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Hella Sweet Lemons Car of the Week: Bad Decisions Racing Nushen JB6500 Dustbuster

We love minivans in Lemons, naturally, and one of the earliest such Lemons machines was the now-legendary Bad Decisions Racing 1995 Pontiac Trans Sport minivan.

This won’t be the complete history of the Bad Decisions “Dustbuster” Pontiac Trans Sport, which began its Lemons career in Michigan five years ago with a big Black & Decker Dustbuster handle installed. Since then, this van has worn many top-notch themes, applied by the team best-known for their surprisingly quick 1948 Plymouth race car. We’re going to look at one of our very favorites, which we saw at the 2018 Yokohama Joliet Prison Break race.

The GM Dustbusters sold very well during the 1990s, and GM officially sold the Chevy Lumina APV in the Chinese market in the middle part of that decade.

China is the Wild East of weird authorized and not-so-authorized vehicle knockoffs, and the success of the Lumina in China inspired Jiangsu Nushen to build a Dustbuster knockoff with a Chrysler 2.2 engine driving the rear wheels. Thus was the Nushen JB6500 born. Bad Decisions Racing got to work several seconds after learning about the existence of this vehicle, painting their Trans Sport the appropriate brick-red and applying the Nushen logo on the hood.

It appears that Nushen used mailbox stick-on letters for the door badges on the JB6500, so Bad Decisions had no problem sourcing such letters at their local hardware store.

Some Chinese characters in gold on the sides completed the look.

Car numbers are hard.

While very few of the spectators had any familiarity with the story of the Nushen JB6500, the wise and fair justices of the Lemons Supreme Court thought this Chinese minivan looked ready to steadfastly advance the cause of the people’s revolution.


We didn’t award the JB6500 any trophies that weekend, but we did pull some strings with Yokohama to get the team some free tires.

Now if we can just get a team to convert a Chevy Spark into a Chery QQ!

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