This shot by nifticus points out an issue that comes up not uncommonly here at CC: camera lens perspective can be deceiving. The Alero in front looks significantly longer than the gen2 Aurora, but it’s actually over a foot shorter. I’ve found that even the slightest deviations from shooting a car dead on in the center can make a difference.
Got anything else to say about these Oldsmobiles?
Only that Aleros are startlingly common in Rustville MN – which leads me to wonder whether Oldsmobiles were stupendously big sellers here back then.
I rented an Alero sedan to drive down to SoCal for a car show. It was a quick trip, down and back with an overnight stay. I was impressed by the Olds. It was comfortable, had a CD player, a small V6 with auto, and returned an average of 28 mpg. on the 700 mile round trip. I actually considered buying one. The first gen Aurora was a good looking, unique American sedan. I preferred the Seville over it, but it was quite distinctive. The subsequent restyling took much of it’s character away in my eyes. Olds had a very good line up with the Aurora, the Intrigue, and the Alero.
The promising, striking 95 Aurora was supposed to point the way to Oldsmobile’s future, especially style-wise. Unfortunately everything Olds made afterward would be rental-car generic, including the second-gen Aurora. Oldsmobiles were once aspirational cars for Ford or Chevy owners looking to splurge on something a bit nicer and more upscale. These two cars though are just sorta there, not eliciting any emotional response of any kind, except that they might make for practical transportation, reliable if you choose your engines carefully.
Gechhk. Those first Auroras seemed to melt away off the roads like ice cubes in freshly-brewed hot tea. The front and rear design of that car made me want to puke, and I don’t miss having to see it. Side on, they could’ve been any other ChevrOldsmoBuick, or a Ford or a Mercury.
The second Auroras didn’t seem to last much longer. Their styling up front was more goofy than gagworthy, which I guess is progress, and in back it shouted “Howdy, y’all! I mean, um, gootin tagg or bonn jore or somethin’! I’m a Yurrupeen! Lookit me bein’ all Yurrupeen, aHYUCK!”.
I’m not a fan.
My best friend’s Mother at the time of the second Aurora had A Bonnie, SSEi. She proclaimed the Aurora to be “gaudy” (JFC have you seen the dash on the final Bonneville?). That itself speaks volumes.
…!
I got nothin’.
The front of the 1st gen Aurora was its weakest angle – it looked like it was squinting at you. The side view reminded me of the 1973 colonade Pontiac LeMans with its curves in the same places, while the rear was evocative of the first Toronado. The interior was one of GM’s best of the 90s (faint praise I know, excepting the lovely 91-96 Park Avenue).
I disagree about the Aurora’s styling. It certainly isn’t as derivative as many American attempts to look European. I don’t love it, but it just looks like an Aurora to me. Maybe it isn’t 100% successful, but I don’t find it off-putting.
As far as longevity, I saw two cleanish examples in West Saint Paul MN yesterday. Which is obviously empirical evidence that they last forever.
Off Robert Street? I love your description of “cleanish”. That’s WSP to a tee. Hey neighbor!
One was parked just off Robert and the other was driving on Robert near the Sinclair.
I was on a Menards run from the West Side.
I “inherited” a lot of driving time in a 2004 GLS auto. V-6 when I settled in with my current “girl” friend (we’re both now well past 70) over 12 years ago. It was bought used, & brought from western Kansas to SW Virginia: & was her daily 40 mile commuter for around 12 years ’til she retired at age 70. I’d become the “caretaker” of the car, & we took quite a number long distance trips in it. I’d characterize it as an above average comfortable, & performing car with surprisingly good handling, & decent reliability. She was even coaxed into autocrossing it once years ago. I think we replaced a radiator at 130K & something went goofy with the electrical system that prevented starting due to a sensor? or some obscure widget dying….”Yeah, they all do that eventually” was the mechanic’s assessment. A few hundred bucks cured the problem, & it ran fine ’til it was sold at 150K. I became a bit attached to it over the years, as i’d owned a few Olds’ years ago, & loved ’em all. Her Alero was the final year for the brand. My eyes are getting wet again. Sigh.
“Alero.” Another Oldsmobile “committee name.” Once they got past “Cutlass” and numbers ending in “8,” what did Olds have left?
Why, they had Achieva!
My sources say Achieva is an antidepressant or a laxative.
It was more like an Underachieva.
I liked the glass headlight lenses on the Alero when most these days seem to be plastic. Many UPS trucks appear to have the same lamps.
The Alero’s headlamp lenses were plastic from start to end; there weren’t any glass ones. The UPS trucks (oops, they call them “package cars”) use aftermarket Alero headlamps made in China by one of the outfits known for poor quality and fraudulent safety certification—UPS could/should have made a much better and more cost-effective choice of headlamp setup when they facelifted their North American package car design.
