Imagine this - you’re driving home on a cool summer night, your tape deck blasting Holy Diver when you come across a hungry Ferrari 348ts in the wrong neighborhood. If you bought this awesome GMC Typhoon, you could blow the Ferrari’s doors rightly off, then laugh maniacally because your whole car cost less than the Ferrari’s overdue service.
This 1993 GMC Typhoon was the truck that never should’ve existed. It was made on the idea that people would like a fast SUV, before fast SUVs were ever invented. Sure there was the Laforza, but that’s more myth than machine. This two door monstrosity has a turbocharged 4.3-liter V6 that puts out 280 horsepower and 360 lb-ft of torque which is enough. Yeah, even for you. Coupled with GM’s stout 4L60 4-speed automatic transmission, it gets from a stop to 60 miles per hour in 5.3 seconds, a third of a second faster than a Ferrari 348ts.
For an example that costs the same as a heavily used economy car at $7,000, this truck is a collector’s item that would accommodate even the most frugal of iconic car budgets.
While this relatively spartan truck does have more than 150,000 miles, it’s a platform that’s made for repeated use and abuse. As long as you take care of the so-simple-it’s-crude mechanical components, the plucky truck should last quite a while with proper maintenance.
Here’s what has been done so far by the previous owner:
Improvements and Maintenance
- 3’ custom exhaust
- Staggered Corvette Sawblades
- Upgraded break kit
- 4 new tires (minimal wear)
- Jason West intercooler scoop
- RPM Intake
- Egr delete
- Rmp Custom made plug wires
- Turbo tweak adjustable chip
- Bilstein shocks on all fours
- Belltech lowering leafs
- New torsion bar mounts
- Belltech sways front and rear
- Billet engine tie down
- Front pads 7 +/- months old
- No rips in the interior
- Autometer afr carbon fiber
- Autometer carbon boost
- All vac lines replaced with silicon hoses
- New window fuzzies, installed 08/2012
- Relocated ecu into glove box
- The cv joints in front prop shaft and replace the front hubs
- Trans is a NOS GM that was installed aprox @ 116K
I’d love to own this truck, mainly because I don’t think the Syclone pickup sibling is as good of a value from a practicality standpoint. With this SUV variant, you wouldn’t need a huge payload capacity and would be able to take full advantage of the air-assisted suspension in the rear as it dramatically improves ride quality. I also tend to think it’s one of the most striking trucks available, bar none. The wider Corvette wheels provide some much-needed contrast to the aggressively glossy black paint. For the asking price, it’s hard to go wrong. At double the price, it’d still be a bargain for the grin factor alone. They’re not making any more of these, so you better get to steppin’.
Tavarish is the founder of APiDA Online and writes and makes videos about buying and selling cool cars on the internet. He owns the world’s cheapest Mercedes S-Class, a graffiti-bombed Lexus, and he’s the only Jalopnik author that has never driven a Miata. He also has a real name that he didn’t feel was journalist-y enough so he used a pen name and this was the best he could do.
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