Start with what the Daewoo LeMans is: a 3/5-door hatchback / 4-door sedan with Petrol engine, built from 1986 to 2016, in the age of turbocharging and the first electronic engine management. What it meant takes a little longer.
The background
The Daewoo LeMans is a compact car, first manufactured by Daewoo in South Korea between 1986 and 1994, and between 1994 and 1997 as Daewoo Cielo — a car mechanically identical to the LeMans, differentiated only by its modified styling cues. Like all Daewoos preceding it, the LeMans took its underpinnings from a European Opel design. In the case of the LeMans, the GM T platform-based Opel Kadett E was the donor vehicle, essentially just badge engineered into the form of the LeMans, and later as the Cielo after a second more thorough facelift. In markets outside South Korea, the original version of the car bore the Asüna GT, Asüna SE, Daewoo 1.5i, Daewoo Fantasy, Daewoo Pointer, Daewoo Racer, Passport Optima and Pontiac LeMans names. The "LeMans" nameplate was not used at all for the facelifted model. Five-door hatchback models exported to Europe were badged Daewoo Nexia with the Daewoo Racer name used seemingly at random on various bodystyles. The Daewoo Heaven name has also been used.
The Cielo was subsequently replaced by the subcompact Daewoo Lanos and the compact Nubira in 1997, except in Russia where the production lasted from 1996 to 1998 and Uzbekistan where the production started in 1996 and lasted until the end of 2016. In Uzbekistan, the local manufacturer UzDaewoo Motors (later GM Uzbekistan, now UzAuto Motors) produced exclusively the second generation of the LeMans and badged it as Daewoo Nexia.
The engineering
The engine is Petrol engine; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. On the scales it comes to NNNN -. Drive goes through a 4/5-speed manual / 3-speed automatic. The layout matters: the engine drives the front wheels, the packaging choice that gives a small car a big cabin. The wheelbase is 2520 mm. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Where it sits
In the Daewoo line-up the Daewoo LeMans has a clear place: it replaced the Daewoo Maepsy / Pontiac Acadian / Pontiac T-1000 / Pontiac Sunburst (Canada); it handed the line to the Daewoo Lanos / Daewoo Nubira; the factory was Bupyeong, Incheon. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Jeep Wrangler, the Ferrari F40, the BMW 5 Series. Its Daewoo stablemates include the Daewoo Honker 2000 and the Daewoo Arcadia.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Daewoo LeMans — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.