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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
I've held off because I had a friend who was being considered to run the marketing operations at Cars and Bids. Now that she's doing something else I might be able to rap about it a bit.
I enjoy all of the “Wichita car mafia” channels, but Derek’s channel is also required viewing for a guy! 😂 The Illinois guy, Scott, who pieces together salvaged vehicles to better-than-fact’ry, vehcor, is also a riot! As are Junkyard Digs, Dylan McCool, and the spinoffs from those two!
And yes, I do appreciate Bill’s videos from Florida every so-often. (A shot of whiskey to keep the ‘Rona at bay?! Why the fuck not?!)
Amazingly, ASCs tweaking dramatically improved the Versailles, both functionally and cosmetically. I think the car would have been much more successful if it had been launched that way.
I'll link it when it's up... I've been doing a fair amount of stuff as white label or "staff" for companies that just want the content minus the notoriety.
That's gotta be an interesting conversation, on both sides of the table. "There's something about your product and we want to be associated with that thing-- absent an association you as such."
"Okay. Five grand for the thing, and five grand to pretend you can make it yourself."
They take a lot of slack as just being reskinned Novas, but that really isn't the case. The guys at Cadillac did a lot of engineering to turn that platform into a real Cadillac. Even got its own designation as the K Body. While structural rigidity wasn't a thing yet, and that big hinge at the firewall where the front subframe connected was never good, the whole platform was successful. Typical of the time, GM engines and transmissions were smooth and bulletproof. GM HVAC led the world. The GM parts bin was deep with good quality parts. Yeah, stupid things like the Vega were starting to happen, but there was still a reason why GM was the biggest carmaker in the world.
The Sheer Look Seville design was certainly one of Mitchell's greatest works. Sadly, they continued that design language continued at least 5 years too long. But Mitchell was gone by then, and Rybiki wasn't half the man, though apparently a much nicer guy.
The '77-'79 models looked so much better. The aero reskin for '80 took away a lot of the character and the coupes went from vaguely sporty to frumpy with that upright roofline.
Good one! I enjoyed many of these entries, particularly the one about the “what if?” ‘69 or so Escalade. Also, nice touch on the added “advertisements.” Side note, those fastback coupes with a trunk were odd but the Century Turbo Sport Coupe is one I’d have.
I have never had any dealings with Geico whatsoever! Just creating an alternate universe where an insurance company could be stupid enough to do all those things. Couldn't happen in real life!
Lots of acquisitions to cover up weak underlying business. A forward P/E of 168 based off of analyst projections, negative historic EBITDA with a promise of a significant increase in the upcoming year. hmmmmmm.....
Unpopular opinion, but I think the Aeroback Oldsmobuicks looked better than the ones with the ones with the grafted on Seville roof.
The Malibu and Lemans looked best, until they put the stupid formal roof on those, too. Then they looked the worst. And the fixed rear door glass remains one of the worst automotive ideas of all time. Chrysler tried it with the first-year K-cars, but immediately fixed it for '82. GM being GM, left it in place (pun somewhat intended) for 10 model years.
At least they were trying to be different with these. If this Cimarron was real, it would have been an interesting prelude to the '80 Seville. Both would have been reviled, but still.
In hindsight, it was obvious that General Motors put their "A" team on the "B" body... and vice versa. The 1977 full-sizers were astoundingly good in every respect, but the 1978 mid-sizers were damp squibs with unpleasant single-headlight noses, charmless powertrains, poor build quality, and a host of annoying issues ranging from the aforementioned rear windows to the fact that the station wagons (and El Camino) had tiny, hard-to-see tail lights that imploded in the slightest of parking-lot mishaps.
GM Styling also bet too much on Europhilia. By the time the X-cars came out, they had fastbacks on the cheap brands, not the upscale brands, as a direct result of the Aeroback mess. The Malibu and LeMans should have dropped as proper hatches to start, with formal sedans for Buick and Oldsmobile.
The formal A-bodies looked best with quad lamps and vinyl roofs, a combination that was all too rare.
I always liked the look of and seeing the wagon and El Camino lights at night though. Less so the ‘78s with the 1 year placement of the backup lamps on the outside edges.
I never noticed that change. Actually, I thought at least one division had unique lenses on this generation, but no. Cheap.
