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Junkyard Gem: 1986 Pontiac Fiero GT

If you like affordable, mid-engined two-seaters, the 1980s were your decade. Fiat (and, a bit later, Bertone) offered the X1/9, Toyota sold MR2s, and even General Motors got into the act by creating the Fiero. Available from the 1984 through 1988 model years, the Pontiac Fiero showed plenty of promise but ended up being mostly disappointing, in some ways echoing the career of the Chevy Corvair of a couple of decades earlier. Today's Junkyard Gem is a once-spiffy 1986 Fiero GT, found in a self-service yard near Denver, Colorado. After a long and painful development period stretching all the way back to John DeLorean's XP-833 Banshee (which ended up being a major influence behind the original Opel GT), the Fiero finally debuted in 1983 as a 1984 model. The top-of-the-model-range GT appeared the following year. The Fiero was built as a notchback coupe and as a fastback, with all the GTs being the latter type. I couldn't get the engine lid open, but this car would have left the assembly line (in Pontiac, Michigan) with a 2.8-liter V6 rated at 140 horsepower. This car has a five-speed manual transmission, making it a credible rival for Toyota's MR2.  The 1986 MR2 was less powerful than the Fiero GT (112 horsepower versus 140), but also scaled in significantly lighter (2,459 pounds against the Pontiac's 2,780 pounds). The MR2 also cost less, priced at $11,298 while the Fiero GT cost $12,875 (that's about $30,540 and $34,805, respectively, in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars). Meanwhile, the $6,998 Honda Civic CRX two-seater lured away many potential Fiero buyers despite being a front-engined/front-wheel-drive car, and the $7,186 Ford EXP/Mercury LN7 also put a dent in Fiero sales. I can't find a price for the 1986 Bertone X1/9, but it cost a hard-to-believe $13,990 in 1984. GM still was using five-digit odometers in many vehicles by the middle 1980s, but this Fiero has a six-digit unit and thus we can see that it nearly achieved 150,000 miles during its driving career. The 1984-1987 Fiero suffered from a parts-bin suspension design, with the front suspension borrowed from the Chevrolet Chevette and the entire rear transaxle/suspension assembly lifted from the front end of the Chevrolet Citation. For the 1988 model year, GM finally spent the money to design an improved Fiero-specific suspension … and then promptly put a halt to production.

There's a 'Knight Rider' movie in development

James Wan, who has directed films from the first "Saw" to "Aquaman," with "Furious 7" in between, and produced even more projects, is producing a new Knight Rider movie according to a report in Deadline. Just in case there's a reader who doesn't know, Knight Rider was one of the seminal trio of iconic-car shows from the 1980s, along with "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "Miami Vice." The series lasted 90 episodes that ran from 1982 to 1986, following the crime-fighting exploits of Michael Knight, a man who crusaded for justice after being shot in the face. Billionaire Walton Knight hired Michael to work with the Knight Foundation, where Michael helps develop the Knight Industries Two Thousand, a Pontiac Trans-Am with AI that can talk, drive more than 200 miles per hour, and could teach MI6's Q Branch about gadgetry. Collider described David Hasselhof's Michael Knight as "crimefighter by trade and wearing-a-leather-jacket-with-no-shirt-underneath innovator by hobby." The show made such an impression that there was a series spinoff called "Code of Justice," two TV movies in 1991 and 1994, a convention called KnightCon, and a series reboot on NBC that lasted for one season from 2008 to 2009, as well as stores full of action figures and models and literature, YouTube fan-made trailers and movies, and this wacky German-dubbed short "Knight Rider" film starring Hasselhoff. We don't know anything about the new movie's plot yet, other than that it's set in the present. T.J. Fixman, better known for now as a video game writer who worked on franchises like "Ratchet and Clank" and "Resistance: Fall of Man," has been attached to write, with a mandate to keep "the anti-establishment tone of the original." With matters still early in development there's no telling when the movie will hit theaters, and Wan's probably got his hands busy with the new MacGuyver reboot for CBS, anyway. Now that there's already been a Knight Industries 2000 and 3000, that gives us plenty of time to imagine — in a world where 200-mph hypercars powered by everything sprout like weeds and even Cannonballers are using military-like equipment — what would a Knight Industries Four Thousand possess? And would it be called KIFT? Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.

Junkyard Gem: 1984 Pontiac Fiero with supercharged 3800 V6 swap

Like the Corvair, the Vega, and the Citation, the Pontiac Fiero was a very innovative machine that ended up causing General Motors more headaches than happiness, and Fiero aficionados and naysayers continue to beat each other with tire irons (figuratively speaking, I hope) to this day. The General has often proved willing to take the occasional big gamble and huge GM successes in engineering prowess (including the first overhead-valve V8 engine for the masses and the first real-world-usable true automatic transmission) and marketing brilliance (e.g., the Pontiac GTO and related John DeLorean home runs) meant that the idea of a mid-engined sporty economy car (or economical sports car) got a shot from the suits on the 14th floor. Sadly, the Fiero ended up being the marketplace victim of too many issues to get into here, and The General pulled the plug immediately after the 1988-model-year suspension redesign that made the Fiero the sports car it should have been all along. But what if the plastic Pontiac had never suffered from the misery of the gnashy, pokey Iron Duke engine and had been built from the start with a screaming supercharged V6 making way better than 200 horsepower? The final owner of today's Junkyard Gem sought to make that very Fiero, by dropping in one of the many supercharged 3.8-liter V6s installed in 1990s and 2000s GM factory hot rods. The first Fieros came out in 1983 for model year 1984, and the only engine available that year was the Iron Duke 2.5-liter four-cylinder, which generated its 92 horsepower with the full-throated song of a Soviet tractor stuck in the freezing mud of a Polish sugar-beet field. The 2M4 badging stood for "two seats, mid-engine, four cylinders," just as the numbers in the Oldsmobile 4-4-2 once represented "four carburetor barrels, four-speed manual transmission, dual exhaust." This car is a top-trim-level SE model, which listed for $9,599 (about $24,200 today). The no-frills Fiero cost just $7,999 that year, making these cars far cheaper than the only other reasonably affordable new mid-engined car Americans could buy at that time: the $13,990 Bertone (aka Fiat) X1/9. The Toyota MR2 appeared in North America as a 1985 model with a base price of $10,999 and promptly siphoned off the car-buying cash from a bunch of potential Fiero shoppers.