The 1970 Olds Rallye 350 was one of several “junior muscle cars” that arrived that year in response to drastic increases in insurance costs for the real thing. The formula was pretty simple: throw a few pieces together in an option trim package (W-25, in this case) which included urethane coated steel bumpers, and slap them on a choice of F-85 or Cutlass coupes, and watch them sell like hot cakes. If the GTO’s Endura bumper is so hot, these must be too.
Except that they weren’t. These Rallye 350s were laggards, and sat on dealer lots. Some dealers felt that the body-colored bumpers were the problem, and swapped them out for chrome ones. Although only 3,547 were built, some were still sitting on dealer lots in 1971.
The only engine choice was the same 310 hp 350 V8 as used widely in the Cutlass line; the 325 hp version of the 350 was not available. Standard equipment was a three-speed manual, a suspension package, and of course the special hood and spoiler and stripes. Drum brakes were also still standard; discs were optional, along with the usual comfort and convenience items. A four speed manual and the THM-350 automatic were also available at extra cost. Even wheel trim rings were optional. A bare-bones junior muscle car, priced $68 cheaper than the 1970 Road Runner, which sported a healthier hi-po 383 V8 as standard.
But these Rallye 350 get plenty of love today, so no worries on that account.
I wasn’t there, so I can only offer an opinion. Sebring yellow, almost a bright canary yellow, is not for everyone. Not generally considered a masculine colour. Also, the Oldsmobile Super Stock III wheels look significantly less appealing without chrome trim rings (see below). IMO, the lack of trim rings, less so the bumpers, lends a strong decontented vibe. More of a stock car look. They shouldn’t have done both. I do think the body-coloured bumper looks great at the front. Not so successful at the rear. They should have left the rear bumper chromed, like The Judge.
The yellow wheels make me think school bus, which is probably not what someone in their late teens/early 20s cars like this were targeted towards is eager to be reminded of
My father was one of the 3,547 people who bought one.
I don’t quite know why he bought a Rallye 350, since he generally preferred smaller foreign cars, and something in screaming yellow wasn’t really his thing. Plus he was married and had a toddler by then, and this wasn’t exactly a typical family car. I do remember him saying that the Olds salesman thought the Rallye 350 was “more of a kids’ car” and tried to talk my dad into buying something else.
In any event, he liked his Rallye 350 and kept it for 5 years (replaced, oddly enough, by a VW Scirocco). I don’t remember him saying anything bad about it at all.
Dad was a meticulous person, and the Olds was virtually new looking when he sold it. He sold it to a teenage kid who wrecked it within a few months. Oh well.
I don’t have any real pictures of our Rallye 350, but it did show up in the background of a few family photos, like this one with my mom and sister at our house:
Ouch… what a waste. But I love the story and pic!
Eric, this picture is great. So is this the car in which you came home from the hospital some time after this taken?
Sadly, no… my folks brought me home from the hospital in mom’s Ford LTD.
That car belonged to my grandfather, and when he passed away in 1971, mom took it over. The Ford remained in our family until 1976, when a drunk driver drove down our street, hitting a bunch of cars that were parked curbside. The Ford was hit pretty hard – and the commotion that followed is one of my earliest childhood memories.
There is one surviving picture of me with the Olds… here I am playing in the driveway with the Rallye 350 safely stowed in the garage:
It was around this time that crushing insurance rates were beginning to put and end to the muscle car era. I recall that my cousin, with a 1967 GTO, was paying over $1,000/yr. He didn’t have the best driving record, but that’s still over $7,000/yr. in todays money. It was soon stolen and wrecked, putting an end to his financial misery. This was not an unusual ending for many muscle cars. I had friends who had another GTO, a Mach I and a Duster 340. All were stolen and/or wrecked, with a good friend dying in his 3 month old Duster 340. The insurance industry took notice and put the kibosh on these in short order. The young, single male demographic at which these were marketed simply could not afford to own one.