The Colonnade wagons had the same goofy bumper taillights, but each division had unique lenses. For '73, there were at least three different bumpers to accommodate different taillight designs across the brands - the Pontiac and Buick ones look the same, but it wouldn't surprise me if they aren't. And, yes, I wasted too much time digging in to this.
The two piece tailgate on these was seriously retrograde, too. They at least could have done a two way tail gate with flip up glass like the '91+ B wagons.
Also, it's pathetic to me that neither the downsized A bodies and the "compact" rear drive wagons from Ford and Chrysler could accommodate a third seat.
All that said, I would totally rock a '78-'83 wagon as a utility vehicle.
The Pontiac Grand LeMans Safari had a little bright overlay on the taillights, at least early on. And yes, the predecessor wagons did have more taillight arrangements and I sort of liked the ‘73 Chevelle style, which continued on the El Camino through ‘77, probably as the rear bumper there wasn’t required to adopt the ‘74 5-MPH impact standard.
The single rectangular headlights are what I truly despise about these cars. What's funny is that the Grand Prix, the car responsible for the whole "neoclassical" dual lamp trend, was the only A car to stick with quads for '78.
Single lights looked good on the original Grand Prix/Monte Carlo, the Colonnades, and the Cordoba. On anything other non-compact from 1958 on, they look like cheap shit. Dishonorable mention goes to the the '71-'72 Chevelle and '75-'78 Gran Fury.
The weird thing was that, by 1980, they went to the four-light front on the notchback coupes (Supreme, GP, Monte, Regal), then the following year, it became a complete mish-mash! The base 1981 Cutlass Sedan was a holdover of the now-defunct base Salon, with combined beams, while the LS (Supreme-level) and Cutlass Brougham sedans got a four-light front! The Malibu and LeMans (four lights on the latter, two on the former) sedans got the notchback roof with the swing-out vent in the door, as the Cutlass and Century had the previous year. I wonder if the various models and trims with two headlights were assembled in one plant or set of them, while the ones with four lights were assembled in another? (Yes, I googled the LeMans, and now I’m curious if the 1981 Malibu sedan kept its two-light grille in 1982, or went to the four-light grille?) (::Googles it!::) Aha! All of the G-Bodies (renamed since the A-Bodies were now the FWD Celebrity/6000/Ciera/Century) had four lights up front; recall that in 1982, Pontiac dropped the full-sized Bonneville/Catalina and rechristened their G-Body the Bonneville G (with the full-sizer resurrected a couple years later, Canadian-style, as a Caprice with a Pontiac grille and taillights, the Parisienne), while over at Buick, the Regal name graced the former Century sedan, with a four-light grille. (The Buick sedan lasted until 1984, so only had one year of the revised dashboard—from the three-pod IP to the sweep speedometer. Probably the hardest of any of these sedans or wagons to find!)
Quality-wise, I think things started off badly in 1978 (my first car, an inherited hooptie of a 1978 Salon base, well-equipped with the 260 Olds V8, and probably the THM-200 transmission (🤮), was a basket case, but the 1980 Cutlass Sedan (base Salon-spec) in the family was better, and by 1983, when my Dad got his Regal Custom sedan company car and bought the Cutlass from the company for my Mom, it was the best of the bunch! Both of the latter two vehicles were equipped with the Buick 3.8 (231 cid) V6 and heavy duty/Gran Touring suspensions, and were the cars I cut my driving teeth on. Agricultural-sounding, but could get out of their own way, and handled reasonably well.
I inherited the 1978 Salon in 1988, and by then, my Dad lost his company car privileges, having moved to the corporate office in Toledo, but he was able to buy the Regal for Mom, and traded the 1980 Cutlass on his 1986 Century, his first off-the-lot car purchase, the car which (along with the problems I had with the 1984 Sunbird hatchback which I bought from another family member) turned my immediate family into Honda lifers, including his five and my four Accords (with my current one probably my last since Honda Camry-fied it and removed any Honda-ness or hint of sporting pretension from it, not to mention XM Radio), plus a few Civics, an Integra, and a couple Odysseys!
Nurse, get this patient to the burn unit, STAT!
Reader feedback: I really enjoy these little detours, Jack. Keep them coming... and please let Arellano know I think he does fantastic work...
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
His wife wears the pants, so he can wear the shorts!
Got him pegged, so to speak.
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...
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.
I always liked them, but I know I'm in the minority.
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.
