Last night I had a strange dream about Oprah Winfrey taking me on a tour of Chicago's neighborhoods.
But never mind. Today, I'd like to focus on a story having something to with other than the war in Iraq, from which we need a break. Early last week, the last Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line, closing the book on the 107-year-old automobile make. A lot of people are upset about Oldsmobile passing into history, though I don't understand what the big fuss is. Even Michael Moore is bitching about GM killing off Oldsmobile, because of all the jobs being lost in Lansing, Michigan, where the division was based. I like Michael Moore, but quite frankly, I think he's full of crap on this one, partly because Lansing still has GM plants producing Pontiacs and Cadillacs, including the hot new Cadillac CTS. And to be brutally honest, Oldsmobile hasn't produced one interesting car in the past thirty years.
Don't take my word for it. Consider some of the cars that Oldsmobile has given us of late. Like the Custom Cruiser station wagon of the early seventies, with its tailfins and its rear-wheel-well skirts - if you ordered it in black, it would have looked exactly like a hearse. Then came the Cutlass Supreme, a gaudy "pesonal luxury" coupe appointed with overplush velour seats and a vinyl roof. Than there were the Cutlass Salon, the Cutlass LS, the Cutlass Ciera, and several more Cutlasses that were either pretentious Chevrolets or stripped-down Buicks. How about the Calais of the mid-eighties, which was about as big as a Chevrolet Cavalier but was designed to look like a traditional Cutlass? An old man's car design on a small wheelbase? You can imagine how ridiculous it looked.
Oldsmobiles didn't ride so well, either. Riding in one was like sitting on a marshmallow. So you can imagine what it was like to drive one. I once drove a rented Calais, and the steering was mushy, the handling was unresponsive, and the overall feel was rather bland. The Achieva, which replaced the Calais, had edgier styling, but the package underneath - again, I drove a rented model - was very much the same.
Then there were Oldsmobile's fabulous engines. Back in the seventies, Oldsmobile developed diesel engines in response to the need for greater fuel economy in American automobiles. The 4.3-liter V6 and the 5.7-liter V8 Oldsmobile produced were indeed very good at saving fuel - because they broke down so much that the cars they powered (any GM car that had them, not just Oldsmobiles) spent more time in the repair shops than on the road. They were so bad, it was a wonder they lasted six years; they were even worse than Cadillac's inane 368 V-8-6-4 engine (an engine that was desinged to shut down two or four of its cylinders when the car needed less power but more often than not shut down completely, lasting only for the 1981 model year). Then, in the late eighties, Oldsmobile tried to rectify their sorry reputation for base technology by producing GM's first multiple-valve engine, the Quad 4. It was powerful. It was high-tech. It was one also one of the noisiest, crudest engines GM ever made.
Did Oldsmobile do anything right in designing engines? Well, it did have an experimental diesel engine that operated with fuel injection, a feature that had never been used on diesel engines before, and early tests were promising in terms of performance and fuel economy. But GM pulled the plug on the project when it got out of the passenger car diesel business, leaving Volkswagen to develop a superior fuel-injected diesel engine that also employed a turbocharger - their acclaimed Turbo Direct Injection (TDI) powerplant - that debuted in the mid-nineties. Ah, what could have been . . ..
Then there was the stupid advertising. Remember slogans like "We've had one built for you?" Yeah, where was my Olds? Then there was "There's a special feel in an Oldsmobile." I pretty much covered that one in an earlier paragraph. But these inanities were nothing compared to the later television ads featuring the children of various celebrities to show how latter-day Oldsmobile models were hipper than the Oldsmobiles that - you guessed it - your father drove. But did Leonard Nimoy's daughter or Harry Belafonte's son really influence anyone's attitude or preconceptions toward the cars they were shilling for? Doubtful. It reminds me of an episode of "The Jeffersons" in which George considers getting an endorsement for his dry cleaning chain from the son of a plumber who had worked in the house of one of the women in Dawn, Tony Orlando's backing-vocal duo. George eventually realizes what a stupid idea that is. "It's either his father or nothing," he concludes. :-D
It's such a pity that Oldsmobile didn't keep Dick Van Patten as their spokesman.
Oldsmobile's last attempt at staying afloat was to design a new line of cars designed to lure Baby Boomers considering a BMW or an Acura. The cars in question - the Aurora, the Intrigue, the Alero - did look snazzier and ride a little better than previous Oldsmobile models. But not only was their engineering hopelessly generic and predictable, their quality was abysmal. One article in Car and Driver noted how the climate control thermometer in an Aurora sedan showed the cabin temperature to be 178 degrees - the "1" digit obviously wasn't supposed to light up. Also, the fit and finish of these cars, while improved over previous Oldsmobile models, still didn't quite measure up to their intended competition.
Oldsmobile had always been intended to be a medium-priced car between Chevrolet and Pontiac and Buick and Cadillac. But with all of GM's other divisions offering different and more interesting models for various market segments and selling their cars based on overall image rather than some kind of hierarchical status - and with GM's newer Saturn division throwing a monkey wrench in the hierarchical order Alfred Sloan had set up back in the thirties - Oldsmobile has long since become irrelevant. It's had a (mostly) repsectable 107-year run, and now it's time for it to pass into history. Rest in peace.
P.S. Full disclosure requires me to state that my cousin is leasing an Alero coupe. Needless to say, he got a good deal on it.
As for my dream about Oprah, I can't remember any of it. Sorry I can't tell you more about it.
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