If you’re looking for a hatchback that’s practical and cheap to run, you might be thinking about a used Toyota Yaris, or maybe a Mitsubishi Mirage. If you’re anywhere near Oklahoma, though, there’s a far more interesting option available to you—it’s a 1988 Daihatsu Charade CLS!
This Charade has led an interesting and weird life. The seller, one Eric Lieberman of Oklahoma, reported it has just 7,000 miles on the clock. The car presents as virtually brand new, inside and out. And joy of joys, this time capsule is a manual to boot.
The car was apparently originally a prize in a competition run by South Park Daihatsu, shortly after the brand reached the United States. A newspaper clipping held by the seller indicates it was originally won by Mr. and Mrs. John Harmon of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
That dealership is long gone, with Jim Norton Toyota now operating at the former site. Similarly, it appears the sales manager involved, one Rick Mattioni, is no longer with us, so it’s not easy to verify the provenance of the car. At a glance, though, the story appears to check out. Lieberman has a huge pile of documentation to go with the vehicle, including a dealer survey filled out by the original owners. Apparently, the couple were regular watchers of Good Morning America.
Lieberman says the car hasn’t spent a night outside in its entire life, and that’s easy to believe. The paint, trims, and lights all look brand new. The interior is much the same, bar a couple of tiny blemishes on the carpet that suggest someone has indeed had their shoes in there. The outside has some marks that look like faded decals just behind the doors, though. I’ve contacted Lieberman for more details on this and to learn more of the car’s back story.
So what could you expect of a 1988 Charade? Well, the three-door hatchback had an inline-three engine good for 52 horsepower and 58 pound-feet of torque. It wasn’t much chop in the acceleration stakes, but it only sipped at its fuel tank. It would hit 38 mpg city, 42 mpg highway, and 39 mpg combined. That’ll beat a non-hybrid 2024 Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla, no problem.
The Charade was a basic car, but the model was up with the times. It came with electronic fuel injection, so annoying cold starts aren’t a thing. There’s precious little other fancy equipment on this stripper model, though. It has steel wheels, no tach, and there’s no mention of air conditioning on the window sheet, either. A glance at the dash seems to indicate it’s not fitted.
There is one major item that stands out to me as a bit of a tragedy, too. The original stereo is nowhere to be seen. Sadly, a Pioneer head unit has been installed in place of what was presumably a tape deck and AM/FM radio. The interior was virtually perfect in every other way.
Weirdly, too, the car has a “Dukakis ’88” sticker on the rear window. If you’re not familiar with Mike Dukakis, he’s the ex-governor of Massachusetts. He famously scored the Democratic presidential nomination for the 1988 election and ended up going toe-to-toe with George H.W. Bush as the Republican nominee. Dukakis went on to lose, partially because he looked so damn goofy in a tank.
Maybe you’re a big Dukakis fan. Maybe you just want to drive one of the super-rare Daihatsu Charades in North America that are still in new condition. Either way, you’ll have to try and cut a hard deal with Lieberman. He’s looking for $11,950. That’s a big pile of money for a very small car. Even if you’re driving a really thirsty truck right now, it would still take you ages to come out ahead by driving the Charade instead.
Still, there simply aren’t a lot of 7,000-mile Charades lurking around the US right now. I’d wager this might even be the only one. Most examples died or rusted out long ago. This isn’t just a runner, it’s a hair off as-new condition.
Hopefully, this one can find a loving home and will be preserved in the same glorious condition it’s currently in today, while maybe racking up a few more miles for good measure.
Image credits: Eric Lieberman
The Charade holds a special place for me, as for many years it was the only car I knew of to incorporate my initials as a model or trim level. I was rather grateful in 2004 when Mercedes introduced the CLS and took my monogram upscale.
You mourn the loss of the original stereo, but I would bet it didn’t come with one. In those days a radio was an option and there’s nothing listed on the window sticker.
BTW, Charade has got to be one of the worst names ever for a car. Almost makes Edsel sound like a sexy European sports car. I’m a Charade, and I’m pretending to be a real car! STUPIDEST NAME EVER!!!!
On its way to becoming this car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAF4NihChRw
Yes, they were expensive for their day and size class, however, they did have very stout materials and construction. I had a friend who bought one in 1989 and just recently laid it to rest. She couldn’t get even the simplest of parts to keep it going anymore after 315k miles. Does anyone remember the Mad TV comedy show from the early 90’s? They had this funny Asian geek who would slide across the hood of his Charade and try to impress the girls so he could get laid. OMG it was funny! He had a neon piss Charade with all of the mods on it. Classic, so un-PC, real comedy.
Love it, but way too much money. Easy to add a tach and some decent wheels. AC would be difficult though.
Way overpriced. It is a beauty now but if you drive it it will be taken by rust. It probably needs rubber replaced all over. And I bet the ask is over the new price for a car whose only special is it is a pos that hasn’t fallen apart yet.
“Sadly, a Pioneer head unit has been installed in place of what was presumably a tape deck and AM/FM radio.”