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.
It was a less enlightened era, where we did not truly understand the necessity of making the bottom 99% eat dogshit at every opportunity.
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?
I have a genuine and unfeigned love of Citations.
I wrote a sonnet to the Citation (It was a class assignment) and it was printed in my high school literary magazine.
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.
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.
My mother drove an x-body Buick Skylark in the early 80s. If she turned left too hard the engine would stall.
BMW has entered the chat with single use fasteners on the strut braces
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.
I haven't driven one in 25 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As long as there is a hatchback option. If there is a 6 cylinder, it needs to be inline or flat, not V.
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.
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.
Why does none of this seem like fiction?......
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.
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
A lot of the people who create shows like that prefer cockwood, not that there's anything wrong with that.
Cuckwood
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.
Too funny
I want one?
With the 3.8 Turbo and a five-speed it would have been a 3-series KILLER.
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.
I removed a paragraph to that effect... can't sail too close to the severance wind.
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.
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.
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."
Finding out those fun stories takes real, hardcore journalisming. Not something too many want to get into nowadays.
Which is why Collectible Automobile is such a precious resource. They do all the research and get all the stories.
Black Air? What's that?
The Buick Grand National. The Jules Winnfield of automobiles.
It's big. It's black. It's a bad motherfucker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GacP0ap776Y
Thanks for that.
Would get thwopped by the E30 once it comes out but it definitely seems like a good competitor to the E21.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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.
Jesus Jack, did you leave any salt in the ocean on this one?
I love it.
My guess is that this rides the line of an..ahem..NDA or three, considering the remark elsewhere in the comments! 😉
I hated the way those looked.
They have a very British Leyland feel to them, aesthetically. Awkward and half-assed.
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.
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.
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.
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
My grandmother drove a 1976 Salon coupe in silver with maroon interior. It was simply wonderful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I enjoyed the perpetually put-upon Neanderthals.
Little did I know that would one day be my life.
I believe you have called yourself Neanderthal of face (or cro-magnon?), how could you be surprised?
I am too paranoid to let a company test my DNA but I have to be like 8 percent Neanderthal.
😂😂
I particularly enjoyed this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FyS94N7M5A
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.
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.
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.
And, the 79-81 Trans Am got rear discs thanks to the work done on the Seville.
No, the magazines all beat you to 'em.
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
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.
I've come to believe that YouTube is an indispensable resource for FIXING cars, and utterly worthless when it comes to ENJOYING them.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do an expose on DeMuro!
I've held off because I had a friend who was being considered to run the marketing operations at Cars and Bids. Now that she's doing something else I might be able to rap about it a bit.
I enjoy all of the “Wichita car mafia” channels, but Derek’s channel is also required viewing for a guy! 😂 The Illinois guy, Scott, who pieces together salvaged vehicles to better-than-fact’ry, vehcor, is also a riot! As are Junkyard Digs, Dylan McCool, and the spinoffs from those two!
And yes, I do appreciate Bill’s videos from Florida every so-often. (A shot of whiskey to keep the ‘Rona at bay?! Why the fuck not?!)
DeMuro seems to have at least spent a couple semesters at the Jordan Taylor School of SO WACKY.
"I took my RHD Skyline through a drive-thru, what hijinks will ensue? How could we ever guess..."
Jordan and Danny Ric both grate on me.
Do your fuckin' job and stop clowning. That Road Atlanta restart is a good example of clown-like behavior both inside and outside social media.
I have a low tolerance for cringe humor, so maybe the problem's me, as noted by 21st century pop sociologist T. Swift.
Doesn't help that Jordan is catering to the, ahem, weirder aspects of sporty car fandom.
And I'm saying that as someone that doesn't take himself overly seriously professionally.
Didn't he take a Miura to CarMax to see what they'd give him for it?
Nothing gimmicky about that...
Amazingly, ASCs tweaking dramatically improved the Versailles, both functionally and cosmetically. I think the car would have been much more successful if it had been launched that way.
ABSOLUTELY.
Was that the extended wheelbase version, or just what was done with the top?
Link your story here..inquiring minds, etc., etc.!
Jack, where do we get to read your Versailles article?
I'll link it when it's up... I've been doing a fair amount of stuff as white label or "staff" for companies that just want the content minus the notoriety.
God's gift (to ballroom impropriety).
