While there has perhaps been no more contrarient car name than the Chevy Celebrity. Today’s four-speed sedan nonetheless might be paparazzi worthy. That is unless its price means it can’t get arrested in this town.

Imagine if you will a world without cars like yesterday’s . Crazy cars like that need to exist just to keep our sense of propriety in check. Was it necessary? No. Was it potentially loud, fun and excessive? Hell yeah. Was it a good value? Well, perhaps not, at least according to the 84% of you that voted it a Crack Pipe price. Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all.

If that Ford was ostentatious in the extreme, then today’s is its counterpoint, a talisman as it were, to suck out all that Ford’s testosterone-infused juju. In doing so, it appears to have developed a slight sense of fun itself.

Now, very few people would have ever slotted the square peg Celebrity in the round hole of fun. It was dull, honest, perhaps even reliable transportation for people who go to the local high school football game on Friday night and then to their local church on Sunday to atone for all the bad things they were thinking about the other team two days prior.

This one’s a little more than that.

First off, it’s seemingly in pretty great shape. The metallic grey paint is a recent respray and the car rolls on later Lumina alloy wheels. If you like the rectilinear lines of the Volvo 700 series then you’ll feel right at home with the similarly shaped Celeb. A rear wing off of a Firebird let’s it shake its tail feathers more so than normal.

The interior is also in perfectly serviceable shape and features two—count ‘em, two—bench seats for all your automotive hanky-panky needs. Or maybe you just need to move five of your friends in a modicum of room if not comfort.

The middle friend in front will need to be cool with having a stick shift grazing their calf. This because this Celebrity sports a rare four-speed manual. That’s not for performance however as it’s mated to one of history’s more unenthusiastic engines, a 2.5-litre four most commonly known as the Iron Duke, or to those that really knew them as the iron puke.

This cast iron castration was offered as the Celebrity’s base engine as well as serving the same function in the Pontiac Fiero and a slew of other forgettable GM rides from the Eighties that have long since gone to the crusher.

Perhaps making up for the mediocre mill is a litany of new parts including tires, muffler, battery, alternator… oh, you get the idea. There’s only 98,000 miles claimed on the car, and it comes with a clean title.

On the down side, the A/C is on the fritz and at this age that’s an R12 setup not the current R134 so have fun with that.

It would cost an arm and a sweaty leg to have fun with this car as its asking price is a nominal $2,800. That may be cheap, but is it a good value? That’s what we’re here to decide. What do you think, is this odd manual four-banger celebrity worth $2,800 for the novelty alone? Or does that price mean that this Celebrity is a D-lister?

You decide!

Des Moines IA , or go if the ad disappears.

H/T to Jake Sanders for the hook up!

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