Isuzu

Today we bring you a 2001 Isuzu Trooper that runs rough.

Regular readers know they can't all be winners.

The 2001 Isuzu Vehicross was an odd duck -- and today we have a lifted version for you.

Today we have a 1999 Isuzu Rodeo that clearly needs some work.

Today's UCOTD is a 1989 Isuzu Trooper II LS.

Before the creation of the Geo brand for the 1989 model year, The General sold Isuzus and Suzukis with Chevrolet badging in the United States. Only one of those vehicles started its American showroom career as a Chevrolet and finished it as a Geo: the Spectrum. Here's one currently residing at a car graveyard in Colorado Springs.

We feature a lot of Isuzu Troopers here because they are plentiful in our forums. Today we have a 2002 Isuzu Trooper that looks trail-ready.

Today we bring you a 1991 Isuzu Trooper.

Today we have a "show car" 1990 Isuzu Trooper.

Today we send you a 1985 Isuzu Trooper to check out.

Today we're bringing you what appears to be a project car with this 1986 Isuzu Trooper.

Today we have a 1990 Isuzu Trooper for you to check out.

Today we have a 1990 Isuzu Trooper that is ready for an LS swap.

Today our UCOTD is a heavily-modded, off-road-ready 1994 Isuzu Trooper.

Today we have a 1998 Isuzu Trooper that needs some work.

Today's offering is a 1998 Isuzu Amigo that could serve as cheap wheels for someone in need of such.

Today we're going quirky with this 2001 Isuzu Vehicross.

There are certain milestone vehicles I have worked at checking off a personal list as I roam the junkyards of the land. The last of the Oldsmobiles or Plymouths or Pontiacs or Studebakers, for example, or the first of the Camrys or del Sols or Altimas. For at least a decade now, I've been scouring the boneyards for an example of the very last non-truck Isuzu model sold in the United States: A 1993 Stylus. Finally, success in Colorado Springs!

Today we're trooping it with this 2001 Isuzu Trooper.

We'll send you out of 2024 and into 2025 with this 1999 Isuzu Rodeo LS.

Today we send you into the weekend with a 2002 Isuzu Trooper.

Today we bring you a 1997 Isuzu Trooper LS that is just shy of 100,000 miles.

Today we go back to the days of my youth for this 1989 Isuzu Trooper RS.

Today we bring you an off-road-ready, oil-burning 1994 Isuzu Trooper.

Today we bring you a 2004 Nissan Xterra that was once a dealer demo.

Today we bring you a 1988 Isuzu 4x4 that will let you go camping.

Today's UCOTD is a 1986 Isuzu Trooper that's in the midst of a build.

Today we have an oddity -- a 1989 Isuzu Space Cab.

We return to Abandoned History’s coverage of the twists and turns of the Daewoo story, at a time when the company’s predecessor, Shinjin, was no more. After an early Seventies joint venture with General Motors saw the company renamed to General Motors Korea, Shinjin bowed out of the deal after just five years. In 1976 Shinjin’s ownership in the business was sold to a state-owned Korean bank, and General Motors Korea was renamed to Saehan Motor Company. But that didn’t mean GM was out of the picture - far from it.

Rare Rides featured Isuzu vehicles on four previous occasions, and all of them were from the Seventies or Eighties.

Today we switch it up a bit and present an Isuzu from the Nineties. Ready for Irmscher?

Rare Rides has already featured Isuzu’s mass-market successor to the 117, in the boxy and thoroughly Eighties Impulse. Let’s check out what Isuzu offered to its coupe customers a decade prior, when it aimed for a discerning, well-heeled customer.

Today’s Rare Ride is from the period in the Eighties when many compact pickup trucks were available to the North American consumer. While most of these vehicles were Japanese, some covered their origins with American badges. Others wore both Japanese and American branding, albeit at different dealerships.

Wouldn’t you LUV to check out this P’up? Ugh.

In the last edition of Buy/Drive/Burn we pitted three compact pickup trucks from Japan against one another. The year was 1972 — still fairly early in Japan’s truck presence on North American shores. The distant year caused many commenters to shout “We are young!” and then claim a lack of familiarity.

Fine! Today we’ll move it forward a decade, and talk trucks in 1982.

Last time on Buy/Drive/Burn, we considered three-door Japanese SUVs from 1989. In this edition, we move forward a couple years in history and down a size class. Up for grabs are compact SUVs with removable roofs, all of them Japanese.

Do you remember what the compact SUV market looked like in 1989? Me either. But it was a time where every Japanese manufacturer (except Honda, obviously) offered a three-door SUV. Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Isuzu all vie for your 1989 dollars.

