The interior was nice and it sounded like an Oldsmobile, but that was where the similarities ended. I eventually owned an Oldsmobile that was built five years after this one – a 1984 Ninety-Eight Regency coupe. And as a bonus, it sounded like an Oldsmobile should. The shape was good, the details were right and there was nothing wrong with it. The Olds carried its big-boned, square-jawed looks well. The Pontiac was OK if you were in the mood for lots of chrome and some fender skirts, and the Buick was fine until you got around to what might have been the least inspired rear end of a car since the 1920’s. The second thing these photos made me think about was that this was, to my eyes, the best styling job of the four B body cars that GM offered in 1977-79.Įveryone loves the Chevy, but it never did a thing for me. That slightly darker blue on the body sides is an interesting color (imaginitively called “medium blue”) that seems to have been offered in only 19 and only as part of a two tone on Oldsmobiles and Buicks. I am not sure I noticed it at the time but this is actually a two-tone paint job – and with a vinyl roof thrown in for fun. First, I was delighted to see this color jump back to near the top of popularity after its early 1970’s disappearance. These shots reminded me of a couple of things. And had I figured out that there has never before been a proper CC of a 1977-79 Delta 88 I might have gotten back to this one sooner. I’ve got a million of ’em, so if I never see another CC I still have a couple of years worth of material to cover. This is another set of pictures pulled from my marinated and aged stash of cars I never got around to writing up. At GM at least, these big B/C body cars would get the aero treatment forced on them, so that new Oldsmobiles looked like big doorstops on wheels. And cars would no longer be styled just to look good. Overdrive automatics of increasing cost and complexity (and decreased driving pleasure) started to show themselves. Displacement and axle ratios raced to lower numbers. CAFE was the new law of the land and weight was the enemy. By 1980 the traditional big American car started to die. At least you still got the good old Turbo HydraMatic 3 speed transmission.īut more ‘change was a-brewin’. If you wanted to tow a trailer or just wanted a little more scoot a 403 was easily available. This was the year you could also get a V6, a diesel, an Olds 260 V8 and a (gasp) Pontiac 301. But we could see a world of compromise coming across the horizon. A 4 bbl 350 V8 was still considered a God-given right. Yes, there had been a learning curve in dealing with emissions hardware, but by 1979 the engineers had gotten pretty much back on their game.
When you stepped on the gas it went faster and when you stepped on the brakes it went slower. CAFE was coming and took some of the biggest engines out of some lineups by 1979 but you still had some decent powertrains available.Ī good big American car started right up when you turned the key and didn’t make you think about it until you shut it off again. Cubic inches still ruled and sixteen or seventeen miles per gallon on the highway out of a big, heavy American sedan was the kind of thing people bragged about. Until summer of that year (pretty much the end of 1979 model year production) cars were just cars. Let’s think about what normal was in 1979. And I had no way of knowing that this kind of normal was on the brink of disappearing forever. But looking back now after all these years I realize two things: Oldsmobile’s kind of normal was good.
Big Lincolns and Chryslers were exotic to me, with presence. I liked my big cars big, and these no longer were. When Oldsmobile (and the rest of GM’s big car lines) were put on a diet for the 1977 model year I found them yawn-worthy. If I ever got in a spot where I needed an Olds, finding one would be a cinch.
The result of all this is that while I was steeped in a world of Oldsmobiles, I didn’t really pay attention to them. Oldsmobile occupied the same place in my mind as old bits of advice like “eat your dinner before you get dessert.” Oldsmobile was good for you. People drank their coffee from Folgers or Maxwell House. In the years of my youth average was good. They don’t want bourbon, they want spirits crafted in a particular way, with a particular variety of grain, barrel char and aging. They don’t want coffee, they want something at Starbucks that takes as long to say as it takes to make.
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