Are you sure? I don’t think this came from the factory with any radio at all. There’s no mention of a radio on the window sticker.
Dealer installed accessory perhaps?
Are those the original tires – mounted with the whitewalls inside?
Highly doubt it – whitewalls are indigenous to North America. Tires for imports would have been blackwalls from the factory.
Mazda sold their 86-92 B-series pickups with whitewalls at least through 1988. My family had two of them from new, and I remember.
This is shocking on many levels….the first of which is why any pickup would have whitewalls to begin with, but I digress. So I honestly don’t know the answer to this, but I wonder if those pickups were North America only (?)
The pickups weren’t US-only – in fact, they made them in Thailand long after Mazda stopped making them in Japan and started rebadging the Ranger for the US market in 1993 – but I would not be surprised if the whitewalls were just for the US. You usually saw them on the early SE-5 models with the white painted steel “wagon wheels.” The whitewalls made those wheels seem bigger.
Can we discuss the fact that the dealer, in their own ad celebrating the contest winner, managed to misspell Daihatsu? They wrote “Diahatsu” at the top of the page.
I still kick myself for having passed on an RHD Charade (rural mailman’s car) which went on eBay for a song in 2002.
Now I know why the new Hyundai Santa Fe’s rear looks so familiar, it’s like a reinterpretation of the rear of the Daihatsu Charade!
A 93 Geo Metro, and I’ll throw in an 88 Tercel EZ along with a 90 Mitsubishi Mirage hatchback, also showed up in the new Sante Fe’s rear end styling consultation. The Charade was the special guest.
I thought about the Metro/Swift as well but it seems the Charade is a better match.
Agreed. At least the Sante Fe’s taillights go up with the hatch and aren’t in harms way when loading stuff over tall lift over height. I used to bang the crap out of my many Metro’s taillights loading my design toolbox in and out of the hatch. Hauling small furniture was brutal for them as well. By the way, a Metro would fit a club chair with the back seat folded down.
This is why hatchbacks rule! I’ve fit so much stuff into my Focus ZX-5.
Long live the hatch back. God I miss them. That was a fad that started in the 70’s that should come back. Even Chevy added a hatchback to the Nova, hell, even Buick and Pontiac added hatchbacks to their car lines!
You know what’s even better? Liftbacks! Even the first gen Mazda 6 had a liftback. I think the only other brand I can think of that has one is Audi. Skoda had one where it opened like a regular trunk but you could also open it like a liftback for immediate access to EVERYTHING!
God, these are the things I’m gonna restomod the hell out of when I win the lotto
Meticulously preserving the authentic Dukakis sticker, naturally
If you win the lotto, bring in a Charade GTti (turbo, four-valve head, twin cam) and restore it if necessary.
Look for the old Mad TV episodes with the modded out neon piss yellow Charade. If you don’t laff watching that poor geek sliding across that tiny hood you are comically challenged my friend.
Daihatsu and Suzuki should come back to the US. They would be much more successful this time around. The inexpensive cars they’re known for are sorely needed now.
Jimny with the flares and the bigger engine. Don’t need the kei-spec in the US. Wouldn’t pass crash tests though 🙁
My best friend’s family had one of these growing up in Colorado. I have a distinct memory of having great difficulty getting up to the mountains with one adult and two six year olds in the car. 0/10 would not buy for any price, especially THAT price.
I can believe that. I had a ’93 Geo Metro in CO. It had 55 hp at sea level. 2nd gear climbing I70 in the truck lane… The “good” old days.
Remember trucks passing my ’91 on I-70. That was 20 years ago. Couldn’t imagine what it’s like taking a metro up the mountains today.
No A/C in Oklahoma. No wonder it didn’t get driven much. Wonder if it was an option given the 52hp engine? I think you could get A/C on a Geo Metro.
You could get A/C on the Geo, but I didn’t. It could barely make highway speeds without it.
And the non-a/c models got a piece of sheet metal that created a nice cubby to store a quart of oil and a jug of antifreeze!
I think when I said yesterday that you could use this engine in the F300, I meant the Applause?
I remember one person saying they put the Charade engine in their dead Rocky and the results were…awful. Only maginally helped by the gearing.
But Applauses (Applausi?) pop up in the US, so perhaps they were sold in Canada?
Daihatsu charade brings something completely different to mind today.
Roller-skate driving simulator is now available.
Second prize was two Charades.
Third prize is you’re fired.
COTD
Amazing how simple and uncluttered this car is. No fancy nothin’. Just the bare minimum needed to make the car go down the road, and that’s it.
There’s a purity to cars like this that is beautiful and very compelling. Too bad such a unicorn no longer exists.
The line between minimalist car and penalty box car is indeed fine.
And this thing is well across it.
A manual transmission without a tachometer is inexcusable cost savings.
I know I’m inviting 50 replies from commenters who own cars so old and shitty that the word tachometer wasn’t even invented when they were built, and they shift their 4 speed manual by knowing the resonant frequencies of their 450 cc inline 2 or whatever, but this is objectively stupid.
