Welcome to Down On The Street, where we admire old vehicles on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Here's an example of badge engineering from the perhaps-best-forgotten GM X-Body platform.

While Chrysler's front-wheel-drive K cars were giving the company a new lease on life after near-failure and a government bailout at the tail end of the Malaise Era, The General wasn't doing quite as well with its X-Body platform. Sure, the X was front-wheel-drive and quite roomy for its exterior dimensions, but the performance was pretty grim and the build quality even worse. You could get a Citation, an Omega, a Phoenix, and a Skylark version of the X, with the Iron Duke four or the 2.8 V6.


These things are really, really rare on the street nowadays (I haven't seen a Phoenix for at least a decade, and even Citation sightings are noteworthy), so I was happy to find this daily-driven Skylark beating the odds.