227 Comments

Nurse, get this patient to the burn unit, STAT!

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Reader feedback: I really enjoy these little detours, Jack. Keep them coming... and please let Arellano know I think he does fantastic work...

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I feel like Barry needs a Stig like introduction. Some people say he writes a crappy weekly article for an automotive lifestyle brand. Others say his wife wears the pants in the family. All we know is he’s called The Simp

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His wife wears the pants, so he can wear the shorts!

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Got him pegged, so to speak.

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Some say he is not the father of his children, but paternity tests will not be widely available until 1988 so we will have to wait until then to find out. All we know is...

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Man, those fastbacks looked awful. To be honest, if Caddy had done an earlier Cimarron based on that platform, I think they would have done the notchbacks instead.

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I always liked them, but I know I'm in the minority.

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It's funny. I've always liked pretty well everything better in a fastback. Except for these.

I do wonder what Cadillac could have done with this platform, some time and some money. The J car was just a bad idea, forced on them when X Car sales took off more than expected. An X car based Cimarron would have likely been far better accepted in the market. Not that sales would have necessarily been better, as Cimarron sales were pretty solid anyway. But it likely would not have made Cadillac the laughing stock it became.

Sadly, the X Car doesn't get the credit anymore that it deserves. It was a great platform, perfect for the time it was released. The 2.8 was a great little engine, with the best V6 exhaust note this side of a Busso. Some of the X-11s and T Types actually drove very nicely. The 6000 STE was actually a very nice car. A little more development could have changed automotive history dramatically.

It's amazing what GM managed to do in just a few short years. Every car on a new platform. New engines and transmissions everywhere. Basically, every product completely redesigned. It was an incredible effort, and it came very close to succeeding. But even the General at its peak power didn't have the engineering resources to do all of it.

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All done at roughly the same time that the US had 3 competing commercial airliner companies and a large number of computer companies all making rapid advances. The demand for engineers must have seemed insatiable, but, interestingly enough, the H1-B program was not created until 1990.

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It was a less enlightened era, where we did not truly understand the necessity of making the bottom 99% eat dogshit at every opportunity.

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A lot of well-said points here. I own both a Citation and a FWD Century, having grown up with all these cars around and largely decent experiences with them I figure why not?

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I have a genuine and unfeigned love of Citations.

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I wrote a sonnet to the Citation (It was a class assignment) and it was printed in my high school literary magazine.

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From a cost of operation standpoint, I appreciated the mediocre braking system passed down to my N-body Calais. Stopped just as "adequately" on bespoke $150 Carbotech pads as $7 wholesale Wagners.

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How much personal experience do you have with the Citation and it's X platform mates? I drove the Pontiac version for a while and frankly I have fonder memories of the Austin America my dad bought that was a long term loaner (about equal in build quality but the Austin, essentially slightly larger Mini, was at least fun to drive). I'm no fan of cliched 10 Worst Cars lists but the Citation belongs on them. Perhaps the most poorly executed cars GM ever made, maybe the most poorly executed postwar American cars period (though I admittedly wasn't around in the '50s when there was literally tons of dreck). Besides smog-controlled engines that ran like crap, stalling in intersections and dieseling when you tried to shut them off and barely adequate brakes there were all sorts of "engineering by afterthought" touches all over the cars, like having to remove a strut brace (which they shouldn't have needed if they hadn't cheapened out on the unibody) to change a battery. Truly GM's nadir, at least in terms of vehicle quality.

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My mother drove an x-body Buick Skylark in the early 80s. If she turned left too hard the engine would stall.

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BMW has entered the chat with single use fasteners on the strut braces

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The A-Bodies, descended from the X-es, were better, but it was still feast or famine, with some examples eliciting a fond respect, while others (like my Dad’s 1986 Century) turned lifelong GM buyers to the Japanese competition.

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I haven't driven one in 25 years.

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I will always have a soft spot for them having been asked to Homecoming junior year by a hopelessly out-of-my-league senior girl that drove a hand-me-down Olds version in dog log brown.

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I love these and Abimelec's work. Please keep pumping these out. I will say - it would've been even cooler to see a Cimarron out of Cadillac's golden age. I want to see a sporty compact...with fins!

The Saab mention got me thinking as well - how about a What If? featuring the 2023 Saab 9-3? Saab remains successful by being the only European brand to continue producing and selling....sporty European cars.

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Brilliant idea.

This is not ALWAYS the case, but I think of What If? as a way to tell stories about a world that is just a little bit better and braver than our own, and this fits well.

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Also, the instrumentation should be an order of magnitude less distracting and more useful than comparable cars:

* Traditional analog instruments and knobs/buttons; no white LEDs or screens in the main cluster

* World-leading HUD/HGS/EFVS which can be enabled / disabled though a steering wheel switch

* Whatever "infotainment" exists will be based on open standards and fully upgradable

Gratuitous references to the T-7A project would be most welcome.

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As long as there is a hatchback option. If there is a 6 cylinder, it needs to be inline or flat, not V.

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Last comment: the EFVS should look functional and tasteful: designed by aeronautical Human Factors engineers working classically-trained artists, none of whom have ever been exposed to a modern video game.