The Rallye 350 was one of several attempts to mitigate the high insurance premiums by offering a lo-po alternative to traditional muscle cars. GTO offered a 265 HP 2 bbl. version of the 400, Buick the California GS and in 1971 Road Runner and Charger started making the 383 optional. Didn’t really matter as these were poorly received and by 1973 the muscle car party was over. Was fun while it lasted.
Even as early as 1967 you could get a 2-barrel 400 in a GTO.
I wonder if the car was made sweeter for your dad by being a screaming deal if it had been sitting around on the lot for awhile. Many of us dads will make unusual purchase choices when enough money gets knocked off the price. 🙂
Could very well be that a good deal, plus a bit of a midlife crisis, was enough to prompt him to make this unusual choice.
Incidentally, this was the only brightly-colored car that Dad ever owned.
My first thought is that these loud, ostentations, “Hey look at me!” performance cars never sold that well. The Charger Daytonas and Superbirds sat unsold on dealer lots too. My guess is that people interested in real performance were less interested in the kinds of visual packages that drew extra attention.
This car seems to me a precursor to that 1970s phenomenon of the all-show/no-go decal packages that remained a thing into the early 80s.
FWIW, Dodge dealers were able to unload all of their 1969 Daytonas in short order; it was the Superbirds that sat on the dealer lots, sometimes for years. Someone bought one in 1972 to run on the Bonneville Salt Flats for about the same price as a Valiant.
There was a line from Chrysler Product Planner Burton Bouwkamp (I think) in a book about Plymouth dealers being unable to sell the Superbird: “Chrysler found out that there was a market for about 500 of these [wingcars], and they had all bought Daytonas!”.
I wouldn’t put the Superbird into quite the same category as these Rallye 350s.
No, but there is one similarity: although the Hemi was optional, like the lo-po engine in the Rallye 350, the vast majority of Superbirds got the more tame 440-4v engine (at least compared to the Hemi or 440-6v).
Probably not a valid reason, but I wonder if these might have sold a bit faster with a different name? That 350 part pretty much trumpets to your friends that you settled for not quite the “real thing” in a performance car. This would of course, with that rationale, explain why the Ventura based GTO was a bit of a sales disappointment.
I like yellow cars, tho this shade of yellow would be a bit hard to take for 36-48 months to pay off.
May have been better if the chrome trim arcing over the Hadlights and grill had been body color painted as well, or maybe some throw away chrome trim on the leading edge of the bumper to complete the “ring”. It just screams “Unfinished” This was my thought when 1st seeing them in 70 and I still hold to it. AMC did the same thing with the body colored bumpers on the AMX.
The cheap muscle car from an upper-tier manufacturer market really didn’t jive with consumers in general. Considering this Oldsmobile only came in “searing Sebring”, I don’t think 3,547 is that bad of a number. Dodge only managed 15,506 Super Bees of all flavors in 1970, and Mercury 13,496 Cyclones. Plymouth succeeded in selling boatloads of Road Runners not solely based on price, but also because of the brilliant marketing of the tongue-in-cheek “harmless” nature they *wink wink* mislead you with. The imitators all seemed to miss this fact, because with names like Cobra, Eliminator, the Machine, etcetera they very much were implying to be taken seriously.
As to this Oldsmobile specifically, color aside, the fact that A/C was a no-go on these unless you stuck with a 3-speed manual wasn’t doing it any favors. A bare bones Olds just did not compute with people when the the performance part of the equation this car was was selling itself upon wasn’t particularly superior in actual practice.
Is that really true about no A/C unless you got a 3-speed? Doesn’t make sense.
the fact that A/C was a no-go on these unless you stuck with a 3-speed manual wasn’t doing it any favors.
Where did you get that? The W25 option package (Rallye 350) was all purely cosmetic. Why wouldn’t a/c be available with the automatic or four speed? These could be ordered with any of the options available on the F-85/Cutlass lines, including a/c, although there were no optional engine choices.
Hemmings gives contextual detail about the circumstances around A/C availability here, and I misread it, apparently. Standard axle ratio automatic cars weren’t excluded. My apologies!
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/article/1970-oldsmobile-rallye-350-3/amp
Hemmings is good at only one thing: classified ads. Their so-called journalism is consistently lousy.
