Price: £1950
Mileage: 45,271
Condition: FOTU-approved
Advert: eBay
More than a few times, there has been crossover between the Festival of the Unexceptional and our Unexceptional Classified series, sometimes with readers occasionally getting in touch to say they’ve bought a car we’ve featured, other times when we spy a previous entrant here on the lawn at Grimsthorpe Castle.
But this time, it’s your chance to buy a car that actually featured on the lawn in the Concours de l’Ordinaire at 2024’s Festival, since this 1997 Daewoo Lanos SE was positioned nearly front and centre, and difficult to miss in its vibrant shade of red.
We suspect Korean models from the 1990s and soon 2000s will become an increasingly familiar sight at FOTU in the future. These were of course the decades that the likes of Kia, Hyundai, and yes, Daewoo were all finding their feet in the global automotive industry, and as was often the case when a country was just getting off the ground in the auto business, the early products tended to be both budget-friendly and somewhat unremarkable. Perfect for the Festival, in other words.
Daewoo’s memorable (or should that be unmemorable) early efforts were both effectively heavy facelifts of a pair of 1980s Vauxhalls, the Astra-based Nexia and the Cavalier-based Espero.
The company’s schtick was a no-hard-sell, no-haggle model where you simply walked into a showroom, pointed at the car you wanted, and drove out with a three-year, 60,000-mile warranty that was basically unprecedented in the ’90s, as well as three years of free servicing, free AA cover, and even a free set of tyres after you’d scrubbed through the first set. If you really, really didn’t care about image, or dynamics, or having a car that looked like it was from the decade you bought it, a Nexia or Espero was just about perfect.
Obviously, objectively speaking both cars were pretty dire by the standards of the 1990s, but that’s where their replacements, the large supermini-sized Lanos and the Nubira family car, came in. The Lanos was very loosely based on the old Astra’s platform still but you’d not recognise it as such, while the Nubira truly was all-new. Both cars had input from the likes of Italdesign, Idea, Ricardo, Holden, and even Porsche, while the Nubira was primarily developed not in Korea but in . . . Worthing.
Anyway, to the Lanos, the smaller of the pair, and the FOTU-worthy car we’ve found today. Its generically curvy 1990s shape (both inside and out) was available in three and five-door forms, and with 1.4- and 1.6-litre engines developed by General Motors. Road tests found such qualities as a surprisingly snappy gearshift, relatively low engine and wind noise, a snatchy drivetrain in traffic, and unremarkable handling hidden behind spongy steering, but it was still an improvement on the Nexia.
The car in our ad, a Lanos 1.4 SE discovered on eBay and for a shade under two grand, has low miles at 45,000, which if it weren’t now so old would amusingly still be within the brand’s warranty limit. It’s been recently serviced, including a timing belt, and apparently runs faultlessly. Plenty of history with it, and both keys, too.
A fully deserving entrant into the Concours, we reckon, and we’d hope whoever buys it takes it back to the Festival of the Unexceptional next year, as these Daewoos really are the peak unexceptional models of their era, and deserve to be preserved.
