Junkyard Gem: 1993 Honda Civic del Sol

For the 1984 model 12 months, Honda began selling a two-seat version of the third-generation Civic referred to as the Civic CRX. Perhaps this was in emulation of Ford’s two-seaterization of the Escort, referred to as the EXP and LN7, which first hit American showrooms as a 1982 model, however the copycat ended up being far more successful than the unique here. The CRX was fun to drive while getting shockingly good fuel economy, and its final model 12 months was 1991. Its successor first appeared here as a 1993 model: the Civic del Sol. Here’s an example of a first-year del Sol, present in a boneyard near Denver, Colorado.

I daily-drove CRXs for years and loved them very much (aside from the nightmarishly complex “Map of the Universe” tangle of vacuum lines on the CVCC versions, especially when attempting to pass California emissions tests). Like many CRX aficionados, I never could warm as much as the del Sol.

It appeared to be trying too hard to be lovable, while its predecessor earned love by just being a greater automobile than any of its rivals. By the point the del Sol hit our shores, Soichiro Honda was dead, the competition had caught up and Americans not needed to pay well over MSRP to purchase a brand new Accord or Civic.

The fifth-generation Civic (the idea of the del Sol) was a masterpiece of engineering, my personal favorite of all of the Civic generations. The del Sol was built just as well as its hatchback, sedan and coupe siblings (and its first cousin, the 1993-2001 Acura Integra), but perhaps those automobile shoppers who might once have considered a two-seater were moving on to more truckish cute machinery by 1993. In any case, the rare CRXs I find in junkyards nowadays get picked clean instantly, while most del Sols go the the crusher’s cold steel jaws with most (non-mechanical) parts still present.

For 1993, the bottom del Sol got the very reliable but not-so-powerful 1.5-liter engine, rated at 102 horsepower and 98 pound feet. That is what we have now here, and it’s impossible that any junkyard shopper will likely be buying such a commonplace plant. The 1993 del Sol Si got a VTEC-equipped 1.6 with 125 horsepower and 106 pound-feet, and that engine stays fairly desirable within the eyes of Honda builders.

An automatic was available, but this automobile has the five-speed manual.

Someone yanked the instrument cluster before I came (the tachometers on these cars often go bad once they hit age 25 or so, so junkyard clusters are price money), so we will not know the way many miles were on it. I find loads of discarded members of the fifth-generation Civic family with higher than 300,000 miles, and this automobile might well have been a member of that not-so-exclusive club.

It appears to have been in fine condition prior to the crash that did it in.

Interestingly, the extremely low sequence number on this automobile’s VIN (plus the June 1992 construct date) shows that it was one among the very first U.S.-market del Sols ever built. There’s a superb likelihood that it was in the primary shipment of del Sols brought across the Pacific. 

The truth is, there is a likelihood that I drove this automobile when it was fresh off the boat and still covered with protective plastic. The early Nineties were grim economic times in California, where I used to be living on the time, and sooner or later in the course of the summer of 1992 I took a temp job driving brand-new Hondas and Acuras between a storage yard at the Port of Richmond and a trainyard just a few miles away where they might be loaded onto a train for shipment east. The drivers would pile right into a doorless Econoline van and get dropped off in an infinite lot full of latest cars, where we’d each jump right into a Prelude or Vigor or whatever.

There can be barely enough time to extract the owner’s manual from the glovebox, get the radio security code off the back cover, enter it into the radio, find a superb station and have music to blast on the five-minute drive to the train docks (I attempted my best to get a Legend if possible, since the Legend’s audio system had enough bass to do justice to the proper North Bay music of the era). Then it was back to the Econoline, repeat, repeat, repeat. I can not recall whether I had this job for weeks or months, but I drove lots of del Sols with clear plastic seat covers on that gig. If I didn’t drive this exact automobile, I probably saw it.

Drive it with the roof off at 130 mph!

Take the roof off 912 times during a 30-month lease.

In its homeland, the del Sol was still a CR-X… and it gave you 2Way Paradise!