32-Year-Old Truck Sells for $226,000. I Thought We Were Done With This

I’m rarely surprised by car auction results these days, but this one did it. There was a time when everything on Bring a Trailer and Cars and Bids was going absolutely nuts, especially during COVID, and it felt like even pedestrian cars were breaking auction records every week. However, in the last year or two, prices started going down and things began normalizing. Then someone goes and drops $226,000 on a 1993 GMC Typhoon. Can’t we be done with this?

Let’s try figuring out why someone would spend Porsche 911 GT3 money on a 32-year-old GMC SUV. For starters, it’s pretty rare. GMC only made 4,697 Typhoons during a two-year run, and just 345 of those were Apple Red like this one. This specific example also only has 668 miles on it, making it minty fresh, and collectors are always willing to pay a premium for classics with triple-digit odometer readouts. Lastly, the Typhoon has quite a loyal following, as it was the first real American performance SUV and, at the time, was one of the quickest vehicles on the market.

The Typhoon was basically the SUV version of the GMC Syclone pickup truck, packing the same 4.3-liter turbocharged V6 that made 280 horsepower and 350 lb-ft of torque. But it made more sense in SUV form, because who needs to haul that much ass and lumber from Home Depot? All of that power, fed through a four-speed automatic to all four wheels, helped it reach 60 mph in 5.3 seconds back in the day. That made it quicker than a Ferrari 348ts. The Typhoon also ran the quarter-mile in 14.1 seconds, which nipped at the Acura NSX’s heels back then and is still impressive today. It did all of that as a body-on-frame SUV with a sticker price of just $29,530, or less than half what the Ferrari cost. It even had self-leveling rear suspension in 1993.

This specific one is in as great of shape as you’d expect. It looks like it was driven from the dealership to a hermetically sealed garage, and only awoke from its three-decade-long slumber this morning. The only downside of such originality is its old set of Firestone Firehawk SVX tires, which should be replaced if its new owner actually wants to drive it the way it’s meant to be driven.

The Typhoon is undoubtedly cool looking, too, with its literal two-box shape, three-door configuration, and big square headlights. Did GM only give its designers rulers to draw it?

That’s cool and all, but does it make an old SUV with a Fisher Price dashboard and rushed leather really worth more than a new, fully loaded, 530-horsepower Range Rover? For $226,000, I could have bought my first condo and a brand-new Honda Civic Type R with a little bit left over.

All things considered, it’s easy to understand the Typhoon’s allure. It’s a unique piece of American automotive engineering, and GM deserves credit for having the courage to make such a thing at that time. I also understand paying good money for a mint-condition Typhoon with barely more than dealership mileage. Whoever is dropping a quarter-million dollars on a three-decade-old Chevy SUV likely doesn’t live in a cheap condo and has some other really cool cars in their stable, too, so it’s probably no big deal for the buyer. But for the rest of us, this price tag seems like madness.

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