Do you need a tach for this engine, though?
I don’t “need” windows, a roof, sound deadening, a cushioned seat, a stereo, etc either, but they all improve the driving experience. So would a tach.
This car didn’t come with most of those features either.
Only two throttle positions. Closed or flat on the floor.
It’s not a throttle, it’s a toggle.
Na. When it starts bouncing off the Rev limiter, shift. And it still barely moves
I’d guess this little wheezebox runs out of power long before it runs out of revs.
I’d think this was an exaggeration if I hadn’t had my mom tell me that you know the right time to shift because your car sings to you.
Mind you, she was also a professional musician who learned to drive in a 1960 Morris Minor, and had to shovel coal into the stove every morning to cook breakfast.
My Honda Today has 660cc across three cylinders, five speeds, and no tacho. I’d like one, but it does fine without.
A tach is a nice to have, but I’ve never shifted based on looking at the tach.
Maybe that is because I learned manual on shitboxes without tachs.
I’m pretty sure a tach is for those times when you’re driving spiritedly and want to avoid the rev limiter. Otherwise, if you know the car you never use it.
Agreed, that’s about the only time it’s needed.
Does this engine even need a rev limiter?
There are no Charades lurking around because they all ended up in a junkyard. These are not good cars from what I remember.
Were they bad or were they just a bad car for Americans and cheap enough to be thrown away? Genuinely don’t know about them.
I have a little Japanese car from around that area and its basically like driving a skateboard on the freeway. It’s a bulletproof little beast though and a very good car.
From what I remember, they were just not very good cars. You see zero on the road nowadays, while it’s not uncommon to still see a Toyota or Honda of the same vintage still going.
Some of this is also due to Daihatsu leaving the US market almost as quickly as they got here. Parts support was a real issue before the internet.
I don’t remember them even lasting far into the 90’s.
I don’t know that they even had dealers in all of the lower-48 before they threw in the towel. I lived in PA from 1981-2013, and can recall seeing maybe 2-3 Charades, only once seeing one after 2000. I saw the Rocky more often, but most of that was one Rocky locally owned, through the 90s and into the mid-2000s. I saw another around 2010, but it could still have been that one, since they were both dark gray. The Rocky seemed kind of cool – I feel like the one I saw had glass t-tops.
I knew an attorney who had a Charade and loved it. He got 40+MPG and it was very dependable, and he drove a lot of miles.
Daihatsu is associated with Toyota in one way or another, and I would expect this to hold together like a Tercel of that era. The Charade is similar to the first and second generation Civics – simple, basic, well put together, easy to work on. As a giveaway, this example is the ultra-bare stripper, like you’d see on The Price Is Right – no AC, no options, with luxury features like 2-speed wipers, rearview mirror and radial tires.
I don’t 100% understand why, but I want it.
Charade is also one of my favorite names for a car, mostly in that it’s just a bizarre name choice for, anything that you would ever want to sell?
Anything more than $2,500 is an insane price for this car. Just because it’s old and pristine doesn’t mean it’s valuable.
It’s worth whatever it ends up selling for. Which I’m going to bet is far, far more than $2500.
Yeah 11k is nuts, but I wouldn’t be shocked if someone snatched it up for 7-8k.
I live in Broken Arrow, so if any of you lunatics wants me to go take a first-hand look at this car, I could maybe be persuaded.
Maybe.
But I gotta tell you, my opinion is going to be a bit biased. Was this car named the Charade because it was just pretending to be a car? Seems like a distinct possibility to me.
One of my all-time favorite WTF names. Though I give it a slight pass b/c Japanese manufacturer. Unlike say the Aspire; Ford you absolutely knew better!
Indeed that does seem to be where the name came from. Similar to the Ford Aspire, that aspired to be a car, and the Geo/Chevy Metro where it was better to take the metro than drive them. It amazes me how poorly many of the tiny cars of this era were named
Oh I forgot about the mits Mirage, that one is awful too. Not the car necessarily, but the name. It’s a mirage of a car, meaning it’s not actually a car… What? Who signed off on these?!
I always enjoyed how the coupe version (wow, hard to believe now that Mitsubishi once made that) had the trim level BEFORE the model name on the badging, leading to the awkwardly faux-Euro looking “Mirage LE Coupe”
Broken Arrow, OK? This car may have been owned someone I knew. He worshipped his like it was a Cadillac or some other kind of fancy prestige branded auto.. He (Andy, God rest his soul) Changed the fluids, including coolant, every 1.5k miles and would make you knock the dirt off of your shoe bottoms before you were allowed entry into the Charade. First car his poor family ever had and he was so proud of it. He was such a quirky goofball. Heart bigger than all of the USA. He probably lost his car to some crack ho. His was gold color, on second thought, so this probably wasn’t his. But it could have been based on the care it’s had
A Dukakis sticker, and a seller named Lieberman? I hope the car does better than the candidates…
well done