Junkyard Gem: 1990 Plymouth Voyager Turbo

There was a time when

the word “TURBO” was king

, and even Detroit

minivans

came with nervous, hair-drier-boosted engines and screaming TURBO badging. Why, some of them even had manual transmissions (sadly, not this van) and in the case of the 1990 Plymouth Voyager

Turbo

I spotted in a Denver self-service wrecking yard, a lysergic purple paint plus a Bordello Red interior.

The

first-generation Voyager minivan

(not to be confused with

the full-sized B-series Voyager van

that preceded it) was a tremendous smash hit for

Chrysler

. Because it came from the

K-Car platform

, most of the powertrain options available for other members of the many-branched K Family Tree— from the

Mitsubishi

Astron to the Chrysler turbo 2.5— went into the Voyagers,

Caravans

, and Town & Countries.

The

turbocharged 2.5-liter four

, rated at 150 horsepower, was an option for the 1989 and 1990 Voyagers. That doesn’t sound like much today, an era in which

the Voyager’s descendants

churn out close to 300 horses, but it was

lunacy

for a front-wheel-drive family hauler that weighed just over 3,000 pounds. And people eventually discovered they could be made

far faster than stock

.

Voyager

shoppers could get five-speed manual transmissiona with their Turbo 2.5 engines, though few did. Still, there were more Voyagers and Caravans

with the 5-speed

than you might think, in part because of the manual transmission’s lower cost. The slushbox didn’t conquer the Chrysler Corporation Minivan World until 1996.

Nissan

probably had the most vividly red interiors of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but Chrysler didn’t lag far behind. Look at these acres of shiny red plastic and tough, red I Can’t Believe It’s Not Velour!

Because minivans remain useful for decades, most of them have high odometer readings by the time they get junked. So at a little over 115,000 miles, this one may have had a busted speedometer cable. Speedometers reading better than 85 mph were legal after 1981, but perhaps Chrysler decided not to encourage lead-footed hoonery among minivan drivers.

Auntie Entity

pitching “the best-loved minivan in the world.”