1978 Chevrolet Beauville With 3-on-the-Tree Is Junkyard Treasure

Before the rise of the minivan but still during the heyday of big Detroit wagons, many Americans opted for passenger-ized versions of American cargo vans for family-hauling purposes. These were beefy machines built on truck chassis, inefficient, and hilariously spartan by the standards of our current century, but they sold well and lasted for decades. Today’s Junkyard Treasure is such a van, a Chevy Sportvan Beauville with a most unusual drivetrain (see gallery below).

Murilee Martin

In 1978, the cargo version of the GM G-Series van was known as the Chevy Van (the previous van generation got the hyphenated Chevy-Van name) and the passenger version was the Sportvan. The Beauville package upgraded the Sportvan with plaid fabric on the seats and interior panels and cost an extra couple of hundred bucks on a van retailing at between $5,468 and $6,590 (about $24,820 to $29,915 in 2022 dollars).

Murilee Martin

My family had a 1973 Chevrolet Sportvan Beauville 3/4-ton in red-and-white, bought new for a move from Minnesota to California, and so this ’78 yellow-and-white 3/4-ton seems very familiar.

Murilee Martin

The distinctive Beauville plaid cloth was very tough and unpleasantly scratchy, and much of my childhood was spent wondering what apocalypse-rated industrial material was sourced to provide the stuff. GMC’s Sportvan Beauville counterpart, the Rally STX, had identical cloth. At least GM matched the cloth color to the exterior paint color.

Murilee Martin

Because the Chevy Sportvan and GMC Rally passenger vans were popular, I still see plenty of them during my junkyard travels. What makes this one unusual is the engine/transmission combination. Nearly every post-1960s American van shopper seeking a family-hauling machine sprang for the optional V8 engine.

But this Beauville has the base (for the 3/4-ton Sportvan) 292-cubic-inch 4.8-liter straight-six, rated at a miserable 120 horsepower and a decent 215 lb-ft of torque. The 292 was a serious truck engine, but your typical Sportvan buyer wanted the optional 350-cubic-inch 5.7-liter or 400-cubic-inch 6.5-liter small-block V8, generating a respective 165 and 175 horses.

Murilee Martin

The engine choice is strange enough, but I had never seen a Beauville with a three-on-the-tree column-shift manual transmission before this one. This was the base transmission on GM light trucks in 1978, and it remained available all the way through 1987.

But the three-speed automatic added $345 (about $1,565 today) to the cost of a new ’78 G20 Sportvan and made it much easier for the driver to sip an Oly while tuning the radio and telling the kids in back to pipe down. Dodge offered floor-shift manuals in the Sportsman van around this time (with the shifter awkwardly located so the driver had to reach back for it), but I’ve never seen a Chevy Sportvan with one.