We're Still Not Over Oldsmobile's Death

Believe it or not, electric and steam vehicle production exceeded that of their gasoline-powered counterparts in the late 1890s. It took until 1902 for Olds to build a truly mass-production gas car with the Curved Dash Runabout. The company had produced 425 cars in 1901, but with the CDR it moved five times as many cars in 1902, and some 4,000 Olds were sold in 1903.

Most people remember Henry Ford for “inventing the assembly line,” but that’s hardly the case. He, like his friend Thomas Edison, stood on the shoulders of giants, developing and proliferating existing technology to his benefit. Olds developed the first assembly line production method in automobile history, using a rope and chain system to pull vehicles from station to station. Ford certainly modernized and mechanized this system for the Model T, but it was not the first.

From its early days to decades later, Oldsmobile was always a sales champion. In 1976 the Cutlass was the best-selling automobile in America, when 495,976 units of the large personal luxury coupe were sold that year. Think about that for a second. This breed of car is entirely extinct. No mainstream manufacturer even builds a large luxury coupe anymore. Americans used to buy half a million of these a year, and now they’ve been replaced with egg-shaped compact crossovers. A shame.

It could be argued that Oldsmobile invented the muscle car. With the introduction of the 303 cubic-inch Rocket 88 engine, Olds gave its car a punch that nobody else could offer. The lightweight car with the big motor gave Olds drivers a distinct advantage in NASCAR competition. In 1949, Red Byron became the first series champion, winning five of eight races that year. Oldsmobiles went on to power champions in 1950 and 1951.

The famed racer and bootlegger Junior Johnson once said the Olds 88 was his favorite car “to take whiskey trippin’,” as there was “nothin’ on the road that could catch it.”

Working with a company called Fueling Engineering, Oldsmobile developed a twin-turbocharged 2.3-liter inline four with 1,000 horsepower and shoved it in a long-tailed teardrop on wheels. The Aerotech’s design was inspired by Porsche’s longtail 917s of 1969 and 1970, and was one of the most technologically advanced speed demons on the planet when it ran. In 1987, racer A.J. Foyt smashed the closed-course speed record by running flying-mile runs in Fort Stockton, Texas.

In 1992 the Aerotech was fitted with the Aurora V8 engine and broke 47 different speed endurance records, many of which still stand today.

The last vehicle ever produced by the company was a 2004 Alero GLS Final 500 Collector’s Edition. It rolled off the assembly line on April 29, 2004. The end of an era.

Four-barrel carburetor, four-speed manual transmission, two exhaust pipes. What more could you possibly need?

In 1910, famed artist William H. Foster was asked to paint their new Oldsmobile Limited on canvas. Foster chose to paint the Limited racing against a New York Central train and winning. There is some minor argument as to whether the race actually occurred, but I think Foster’s choice of imagery was more metaphorical, representing a shift in transportation choice of Americans of the era.

He titled the work Setting the Pace, and Oldsmobile distributed prints of the piece widely. It was, at the time, the most famous image of an automobile. The original artwork has not been seen since the 1940s.

Oldsmobile managed to make its front-wheel drive sedans out-handle the contemporary Corvette. It’s no wonder these special cars never made it beyond the experimental stage.

While Cord had experimented with front-wheel drive in the 1930s, Oldsmobile brought it back to the American mainstream nearly three decades later in the Toronado. It was a massive personal luxury coupe with a big V8 powering a chain-drive called Hy-Vo, which delivered the power to a TH425 transaxle. It was weird and wild, and I love it.

The F-88 was a 1954 concept car from Oldsmobile based on the then-new Corvette. Personally, I like the design flare of the F-88 better than its more subdued C1 Corvette counterpart. This could have been a direct competitor to the larger and more luxe Ford Thunderbird or the stately Lincoln Continental MkII. Obviously it never made production, but it’s cool as shit nonetheless.

In the early 1990s, American automakers were actually paying attention to showroom stock racing and building cars to suit it. Dozens of factory hot rods with “magical order form cheat codes” were built in that period, and the Achieva SCX W41 C41 was one of them. The SCX got a higher-performance engine (more on that in a second), a five-speed manual, tuned suspension, and a shorter final drive. The “C41” package signified “heater only,” which ditched the air conditioning and power windows, and conveniently added a Torsen limited slip differential.

From 1987 to 2002, General Motors built a four-cylinder engine that could rival damn near anything from its Japanese rivals. The Quad4 engine was a masterpiece and marked the first dual-overhead cam four-cylinder for regular production by a domestic automaker. The best version, the W41 found in the Achieva SCX, made an incredible 190 horsepower. A 250-horsepower turbocharged version was on the books, but the project was killed off before it could make production.

The Aurora V8 was among the most successful Indy Racing League engines of all time when the Illmor-built engine ran the table from 1997 to 2001. Every year for five years, the Indy 500 was dominated by Oldsmobile, finding wins with Arie Luyendyk, Eddie Cheever, Kenny Bräck, Juan Pablo Montoya, and Helio Castroneves.

If you wanted to win in that era, you had to drive Olds. For each of those five years Infiniti tried to compete against Oldsmobile, and the Japanese automaker only powered one racer to a top-ten finish when Eddie Cheever managed to find fifth in 2000. It was utter speed domination.

The Aurora was an interesting car. This was a last-ditch effort to revitalize the brand with futuristic features, powerful performance, and the height of GM luxury at the time.

It, uh, didn’t work. And now the company is dead. But it was cool while it lasted.