At $7,900, Is This Purple 1996 Chevy Lumina A Plum Deal?

Today’s Nice Price or No Dice Lumina is poverty spec, right down to its manual window winders. Let’s see if this exceedingly clean and low-mileage sedan is priced to make poverty perfectly palatable.

What Car Should You Buy: Fast, Impractical and Fun

While it was enthusiastically greeted in the comments, yesterday’s 1991 Honda Beat took a beatdown in the voting. There, its $10,500 price came up as offbeat for most of you. In the end, that missed a beat with a 56 percent No Dice loss. Man, after all that, I’m beat.

OK, enough with all the Beat puns. We now have to shine a light on this 1996 Chevy Lumina. As we do so, let’s consider what exactly should be the soundtrack for this old-school Chevy. I’m thinking something like Debby Boone’s version of You Light Up My Life, ELO’s Shine a Little Love, and, because of the car’s parsimonious option list, Simple Man by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

You’ve most likely driven a car like this Chevy if you’ve ever partaken of an airport car rental. This car features only the basics, with the most expensive option noted on the original window sticker being Antilock Brakes, which cost the initial buyer an extra $575. Floor mats and cruise control cost, respectively, $217 and $30. Custom cloth seats added another $160 to the bill, while the electric rear window defogger cost an unexpectedly high $170. Geez, Chevy, way to gouge on the basics.

Standard features on the car include the base L82 3.1 liter V6 with 160 horsepower, a 4T60-E four-speed automatic with column shift, manual-winder windows, and plastic covers on the steel wheels. A/C was standard on these cars, although temperature control is set it but don’t forget it.

What’s amazing about this Lumina isn’t that it’s as bare-bones as a post-piranha swimmer but that such a simple car has been so carefully maintained and curated for this long, leaving it in such great shape and with such low mileage—24,000 miles.

The dealer selling the car doesn’t seem to want to give the game away in the ad, simply noting this to be a one-owner car but not letting on whether that one owner had been, perhaps in a coma for 20 years, or had bought the car as part of some sort of static art display.

From what we can see from the pictures, however, this a car that looks, for all intents and purposes, to be as good as new. The paint, which fittingly is simply called “Purple” in Chevy’s color catalog, appears to be without flaw. Even the plastics—lamps, bumpers, etc.—look to be in perfect shape.

The cabin presents similarly, with color-coordinated gray plastics and the semi-luxury of the cloth upholstery. The only jarring element here is the black knobs on the window winders. I know that jives with the color choice on the other switchgear, but the better choice would have been gray. I’m just saying. The engine bay looks just as tidy as the rest of the car.

Along with the car itself—and all the exercise afforded by the window winders— the buyer gets a clean title and a manila folder full of maintenance receipts. That should prove fun to peruse to see what has been done to keep the car on the road, even if it’s been on the road so little.

The asking price for this Lumina-shaped time capsule is $7,900, and it should be pointed out that, while this is an old car with few feathers in its metaphorical cap, it should prove a reliable and reasonably comfortable ride for years and miles to come.

What do you think? Is this Lumina worth that $7,900 asking with that future-proof promise? Or is this sparely-optioned old Chevy simply a waste of a long time?

You decide!

Omaha, Nebraska, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.

H/T to Andrew Pelkner for the hookup!

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