I had just shot this Olds Achieva a few weeks ago for a future CC, when I ran into it again the other day looking worse for wear. Looks like someone else ran into it too, but with a bit more physicality. This is on Washington Street, a busy one-way arterial, and the kind of street where this happens not infrequently. Wonder if the hitter left a note?
Here’s how it looked the last time I saw it, on a quieter street around the corner. Guess he/she wishes they’d parked there the other day.
Here’s another view; debris from the broken taillight is still on the street. The emergency spare tire on the front must have been a coincidence.
So how fast was the impact speed?
Fear not, Achieva lovers; not only didI shoot this one before it got nailed, but I also found an Achieva SC coupe, a true over-achieva if there ever was one.
Ouch! Hopefully no one was injured. I wonder if it was a hit and run?
It’s hard to make an Achieva more ugly – but whoever hit it succeeded. The plastic bumper cover on the roof is a nice touch.
Those little N-body cars did have good structural integrity, I remember seeing Grand Am’s in the body shop with massive damage to the front and rear, but the passenger cell was always pretty much intact, you could open and close all the doors.
I still say they were under-Achievas.
It was probably hit by a truck or SUV. If the bumpers had lined up it may not have been quite so bad.
This is sort of a Reverse Curbside Classic Effect: this Fiero came home with me Sunday. The PO was in a traffic jam and was rear-ended by a full size Chevy Van. The van was totalled also but believe it or not, the Fiero can still be driven and its driver’s door still opens fine. The passenger compartment was not compressed at all.
Too bad this is the best pic I have now: the other side is far more interesting.
What’re your plans with it?
Years ago I used to see a beautifully restored 1956 Dodge 4-door hardtop parked in front of an apartment house on Sherman Way, a major traffic artery in the San Fernando Valley. Two-tone yellow & white it was, and the first year of that body style. You know where I’m going with this, and it was just as bad as the Achieva above. I can only imagine how the owner must have felt.
My dad once had a ’56 Dodge Custom Royal. He had just finished getting the front end bodywork redone. (The front fenders were noted for rotting out behind the headlights on those.) Anyhow, someone slid into him from behind during a winter snowstorm. He said the car was about the shape of a banana, but he was still able to drive it a few blocks to his parents’ house.
Its a bit off topic but there was an exquisite `56 Dodge Royal Lancer at the car show this past weekend.
Rear
My grandfather lost his ’57 Plymouth Savoy this way. Not even a note. Luckily I’ve never found one of my own cars damaged this bad by a hit and run crash, but if I had a dollar for every time I found my car in the mall/supermarket/college library parking lot with some major dent left by a careless jerk who didn’t bother to leave a note, I’d have…..maybe enough for a value meal. But still, that sucks.
When it first came out, I liked the look of the Grand Am the best, but looking back the more mature styling of the Achieva made it the least offensive looking of the GM N bodies. It is fixable, but not worth the money to do it. At least the person who hit it was nice enough to pick the bumper off the street and put it on the roof. I’m surprised the person who hit the Olds was able to drive away. I’m guessing they’ll be easy to find since the front end would be smashed and covered with white paint residue.
It wouldn’t take much to total a car like an Achieva. Especially if it was a late model truck that rear ended that pos Olds. The truck would be barely marred:)
…Be a shame if the owner finds out what happened, here.
Helluva thing, come home and find your car’s been destroyed while it sat in front of the house.
we had a neighbor that had a mint ’78 Mercury Zephyr get taken out like that. Parked in her driveway, a good 25-30 feet from the street, just clobbered the hell out of it, and damn near tried to take out our red-oak tree in the front of our house, managed to avoid it, but it wasn’t hard to find the drunk driver.
A destroyed, mint ’78 Zephyr is no loss. Fox body tin cans.
It’s not a shame! Come on now! All pos ’90s Olds’ deserve that same fate!
While risking turning this article into a discussion of the car itself, instead of hit and runs, here is an excellent article on the development of the Achieva from one of the people who was directly involved:
http://deansgarage.com/2009/development-of-the-1992-oldsmobile-acheiva-scx/
This was one of the last models to come out before I switched over to Cadillac.