That's gotta be an interesting conversation, on both sides of the table. "There's something about your product and we want to be associated with that thing-- absent an association you as such."
"Okay. Five grand for the thing, and five grand to pretend you can make it yourself."
"Let me go run that past my manager..."
Take a zero off it, and you have the idea!
Hey..pays to keep gas in the vehicles for now, right?!
I agree - I think the 1st-gen Seville is the single best expression of the boxy late '70s early '80s GM aesthetic. Clean and well-proportioned.
They take a lot of slack as just being reskinned Novas, but that really isn't the case. The guys at Cadillac did a lot of engineering to turn that platform into a real Cadillac. Even got its own designation as the K Body. While structural rigidity wasn't a thing yet, and that big hinge at the firewall where the front subframe connected was never good, the whole platform was successful. Typical of the time, GM engines and transmissions were smooth and bulletproof. GM HVAC led the world. The GM parts bin was deep with good quality parts. Yeah, stupid things like the Vega were starting to happen, but there was still a reason why GM was the biggest carmaker in the world.
The Sheer Look Seville design was certainly one of Mitchell's greatest works. Sadly, they continued that design language continued at least 5 years too long. But Mitchell was gone by then, and Rybiki wasn't half the man, though apparently a much nicer guy.
Edgy opinion: the 1977 Impala is the same design with much better proportions.
Made a great looking cop car, but the two door version looked awkward.
I love the glassback Caprices and the non-formal-roof coupes. The later models didn't quite have the same visual magic.
The '77-'79 models looked so much better. The aero reskin for '80 took away a lot of the character and the coupes went from vaguely sporty to frumpy with that upright roofline.
That, and the powertrain options turned to shit.
At the time I thought the apex B-body was the late Caprice Classic sedan with formal roof. Now I think it's the early glassback Impala Coupe.
Good one! I enjoyed many of these entries, particularly the one about the “what if?” ‘69 or so Escalade. Also, nice touch on the added “advertisements.” Side note, those fastback coupes with a trunk were odd but the Century Turbo Sport Coupe is one I’d have.
I believe there is an ACF reader with a Century Turbo aeroback!
There is one currently on Bring A Trailer!
Currently at $3,600 with 4 hours to go
While I’m not a fan of the Aerobacks in general, the two door Century Turbo actually works aesthetically.
Jeez, did Geico deny your claim or something? Harsh. But probably true.
I have never had any dealings with Geico whatsoever! Just creating an alternate universe where an insurance company could be stupid enough to do all those things. Couldn't happen in real life!
Lots of acquisitions to cover up weak underlying business. A forward P/E of 168 based off of analyst projections, negative historic EBITDA with a promise of a significant increase in the upcoming year. hmmmmmm.....
Wink, wink! Nudge, nudge! Mallet to the groin! 😬😂
Forget a shot across the bow, Jack just took so many close shots that he completely outlined his target in negative space.
Which was clearly the intent.
Never stop deriving that opinion! ;)
ISWYDT
Unpopular opinion, but I think the Aeroback Oldsmobuicks looked better than the ones with the ones with the grafted on Seville roof.
The Malibu and Lemans looked best, until they put the stupid formal roof on those, too. Then they looked the worst. And the fixed rear door glass remains one of the worst automotive ideas of all time. Chrysler tried it with the first-year K-cars, but immediately fixed it for '82. GM being GM, left it in place (pun somewhat intended) for 10 model years.
At least they were trying to be different with these. If this Cimarron was real, it would have been an interesting prelude to the '80 Seville. Both would have been reviled, but still.
In hindsight, it was obvious that General Motors put their "A" team on the "B" body... and vice versa. The 1977 full-sizers were astoundingly good in every respect, but the 1978 mid-sizers were damp squibs with unpleasant single-headlight noses, charmless powertrains, poor build quality, and a host of annoying issues ranging from the aforementioned rear windows to the fact that the station wagons (and El Camino) had tiny, hard-to-see tail lights that imploded in the slightest of parking-lot mishaps.
GM Styling also bet too much on Europhilia. By the time the X-cars came out, they had fastbacks on the cheap brands, not the upscale brands, as a direct result of the Aeroback mess. The Malibu and LeMans should have dropped as proper hatches to start, with formal sedans for Buick and Oldsmobile.
The formal A-bodies looked best with quad lamps and vinyl roofs, a combination that was all too rare.