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1) On the corporate side, what about: VW's purchase of Scania and Porsche's purchase of VW fall through. Porsche ends up buying a majority of Scania & Saab Automobile and Saab AB buys a small stake.

2) If it helps, the Saab typeface is Gill Sans.

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Why does none of this seem like fiction?......

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Well, I was going to have GEICO pay big bucks for one of the Fifties "sock hop" car shows that were omnipresent in 1977, but not even in fiction would an insurance company be stupid enough to buy a car show that literally has an expiration date at which point all of its cars will be in "regular" car shows... right? That wood be sad.

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ChatGPT tells me such a car show would be called "Rockwood" or "Sockwood" - not that anything like this would happen except in an alternate timeline.

I prefer "Cockwood" personally

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A lot of the people who create shows like that prefer cockwood, not that there's anything wrong with that.

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Cuckwood

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How about a car show that features just cars with some kind of fake wood, either exterior or interior? Call it WoodWood. Late '50s Ford and Mercury wagons had really impressive fake wood.

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Too funny

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I want one?

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With the 3.8 Turbo and a five-speed it would have been a 3-series KILLER.

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To think that Buick was actually kinda cool back then with turbo V6s.

And now the son of the guy responsible for those cars is responsible for you posting this here instead of at, uh, GEICO.

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I removed a paragraph to that effect... can't sail too close to the severance wind.

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It's important to give credit where credit is due and Senior did sign off on them, but if I recall correctly, the amount of money allocated to the Grand National and GNX programs was pretty much the GM equivalent to finding loose change under the couch cushions.

I don't have a lot of movies on disc, but Black Air is one of the documentaries that I own. I'd be interested to hear the opinion on that film by someone who isn't a car person. I think it's a great documentary in general.

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I still find it hilarious that the whole Buick V6 program, which ended up becoming one of GM's most successful, was a complete afterthought. A quick and dirty sawed-off V8 that was sold to Kaiser-Jeep and literally fished back out of the junkyard.

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I just watched it and was fairly disappointed. I was hoping for more in the weeds technical info or inside gossip on how it got greenlit. It was more of a nostalgia piece. "This is my GN and it's awesome and I never/almost never drive it. This is a car show with lots of GNs and fans of it. Here's some guys from Car and Steerer colorfully describing what their test drivers found."

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Finding out those fun stories takes real, hardcore journalisming. Not something too many want to get into nowadays.

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Which is why Collectible Automobile is such a precious resource. They do all the research and get all the stories.

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Black Air? What's that?

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The Buick Grand National. The Jules Winnfield of automobiles.

It's big. It's black. It's a bad motherfucker.

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Would get thwopped by the E30 once it comes out but it definitely seems like a good competitor to the E21.

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Don't forget that the E30 arrived with an eight-valve 1.8 and didn't even get the eta 2.7 until the middle of the 1984 model year. The 325e wouldn't have been any faster than an injected 3.8 turbo would have been in 1979... and by 1984 they had 210 horsepower. Imagine a stick-shift Grand National in the lighter aeroback body. You'd have needed an M5 to keep pace with the thing.

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It's funny looking back, but GM was really on a roll then. The T- Types were really fun cars. The 82 F-Bodies were huge leaps forward. The C4 Corvette. Thr Fiero. The Eldo and Seville. The V8-6-4. The Riv and Toronado. And yes, the X'es, A's and Js. Some great cars and great potential. If only GM had given them 6 months more development each. GM could have single handedly driven back Japanese invasion. Imagine if all 1.1 million 1980 X Body customers had been content with their purchases? The brake recall had never happened. We would have had A very different GM and USA.

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My god...I never realized how little power the early 318s had until I just checked wikipedia. 103 hp in the early 80s. I'm not sure why my brain figured they always had later 318is levels of power (134hp).

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I worked for a BMW dealer when the 318is arrived and you could hear the customers smiling all the way back in parts. That was a hell of a car. But the first Aeroback Turbos had 165 horsepower and still would have given them a run in an alt-universe where BMW and Buick both brought their best to the table.

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I've owned 3 318is' - love 'em. Sold my last one because the wife was making noises about how "unsafe" it was. Sold it to a co-worker who did a lot of work on it and it's probably worth about 5X what I sold it to him for in '19.

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"We’re going to hire the dumbest executives possible, at least two of whom will be no taller than five foot seven"

There's hope for me yet.

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Jesus Jack, did you leave any salt in the ocean on this one?

I love it.

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My guess is that this rides the line of an..ahem..NDA or three, considering the remark elsewhere in the comments! 😉

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I hated the way those looked.

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They have a very British Leyland feel to them, aesthetically. Awkward and half-assed.

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I drove a Buick 2-door in that configuration with a 5-speed. I was accustomed to Chrysler products with 4-speeds, and the Buick felt to me like an S-10. In the words of a guy who tried to sell a big Dodge truck to my father many years before, "It don't have any power but it's got lots of gears..." It didn't help that the Buick was very nearly the same pale metallic green that Boeing was using at the time on company cars and trucks.