The ones on my mom’s Alero seemed to be glass. Lasted like new for about 18 years.
They were a better grade of polycarbonate than most. That was one of the last projects Carello did before getting absorbed into the joint venture when Bosch and Magneti Marelli pooled their vehicle lighting operations and imaginatively named the resultant company Automotive Lighting.
Do the techniques for clearing those up with silver polish (or whatever that stuff is) work for real and hold up for a reasonable length of time?
Mostly not, and the same goes for most of the kits one can buy, even the ones that claim to re-coat the lenses. Polishing strips off the anti-UV/anti-scratch hardcoat that was applied and crosslink-cured under cleanroom conditions when the lamps were manufactured. With this coating gone, the surface degradation will come back faster and worse than before, and the polycarbonate itself will progressively break down.
Two techniques that work better than most are this and this.
My mom drove an Alero for about 18 years. Quite a good all around car really. Not much else went wrong except for the common GM ignition switch problems (twice.) My sister drove it when mom stopped driving and got T-boned two blocks from home – nobody hurt. Mayor of our city drove an Aurora when mom got her Alero – many people couldn’t tell the difference. Nice for the people who owned an Alero. Well equipped considering it’s low price. The leather upholstery went the distance. I think the Lexol treatments helped.
It may come as a surprise to some but I have a few technophobe/regressive preferences when it comes to my automobile tastes, yet I do not miss faux alloy plastic wheel covers shamelessly over very visible between spokes steel wheels that progress seems to have finally done away with. Seems the handful of Aleros and Grand Ams I still see just wear their bare steelies proudly.
My dad had 3 Cutlasses, 2 colonnades, a 76 442 and 76 supreme, and a downsized 80 Supreme, so these two latter day models literally weren’t my father’s Oldsmobiles. #truthinadvertising
I remember GM brought the Alero to Europe as a Chevrolet. It’s curious how aleatory the Chevrolet brand was to GM pre-bankruptcy.
Aleatory is an interesting word. Oldsmobile sold its Silhouette van in Europe renamed as the Pontiac Trans Sport. In Mexico Oldsmobile was supposedly relabeled as Chevrolet but every Oldsmobile I’ve ever seen in Mexico was clearly labeled as an Oldsmobile.
Aleatory implies something random, if I understand correctly, but I’m thinking that the name Oldsmobile is problematic in the non English speaking world. In the United States people knew the history of Oldsmobile as a long time producer of quality automobiles. In Canada they were always sold as Oldsmobile.
In another language any translation of Olds would first probably first connote Olds as pertaining to age as in a car for old people. GM spent lots of effort on image and marketing even if that effort didn’t always translate into making improvements on their product. I think that they probably decided that the name Oldsmobile might unnecessarily create an obstacle to sales. The name Pontiac refers to an Odawa war chief who fought the British to a stalemate around the Great Lakes. Pontiac might still rankle some folks in the UK but was probably safe on the continent. The name Chevrolet connotes something European. The Chevrolet brothers were from Switzerland. I say that selling an American car in Europe by the name of Chevrolet was easier than selling the same car with an Oldsmobile nameplate.
I don’t think GM’s decision to rebadge Oldsmobiles as Chevys or Pontiacs for sale in Europe was aleatory at all. I think it was well considered and probably the right decision.
I was thinking along those lines recently when I read about the Russia’s Sputnik V covid-19 vaccine, the first to become available, which was of course named after the famed 1957 satellite. Many Russians are proud of putting the first-ever satellite into space, so evoking it with the first-ever effective covid vaccine works well in Russia. But to Americans, “Sputnik” was a menace that made us feel like we’d fallen behind the Soviets in the space race and science in general. If you want Americans to buy or use something you don’t want to name it Sputnik.
Thank you for the information! I didn’t know about the history of both brands Olds and Pontiac. I don’t know how the American market worked in GM’s executives minds, for an outsider like me I’ve always associated the Chevrolet brand with something young, humble, versatile or cool like Honda, GMC would cover the trucks and utility vehicles. I’ve always associated Pontiac to GTO and Firebird, so through my eyes Pontiac should make high performance and sportive versions of other GM cars, so Olds would be a kind of formal line of cars as the luxury Toyotas and Lexus; Buick would be GM’s BMW and Cadillac would be the luxury brand, but I found there was luxury Chevrolets, sportive Buicks, humble Pontiacs, sportive Chevrolet and in Europe GM put a range of former Daewoos under Chevrolet brand overlapping exactly the entire Opel range and then a was quite confused with GM’s strategy. A few years before they ended the top sedan Opel Omega because it supposed to be a dead niche, but then they put the Alero in the European market under the cheaper brand Chevrolet instead of Opel and it didn’t make any sense to me. Actually GM used to be aleatory itself.