Some of the most interesting examples of GM badge engineering during the last few decades involved the Isuzu brand; first, the Chevrolet LUV pickup ( Isuzu Faster) arrived during the late 1970s, followed by the Chevrolet/Geo Spectrum ( Isuzu Gemini) and Geo Storm (Isuzu Impulse), and finally the Trailblazer-based Isuzu Ascender. Mixed in there was the Isuzu-ized second-gen Chevy S-10, also known as the Hombre.

You won’t find many Hombres in your local wrecking yard, but I kept my eyes open for one until this ’96 showed up in Denver.

Sporty styling, flip-up headlamps, and promises of performance. These three had it all in the mid-80s, but which one goes home with the Buy? Let’s find out.

Today’s Rare Ride has brown paint, a tweedy tan interior, and super rad 1980s Italian design. Think you can control your Impulses?

Okay, no more puns.

In last week’s Crapwagon Garage QOTD, we combined truck and station wagon to create an SUV, picking five winners. In part VII of the series, we’ll combine truck and station wagon a bit differently and end up with a van.

That’s right, it’s time for some #vanlife (ugh). Car-based minivans also apply, so we’re not limited to things like the sweet Safari GT above.

Let’s take a trip back to the 1980s — the time when one could drive past numerous Chevrolet and Geo (or Pontiac in Canada) dealers to visit their friendly Isuzu franchise. General Motors has a 34-percent stake in Isuzu, and that means some of the vehicles at the Chevrolet, Geo, and Isuzu lots are up to some badge-swapping trickery. Born as the Isuzu Gemini, the hatchback was renamed and rubber-stamped across brands, swapping badges and fascias with ease.

But one version was strictly badged as Isuzu, and only available for two years toward the end of the model’s run. It’s called the RS, and it’s Really Sporty fun on the cheap.

The most successful piece of used car advice I ever gave a friend involved telling her to buy a secondhand Chevrolet Cobalt.

Shock! Horror! Boredom! It panned out, though. No lie.

My friend was on her way to take a newspaper job in the wilds of northern British Columbia. She needed something reliable and ubiquitous. Something affordable to buy, but more importantly, something affordable to fix in a market not exactly saturated with premium imports. I knew from experience that the bland box’s 2.2-liter Ecotec was pretty bulletproof. Six years on, and that ’08 Cobalt, now located on the other side of the country, is still going strong. Operating expenses? Practically nonexistent.

Not long ago, a very different phone call preceded another friend’s used car purchase.

My godson’s dad, a full-time entertainer and owner of a Scion xB (past owner of a ’72 Super Beetle, too), doesn’t do things quietly. Kudos for being avant-garde, even in your driving preferences. Having just recently moved to a remote lakeside compound in some rugged territory over an hour north of town, the lure of a second vehicle had grown overwhelming. Work gigs, a wife who works in the city, two kids staying over on the weekend — maintaining a one-car lifestyle was next to impossible. Never mind what the bike fanatics say.

“I’ve found a four by four,” he told me.

“Oh yeah,” I said, assuming he’d locked in on an old four-wheel-drive GMC Sonoma, or perhaps some beat-up, mid-2000s crossover.

“You’ll never guess what it is,” he continued. Well, consider me intrigued … and suddenly worried.

Since the 1980s, draconian federal importation laws have meant enthusiasts in the United States must wait a full 25 years before some of their favorite brand’s models are legal on these shores. And every year, groups of enthusiasts take to the internet to contemplate what cars will be available for importation with the turn of the new year. The arrival of each new calendar year then becomes a celebration of the past, a revisit of forsaken models, a festival of other-market obscurity.

The Land of the Rising Sun is becoming more than just a source for tuners looking for their next drift car. That’s right, Japanese cars are now collectible.

One of the best things about haunting high-inventory-turnover self-service junkyards is finding really rare vehicles. Sometimes those ultra-rare machines are ancient European cars nobody remembers, sometimes they are commonplace cars with options nobody ordered, and sometimes they are obscure imported minivans that disappeared without a trace.

Today’s Junkyard Find is the third type, with a bewildering badge-engineering subplot that made sense to about a half-dozen suits in Japan.

Update: Automotive News is reporting General Motors is now focusing “on the higher end of the market while the Japanese firm sticks to selling vehicles for everyday commercial purposes,” strongly hinting that GM is the one that broke off the collaboration. We’ve added detail below.

After announcing a new bromance with Mazda just over a week ago, Isuzu is calling it quits with its old beau General Motors.

(Or maybe GM caught Isuzu cheating behind its back. Who knows? The relationship dynamics at play between automakers are difficult to flesh out.)

Regardless, midsize trucks — badged as both Isuzus and Chevrolets — will be no more in the Land of Smiles. The duo, which has a truck plant each in Thailand, will decouple their R&D efforts as they move toward engineering new global midsize pickups.