I was able to take a drive in a 92 W41 Achieva with the 190hp H.O. motor. There were about a half dozen race spec models produced and a few hundred with the Torsen-locking differential. The Quad-4 screamed, but the on track performance was incredible. Especially since you could buy it for ~$15k. W41s used equal length balanced axles on the manual cars which exhibited virtually no torque steer. We were able to get the 1/4 mile times down to mid 14 seconds which is crazy for a 4 cylinder non boosted car in those years.
W41
I read that before. It is a very detailed and enriching article.
“We were able to get the 1/4 mile times down to mid 14 seconds which is crazy for a 4 cylinder non boosted car in those years.”
All that is very good, but you didn’t have VTAK, NAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWZZZZ and to add insult to injury it was a GM car.
In other words… you guys were doing it wrong.
Like those guys across the road with turbo 2.2 engines http://www.allpar.com/model/daytona/launch.html
That site you posted is very good. I’ve read the Achieva article before. We never got the N-body but from the magazines I read, the Olds and to some extent the Buick were the best looking of them.
In the past five years I’ve been the victim of a hit and run three times, all while I was in motion and not at fault. I or others managed to write down the tags of the first two of the offenders, but the third ran like a bat out of hell and got away from me. At least witnesses corroborated my story that third time and my insurance’s injury settlement covered my repair deductible.
I don’t expect people to stop and exchange insurance information anymore. I’m thinking of getting one of those in car video cameras like they have in Russia.
You can watch crash videos on YouTube for hours from Russia.
What do you get when you cross two orphans, a Gremlin and an Achieva? A write-off.
Found a turbo Nissan Bluebird with this problem recently its gone now scrap probably, but it had been a rare survivor.
Sis had a ’94 Achieva much like this one, except maroon/maroon.
It was the absolute hottest car you could ride in in the summer, which I suspect led to the disintegration of the interior, even though it had A/C.
This was also the car I learned to despise the Quad 4/OHC design. It ran well and the 8 valve engine had good pep, but god was that thing a bitch to work on.
I did love the styling of it, and the cockpit-style dash, but after 10 years, it was a total pile that the dealer gave her $250 for it out of pity, after it stalled on him twice on the test drive. It had many problem, and it also couldn’t fit a car seat in the back for their soon to be arriving son, not with 5’10” mom and 6’4″ dad in the front.
I guess crash speed is around 40-60 kmh
Curbside Classic exclusive lost short wheel base Achieva with rare roof mounted bumper found.Could this have been the car that saved Oldsmobile!
I wonder what the picture would show had it been a Pinto instead of an Achieva…
I’m thinking it’s time for a restomod with a Seville/Continental style bustle back.
when I saw this picture and the prior one of the mangled Acura, I just had to send them to my retired buddies in law enforcement. After some thirty years of street patrolling both as a sheriff’s deputy and then as a lieutenant in a small copper mining Arizona town, I found myself thinking of just how surprisingly often this type of hit and run would happened; even in a small town of some 2,000. I guarantee we never found a “sorry I hit your car here’s my name and phone number” note on them. Most were from locals trying to make it home after the bars closed and like the old saying has it, “most accidents happen within 25 miles from home”, in my town that would be “within 3/4s of a mile from home”….distance of the furthest bar. The other major player in events of this tended to be young teenagers showing off to a car full of buddies and either losing it on a corner or distracted by events in the car. Since most of these took place around o dark thirty, you seldom had any witnesses although often somebody heard the impact but by the time they looked out the suspect was gone in an attempt to try and make it home so he could hide the car until he could get it fixed and repainted.
Who’d apologize for hitting a pos car like an Achieva?! If anything the “hit and run” driver did his duty for humanity by ridding the public of a vehicle that was a product of GM’s forgettable past.
I see this on a semi-regular basis. As oldlt43 said above, I suspect it is drunks on the way home after the bars close. I would never park my car on a main drag overnight for this reason. Probably seen 10-20 of them over the past ten years, usually in the morning while driving to work. Always felt bad for the owners…
Oldsmobile was an incurable disease by the ’90s. Its glory years of the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s were never to be seen again. Olds, like all of GM in the ’80s and ’90s was clueless to what their customers wanted. Badge engineering was the norm of those eras, poorly engineered and poorly built products pooped out of of GM’s five divisions in rapid succession. That Achiva shown, with its totaled rear end, puts a smile on my face knowing that there’s one less pos GM product from that era egregiously miring the autoscape. Now if only more people would be willing to toss out their K cars and Fieros the world would be a prettier place.
No worries…it’ll buff out. 😉