I had an Intrigue from ’98 to ’07. Overall, a good car with a great Shortstar engine, but full of persistent, irritating defects like pulsing brakes every 10k miles, eating batteries, and losing lube so the steering clunked. The suspension was a little too stiff for our wavy main roads, which were resurfaced soon after I traded it for a used Deville.
I was working as a GM service advisor when both the Alero and Aurora were still under warranty. While inside the 60,000 warranty envelope, they weren’t too bad but as soon as the warranty was up, suffering Dinah did these things come in a lot. All the normal GM stuff was present: strut tower bearings, ABS sensors, steering rack leaks, just freaking loads of it. The Northstar and Shortstar motors leaked oil like crazy and the starters often failed. Fixing it was an eight hour job to remove the entire intake of the engine.
The real disappointment was the Aurora. They were a great idea spoiled by terrible execution. The ones I saw had older, WW2 generation owners, well advanced in age by then. They usually had the best extended warranty available, the GM Protection Plan. GM lost a ton of money on it and sent dealers a memo threatening to reduce warranty payouts,
The Alero was much the same story. It was basic GM bland generic of the era, meaning it was all hard plastics and grey mouse fur that was impossible to clean. The brakes were not up to the job on hilly country like we have here and we were charging, get this,. $660 for pads and rotors.
After the customers of these two cars passed on, there were no new customers to replace them. GM’s product just couldn’t entice buyers away from Honda and Toyota. Oldsmobile did really well with its Cutlass Ciera Roach, which was a much better car than any Alero or Achieva ever was. The interior, for example, was way better on the Ciera than the Alero or Achieva.
The reason I left GM as a service advisor is the dealer had so many CSI complaints that GM pulled their franchise. To be fair, they were closing stores left and right at the time and using the same excuse.
It never fails to make me sad when I read another testimony to how GM squandered their businesses though continued poor decisions and ineptitude. I owned a lot of Oldsmobiles but my last one was a 86 Delta 88 which my wife drove for about 10-12 years. I thought the Aurora was a step in the right direction and the Intrigue should have been a good replacement for the Ciera.
Oldsmobile was 123 years old when they pulled the plug in 2004, it was one of the oldest automobile manufacturers in the world up there with Benz, Peugeot, Renault, Fiat, Opel and Tatra.
I worked as a warranty administrator for a Ford dealership back in the 80s.. Fords Zone Service Manager told us we were “a high cost dealership ” because we submitted to many claims so we couldn’t “find” faults but just do what was reported by the driver on the job card. Next question. “Why didn’t you find that worn ball joint when the car came in for its service? “.
If I remember correctly this was the business model Ford had been using since forever which was the basis for the overall poor reputation that Ford service departments had nation wide. It wasn’t true of every dealership, my folks were longtime Ford owners and generally had good dealer experiences. Every manufacturer works to keep warranty cost to a minimum but Ford seemed more willing to deny warranty work than other manufacturers. I’m basing this on reading about a series of lawsuits spanning several decades that were brought against Ford. Lee Iaccoca wrote about the adversarial relationships that pervaded the entire company while he was there and had some things to say about the Service departments.
When the Alero was only a couple of years old I was already hearing “Don’t buy” warnings from mechanics I knew and acquaintances who worked in dealerships. Too bad, because it seemed on the surface at least to be a nice direction for Olds to take. It was a disappointment to watch Olds slowly dying for the last decade of so before they pulled the plug.
This makes me sad.
I so love the original Aurora and it’s stable-mate the Riviera.
I thought GM was coming out with striking, polarizing designs after so much malaise.
I love them both. I used to walk by a first generation Aurora every morning and all I felt was nostalgia for it’s design. It was unique, it wasn’t perfect, but in many ways it was. I also thought everything that made the first generation Aurora beautiful was lost in the redesign as if the motivation that helped Oldsmobile be daring was lost due to success.
I also rented an Alero to drive from Montreal to Toronto and back. I liked it. It was comfortable. It drove well. It gave me hope for Oldsmobile.
Oh how I wish Oldsmobile didn’t disappear.
Cars with big and well-curved side glass always caught my eye. Remember the ’87 Audi 5000, first on the scene with nearly-flush side windows ? Today the first Aurora seems not so special—but that low and flowing sheet metal and big glass were eye-openers when new.
Curved side glass and wide-track stance brought the postwar car fully into the present—then—and remain major developments in the history of auto-body design.
The Alero felt like a cheap Honda Accord knockoff. It was a fun car to drive but the interior and overall build quality was such far step down from everything else at the time it was just sad. My mother in law had one with the quad 4. It was fun to drive, I’ll give it that. But man it was such a low qualtiy car I knew at the time GM’s future was not bright and we saw what came next.