Start with what the Isuzu Piazza is: a 3-door liftback coupé with 1949 , built from 1981 to 1993, in the age of turbocharging and the first electronic engine management. What it meant takes a little longer. The shape is credited to Giorgetto Giugiaro at Italdesign.
How it came about
The Isuzu Piazza is a small, sporty 3-door liftback coupé which was manufactured by Isuzu from 1981–1993 across two generations, marketed also as the Isuzu Impulse in North America and as the Holden Piazza in Australia. The first generation Piazza used rear-wheel drive and in the United Kingdom it was the first widely available Isuzu passenger car.
The second generation used front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive, and was marketed as the lower-priced Gemini Coupé and as the Geo Storm in the US market. As of 2010, the number of registered Impulses in North America totaled only 2,300, making Impulses very rare.
The hardware
The engine is 1949 other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. Drive goes through a 5-speed Manual transmission / manual / 4-speed Aisin Automatic transmission / automatic. The layout matters: a front engine drives the rear wheels, the classic proportion — long bonnet, cabin set back — that most people picture when they picture a sports saloon or a grand tourer. The wheelbase is 2440 mm. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Family and rivals
In the Isuzu line-up the Isuzu Piazza has a clear place: it replaced the Isuzu 117 Coupé; it handed the line to the Holden Calibra (Australia); the factory was Kawasaki, Kanagawa (Kawasaki Plant), Japan. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Mitsubishi Pajero, the DeLorean Motor Company DeLorean DMC-12, the Toyota Camry. Its Isuzu stablemates include the Isuzu Gemini and the 4000 Series Medium Duty.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Isuzu Piazza — 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.