I’ve never read the Motor News very much, but I’ve subscribed to their Classic Car and Muscle Machines for many years and find them to be consistently high quality and reliable. The linked article is a good example. It looks like a buyer’s guide in MM and is quite carefully written, with a lot of useful information for someone considering buying one.
Roadrunner wouldn’t have nearly the tongue in cheek it does without the warner bros connection and marketing, as a name its no less serious than Roadmaster. If you think about it Superbee was substantially more tongue and cheek, it’s a play on words with its chassis code and has a cartoon bumblebee wearing a racing helmet as a mascot.
Cobra and Eliminator had motorsport connections in the day, obviously with Shelby for the former and Mercury’s drag racing team were called the Eliminators. Same with the use of Charger at Dodge with Ramchargers. Besides, the Chevelle SS396 was neck and neck with the Roadrunner in sales and that alphanumeric soup of a name wasn’t exactly imaginative, and GTO a was stone serious name as well. Owners had to organically create the tongue in cheek play on words(letters) nickname of the Goat.
I think the problem with the aforementioned names isn’t how serious they are or not, but that they were all so obvious copycats of the Roadrunner formula, somebody asks “what’s the difference between a Torino GT and a Torino Cobra?” the answer will invariably be “eh, the Cobra is like a Roadrunner.” People swayed by fashion and popularity always tend to shun knock offs… unless a specific brand of knock off is deemed cool… which is what the Roadrunner is. The GTX was an obvious GTO knockoff, its sales lagged, yet the same basic car with less standard options and resulting cheaper entry pricetag and unique marketing made it the new hotness.
Someone who lived down the street from my grandparents had one. It was yellow. Very yellow.
1970 seems almost Dickensian in musclecar terms: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. On one hand, GM had lifted it’s engine size limit so every division’s biggest big-block was now available in intermediate coupes. Likewise, Ford now had not only the 428CJ (429CJ for 1970) and the Boss 429 to compete with Chrysler’s Street-Hemi (but only in the Mustang). And the Mopar 440-6v from the previous year was still around, only a tad more civilized (no more huge hood scoop, fiberglass hood or steelies with chrome lug-nuts).
But exorbitant musclecar insurance surcharges virtually brought the whole thing to a screeching halt and, with the exception of a few non-performance big-blocks, all that stuff would be gone from intermediate coupes by 1972. IIRC, the last big-block intermediate was a 1976 Torino which could still be had with a 460.
Thus, the Olds Rallye 350 was born. Ostensively to do battle with the Road Runner, the Rallye 350’s engine was simply no match in performance, so the Olds marketing guys threw every other musclecar cliché they could muster at it.
Unfortunately, to keep the price within Road Runner range, there were several huge faux pas. Besides the lo-po engine, there was the name, the one-color-choice screaming yellow paint, spoilers, hood scoops, no trim ring wheels, and non-chrome bumpers. Kept the price down, sure, but all that undoubtedly killed sales on a low-performance car. I can only guess that the thought process was, if someone didn’t want such an attention getter but with the same performance, there was always the ability to just option up a regular old Cutlass with the same engine.
The irony is that Olds ‘had’ a small-engine Cutlass that had the stones to go up against anything offered by the competition (and even handled pretty good, too, a feat that nearly no other big-engine musclecar could claim): the little-known W-31 package.
Formerly marketed as ‘Ramrod 350’ for 1968-69, the W-31 was similarly offered in the F-85 or Cutlass. The difference from the Rallye 350 was the engine in the W-31 had all the high-performance bits. Likewise, while a W-31 still had the hood scoops, it was a whole lot more low-key than the Rallye 350. Actually, kind of the complete opposite. The W-31 even came with a rear anti-sway bar which was a big factor in improving handling.
The only fly in the W-31 ointment was price; that was the Rallye 350’s ace-in-the-hole. Yeah, with the Rallye 350, you got a car that promised a whole lot more than it delivered, but at least you didn’t pay too much for it, and the insurance rate would actually be affordable. Unfortunately for Olds, it wasn’t enough, and the Rallye 350 only lasted for one year. Sadly, the hot W-31 Olds was gone after 1970, as well.
