Sunday, February 03, 2008

Goodbye, Isuzu

There was an obituary in the business section. Isuzu decided to stop selling cars in the US. This made me sad.


The article focused on how Isuzu's "Joe Isuzu" commercials had been something of a phenomenon in the 1980's and how Isuzu had been one of the first companies to sell SUV's You remember Joe Isuzu. He was the oily used-car-salesman-type guy who described Isuzus as being able to go 300 miles an hour, with a little graphic below that said something like "going down a mountain in a hurricane." They were very funny and helped Isuzu sell a lot of cars for a while. Isuzu's Trooper was one of the first SUV's, along with the Jeep Cherokee. As you know, they spawned bigger and bigger SUV's, eventually achieving their ultimate expression. Once every freakin' car company on the planet except Yugo started building SUV's -- hello, Cadillac Escalade and Porsche Cayenne -- no one bought Isuzu Troopers any more and they died a long, slow death.


The end of Isuzu America made me sad because, in my first wave of sports car lust, I really wanted an Isuzu Impulse. Well, I really wanted a Porsche 911 or 944 or a Ferrari of any type, but that wasn't going to happen. An Isuzu Impulse was somewhere near the range of doable. The Impulse really was the spawn of the first generation of the VW GTI, the seminal pocket rocket car. While the first GTI was boxy and the GTI has never achieved artistic excellence, the Impluse was a very nice-looking car, being designed by some acclaimed Italian designer. It had a turbo four, which what my Audi has now. Besies being named "Isuzu," it had enough other kind of goofy features to give it some weird cred. It had pods of controls on either side of the instrument cluster whose height could be adjusted so that you could have your windshield wiper controls just where you wanted them. I didn't want a Toyota Celica -- that was a chick car. I didn't want a Nissan Pulsar -- that thing was butt ugly. The Dodge Daytona was pretty cool, but my parents had had a Dodge Charger that more or less fell to pieces under their feet, so that wasn't happening. I wanted an Isuzu Impulse.


I never got one and not too many other people did either. The GTI lives on, funky cool as ever. The Impulse is dead. When I read the article about Isuzu America's demise, I ran an Autotrader search for any Impulse between 1981 and 2008 within 500 miles of my town. There was not a single one for sale. They have disappeared from the face of the earth, like the dinosaurs and Michael Dukakis. Good luck, Isuzu, I wish you well back in Japan.

1 Comments:

At 9:10 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've been using my Isuzu Car for the past 2yrs and it doesn't fail to impress me. I also give advice to my co-workers to choose this car. Many people who used this car has been happy of its performance.

http://carsalesphil.com/

 

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