Chevrolet Venture

I’ve had the 1988 Chevrolet Venture concept on my list for several years now, originally because it seemed like the antithesis of what General Motors would eventually become: a company increasingly defined by its trucks and SUVs.

But it wasn’t until recently, when the YouTube channel Test Drive Junkie uploaded an old GM promotional video, that the Venture started to catalyze for me.

The footage comes from General Motors’ 1988 Teamwork & Technology: For Today and Tomorrow event, held at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel in January at a reported cost of $20 million at the time.

GM was working hard to rehabilitate its image, talking at length about how much it had changed, highlighting its collaborations with Disney at EPCOT, and generally trying to convince the world that the world’s largest automaker still knew a thing or two about the future.

And what a future it was (meant to be).

The Venture was displayed alongside an unusually diverse collection of machinery: the Pontiac Banshee concept, Lotus Esprit Turbo, Oldsmobile Aerotech record cars, Buick Lucerne concept, Cadillac Voyage, and GMC Centaur, which I’ve previously covered here at Weird Car of the Day. GM also used the event to introduce the official logo for its then-new Saturn brand.

Amid all that machinery was the Chevrolet Venture, described by GM as a four-door sports sedan. Larger than the contemporary Celebrity but smaller than the Caprice, it occupied a space that would be comfortably considered midsize today.