I always liked the look of and seeing the wagon and El Camino lights at night though. Less so the ‘78s with the 1 year placement of the backup lamps on the outside edges.
I never noticed that change. Actually, I thought at least one division had unique lenses on this generation, but no. Cheap.
The Colonnade wagons had the same goofy bumper taillights, but each division had unique lenses. For '73, there were at least three different bumpers to accommodate different taillight designs across the brands - the Pontiac and Buick ones look the same, but it wouldn't surprise me if they aren't. And, yes, I wasted too much time digging in to this.
The two piece tailgate on these was seriously retrograde, too. They at least could have done a two way tail gate with flip up glass like the '91+ B wagons.
Also, it's pathetic to me that neither the downsized A bodies and the "compact" rear drive wagons from Ford and Chrysler could accommodate a third seat.
All that said, I would totally rock a '78-'83 wagon as a utility vehicle.
The Pontiac Grand LeMans Safari had a little bright overlay on the taillights, at least early on. And yes, the predecessor wagons did have more taillight arrangements and I sort of liked the ‘73 Chevelle style, which continued on the El Camino through ‘77, probably as the rear bumper there wasn’t required to adopt the ‘74 5-MPH impact standard.
The single rectangular headlights are what I truly despise about these cars. What's funny is that the Grand Prix, the car responsible for the whole "neoclassical" dual lamp trend, was the only A car to stick with quads for '78.
Single lights looked good on the original Grand Prix/Monte Carlo, the Colonnades, and the Cordoba. On anything other non-compact from 1958 on, they look like cheap shit. Dishonorable mention goes to the the '71-'72 Chevelle and '75-'78 Gran Fury.
The weird thing was that, by 1980, they went to the four-light front on the notchback coupes (Supreme, GP, Monte, Regal), then the following year, it became a complete mish-mash! The base 1981 Cutlass Sedan was a holdover of the now-defunct base Salon, with combined beams, while the LS (Supreme-level) and Cutlass Brougham sedans got a four-light front! The Malibu and LeMans (four lights on the latter, two on the former) sedans got the notchback roof with the swing-out vent in the door, as the Cutlass and Century had the previous year. I wonder if the various models and trims with two headlights were assembled in one plant or set of them, while the ones with four lights were assembled in another? (Yes, I googled the LeMans, and now I’m curious if the 1981 Malibu sedan kept its two-light grille in 1982, or went to the four-light grille?) (::Googles it!::) Aha! All of the G-Bodies (renamed since the A-Bodies were now the FWD Celebrity/6000/Ciera/Century) had four lights up front; recall that in 1982, Pontiac dropped the full-sized Bonneville/Catalina and rechristened their G-Body the Bonneville G (with the full-sizer resurrected a couple years later, Canadian-style, as a Caprice with a Pontiac grille and taillights, the Parisienne), while over at Buick, the Regal name graced the former Century sedan, with a four-light grille. (The Buick sedan lasted until 1984, so only had one year of the revised dashboard—from the three-pod IP to the sweep speedometer. Probably the hardest of any of these sedans or wagons to find!)
Quality-wise, I think things started off badly in 1978 (my first car, an inherited hooptie of a 1978 Salon base, well-equipped with the 260 Olds V8, and probably the THM-200 transmission (🤮), was a basket case, but the 1980 Cutlass Sedan (base Salon-spec) in the family was better, and by 1983, when my Dad got his Regal Custom sedan company car and bought the Cutlass from the company for my Mom, it was the best of the bunch! Both of the latter two vehicles were equipped with the Buick 3.8 (231 cid) V6 and heavy duty/Gran Touring suspensions, and were the cars I cut my driving teeth on. Agricultural-sounding, but could get out of their own way, and handled reasonably well.
I inherited the 1978 Salon in 1988, and by then, my Dad lost his company car privileges, having moved to the corporate office in Toledo, but he was able to buy the Regal for Mom, and traded the 1980 Cutlass on his 1986 Century, his first off-the-lot car purchase, the car which (along with the problems I had with the 1984 Sunbird hatchback which I bought from another family member) turned my immediate family into Honda lifers, including his five and my four Accords (with my current one probably my last since Honda Camry-fied it and removed any Honda-ness or hint of sporting pretension from it, not to mention XM Radio), plus a few Civics, an Integra, and a couple Odysseys!