. It's a tiny little thing, about twelve feet long and weighing in at something like fourteen hundred pounds.

Designed as an inexpensive but modern-looking  ride, the two-box styling certainly was a more appropriate look in the go-go Sixties than the pontoon fendered car it replaced. Under the hood was a longitudinally-oriented inline four driving the front wheels, originally the 745cc unit from the Renault 4CV, but soon upgraded to the 845cc motor from the Dauphine.

The first ones had a three-speed manual gearbox, and the 4's shifter was a funky lever sticking horizontally straight out of the dashboard. In 1968, the R4 received a fourth gear ratio, and with only thirty-some-odd horsepower on tap, the driver would be visiting all of them frequently on any terrain more hilly than a billiard table.

Incidentally, the rear suspension is trailing arms attached to lateral torsion bars, and the torsion bars are one in front of the other, but the trailing arms are the same length, so the wheelbase on the left side is almost two inches shorter than the wheelbase on the right.

Renault made a blue million of these things in factories all over the world (actually over eight million) between 1961 and 1992. Only a handful of external changes were made over the years, making specific year models difficult to discern from one another.

Fortunately this one's easy to pin down as a 1989 R4 Savane because it was recently up for sale and listed at Sotheby's. I photographed it in May of 2021 using a Pentax Q7 and the 5-15mm f/2.8-4.5 02 Standard Zoom lens.

1989 Volvo 240DL

You want to talk about a car that's difficult to pin to a specific year model range, it'd be the 200-series Volvo sedans.

They were imported into the USA starting with the 1975 model year and sold, largely unchanged, for almost twenty years, clean through 1993.

The closest you can come is via the headlights, since when they were first imported U.S. automotive regulations decreed that headlamps shall be round sealed beam units in one of two sizes. So the very first 240s sold in America sported dual 7" round sealed beam headlights and went through a variety of dual- and quad-headlight units in both round and square for the next decade.

The Black DL sedan in the photos has composite headlamp assemblies with replaceable bulbs and a center high-mounted stop lamp (CHMSL), aka the "third brake light", in the rear window, both of which mark it as an '86-to-'93 vehicle. We'll split the difference and call it a 1989 for site indexing purposes.

It was photographed in August of 2024 using a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV & EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.