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If I read that article right, and I believe I did, those things were NOT actually hatchbacks. That is shocking to me that they would inflict that shape upon us all and have no truth to the styling. I wasn't a fan before, I dislike them even more now.

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It's understandable in historical context. GM saw that fastbacks were becoming mandatory in Europe, but they thought that customers would balk at the size and NVH issues of a hatchback in a mid-sizer. So they did the look without the function.

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Oldsmobile went hard on pushing the Salon as a Euro fighter. That's one thing when the nameplate represented the top-of-the-line Colonnade Cutlass, not so much when the name's applied to poverty spec Aerobacks with bench seats and dog dish hubcaps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW52WtR8Wa0

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My grandmother drove a 1976 Salon coupe in silver with maroon interior. It was simply wonderful.

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My dad still talks about the '77 Century Custom coupe he special ordered as his first company car.

The '79 Malibu Classic that replaced it, not so much.

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My mom had a 403-powered '77 Cutlass Supreme. Dad drove a 1977 LeSabre Custom company car. Then he went to a 1981 Century wagon. That was a bit of a comedown, to be honest.

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I was surprised when I realized that the top-dawg Colonnade Cutlass was the Salon! It sure as hell wasn’t after 1978, although you could get a Salon Brougham with the interior of the notchback Supreme coupe, plus the chrome rocker molding outside.

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Olds juggled the Cutlass trims quite a bit. When the Salon name got put on the Aerobacks, the bucket seat Supreme got renamed "Cutlass Calais." That lasted until the Calais became an N-body and the model reverted back to "Cutlass Salon."

And as if that wasn't confusing enough, small Calais picked up the Cutlass prefix after a couple of years.

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Oldsmobile could have put the Cutlass name on a Kozy Koupe in the 1970s and ’80s, and they wouldn’t have been able to keep them in stock! It really is weird how fast they fell!

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Nope they weren't hatchbacks. Probably one of the reasons the wagons actually outsold these things.

BMC/British Leyland was also infamous for selling hatchback bodies without hatchbacks. Through the '70s, almost everything that wasn't an MGB looked like a hatch, but only the Rover SD1 and Austin Maxi actually had one.

Then there's the Pinto and first generation Honda Civic, which came either way using the same body.

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No they weren't hatchbacks. It's all of the disadvantages with all of the ugly looks.

I know they were aiming for a 'fastback' look, but they should have been looking at Capris' instead of pintos and gremlins.

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I hate GEICO. With the sole exception of the gecko, all their ad campaigns have been skin-crawlingly obnoxious and cutesy-poo, like dad jokes mixed with Full House.

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I enjoyed the perpetually put-upon Neanderthals.

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Little did I know that would one day be my life.

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I believe you have called yourself Neanderthal of face (or cro-magnon?), how could you be surprised?

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I am too paranoid to let a company test my DNA but I have to be like 8 percent Neanderthal.

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😂😂

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I particularly enjoyed this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FyS94N7M5A

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The more I learn about it, the more I like the 1st gen Seville. I didn't realize until very recently that it was priced ABOVE most of Cadillac's own fullsize cars. We always hear about how Americans buy car by the pound, and I'm sure many Caddy loyalists were unimpressed, but it was a smashing success by all accounts. I think they look really good. Lincoln tried to get in on the grift with a Granada based Versailles (*vomit*). GM's re-styling of a disco-Nova was dramatically more successful than Ford's "Granada with a continental kit" IMO. Clean 1st gen Sevilles have gotten increasingly pricey too. The later bustlebacks are a love-it-or-hate-it.... I'm not a huge fan.

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I just finished writing about the Versailles for a freelance customer. It was a late and sloppy response to the Seville, but it debuted a lot of Detroit firsts, from clearcoat paint and halogen headlamps to a unique post-assembly testing regimen patterned after what was being doing overseas.

And did I mention that it had FORGED ALUMINUM WHEELS, standard? And that it beat the Seville in every performance metric?

What I'm getting at: worse looking, better car.

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And rear disc brakes which were the envy of the Mustang retrofit crowd for years. In all of my years of junkyard crawling, I've never found a Versailles rear end.

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And, the 79-81 Trans Am got rear discs thanks to the work done on the Seville.

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No, the magazines all beat you to 'em.

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One of my favorite car youtubers, Bill just did a Versailles review with a very good history/background on the Seville/Versailles. God bless this crotchety old boozed up Jewish guy, such a breath of fresh air after those freaks Demuro and Hoovie, etc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aeHiRHLcww

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Good to know. Somehow the algorithm didn't share that with me. Hopefully, he wasn't attacked by any birds during filming. Or bothered by any pesky Canadians.

I never could stand DeMuro - he just seems to willfully misunderstand things just for a cheap laugh. I did use to love Hoovies show, but nothing is more boring then another YouTuber playing with exotics. Vice Grip Garage has now replaced Hoovie in my YouTube time allotment.

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I've come to believe that YouTube is an indispensable resource for FIXING cars, and utterly worthless when it comes to ENJOYING them.

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PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do an expose on DeMuro!

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