Posts from ‘Oldsmobile’

1942 Oldsmobile 66 Special Club Coupe
Note: The following story was excerpted from the February 2019 issue of Collectible Automobile magazine
The 1942 Oldsmobile brochure proclaimed that the cars were “Better Looking . . . Better Lasting . . . Better Built Than Any Oldsmobile In Forty-Four Years.” Playing off the “B” in “better” and 44 years, all 1942 Olds wore a B-44 badge. This ’42 Series 66 Special, owned by Dave and June Simon of Gardena, California, confirms Olds’s boast of quality and durability. The club coupe has covered 76,000 miles and is mostly original. It has been repainted in its original Metallic Mist Blue, although the engine compartment and trunk retain the factory paint. The tan ripple-weave Bedford-cloth-and-broadcloth interior is original.

1979 Chrysler Cordoba 300
The American auto industry’s “Malaise Era” is generally defined as the 1973 through 1984 model years, and it was by and large a bummer for car enthusiasts. A confluence of several sobering factors—more-stringent emission standards, the introduction of low-lead gasoline, and rising auto-insurance rates—rather suddenly put the kibosh on horsepower, and as a result, on fun.

1964 Mercury Marauder
Say the word “hardtop” and any vintage-auto enthusiast knows what you’re referring to: a closed-roof car with a pillarless roofline (i.e., no door posts to break up the flow of the styling). Though there were earlier examples of the basic concept, General Motors kicked off the hardtop as we know it by introducing a pillarless-coupe body style in its Buick, Cadillac, and Oldsmobile product lines midway through the 1949 model year.

1972 Plymouth Fury
Question: What would large-coupe drivers of the Seventies and Eighties drive today? Answer: Not large coupes, because there aren’t any. I suppose there’s still the Bentley Continental and the BMW 8-Series, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here.

Supercharged Buick Series 3800 V6 engine
By Jim Flammang
Not many automobile engines warrant a biography. Ford’s Model T four-cylinder is one of them. So is Volkswagen’s air-cooled rear engine, which powered what once seemed like zillions of original Beetles.

1959 Dodge Custom Royal Lancer
As far as colors go, pink is a relative newbie. Per Wikipedia, pink was first used as a color name in the late seventeenth century. As a car color, pink’s use has been sporadic at best, though for a brief moment in time (really just the mid Fifties into the early Sixties), pink cars were all the rage.

1983 Buick Century T-Type
Just as consumers are now beginning to grapple with the notion of owning an electric vehicle, car buyers once debated whether or not go with front-wheel drive. Really. Front-drive cars were still a fairly new, unfamiliar idea to the average American car shopper in 1983, though the pioneering front-drive Volkswagen Rabbit had been selling in volume on our shores since 1975.

1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme
For 2022, the Chevrolet Equinox compact crossover will be available with just one engine–a 1.5-liter turbocharged four. A brawny turbo 2.0-liter engine was previously available, but it seems demand for the bigger mill was light–it was dropped after the 2020 model year.