In fact, I wonder if the whole Rallye 350 package was nothing more than a subtle ploy to get around an insurance surcharge for the much hotter W-31. Could it have been an effort to deceive insurance companies into believing that the 350 engine in the W-31 was the same low-performance 350 in the Rallye 350?
I well remember these RALLYE 350s sitting on Olds dealer lots thruout L.A. in 70-71. The engine was the same premium burning 310 (gross) hp one that came in the Cutlass Supreme……not a performance engine!
I was tempted to get one, but bought a ’71 VW Super Bug for my wife instead. Quite a difference. Meanwhile I drove my ’56 Chevy 150 everyday. The RALLYE was a loooonng step UP from a ’56 Chevy; oh well….way tooooooooo late now. 🙁
Being a ID student at ACCD at the time I was very much taken by the simple, somewhat bold packaging of a ho-hum Cutlass into a sorta “muscle car”. Now had they been Nugget Gold the VW probably would not have been purcha$ed! 🙂 DFO
The “look at me” performance car thing can be a tough marketing nut to crack. A bunch of early GTOs and Road Runners were sold, but they had more to back it up and weren’t quite as much of a visual peacock.
The Mach-1 Mustangs and all the “SS” Chevys seemed to do just fine, as did the Trans-Am in the later ‘70s, which was quite the peacock indeed. Right on the hood. Again, generally the idea that the flash had some extra mechanical “oomph” to go with it.
But the peacock cars that had nothing extra mechanical to offer seemed to sell a bit at first, and then just go flat. All those early ‘70s GM intermediates (ever seen a “Heavy Chevy”, a Chevelle, in the flesh? I thought not). The later mid ‘70s Road Runners and GTOs. The AMC packages, including the later AMX. Various Monza/Skylark/Starfire/Sunbird “stripe and panel” packages. “Shelby” FWD Mopars of the ‘80s (some of which actually had a real performance kick). Even the earlier ‘68 Mustang “California Special” package, handsome and well done, and seemingly everywhere here in SoCal, for a while, was 7k cars sold, one and done. Mazdas, Datsun B-210 “Honey Bees” (actually, quite a few of those moved off the lot, as they aimed for “cute” instead of “performance”), and various Subarus. All sorts of Datsun/Nissan Z-car and ZX special editions, after the first 240-Z had come and gone.
Then there were the upper end luxury “special editions”, which Lincoln and Chrysler went after with a vengeance in the ‘80s. Sell a few, it would go stale, move to a different one for the next go-round.
It’s as if the peacock version was a bit of impulse buying for people who had not seen one before, but then it was out there, and “so what”, and “not the real deal” and “other people have them already”, and whatever number of potential buyers was supplied, and that was that.
Perhaps it had to do with having something others didn’t have or hadn’t seen before, that pulled people in. Once it was around for a while, the impulse appeal wore off. If it was last year’s car still on the lot, it sort of nullified the exclusivity thing. The Japanese still work the “special edition” thing endlessly in the JDM, and it still seems to work for them. But that is Japan, not the U.S.
Yes, I have seen a “Heavy Chevy”! Driven by a co-worker at the welder factory, a fat boy named Kevin who immediately became known as “heavy Kevie”.
Living in a city , stuck with street parking. HATE body color bumpers! Car looks 4 years old , three months after get it.
My 2009 ride now looks like an abandoned ride.
I love yellow paint on cars but I have met way more people who loathe it than love it, including many gearheads who love old muscle cars. Making the bumpers yellow and the matching Olds rally wheels yellow is even a bridge too far for me, I could have seen these selling better if they weren’t confined to that color.
These weren’t alone in the pre-malaise poseur muscle cars either, the Duster Twister with its 340 style striping and toothy grille was another, as was the 70 Mustang Grabber that used the previous year’s Boss 302 style side stripes come to mind. In fact there was an appearance package you could get on the 71-73s that got you the mach 1 “look” as well. That’s the other oddity, the Rally e 350 scheme more resembles the Buick GSX of the same year
As for the bumpers, it is a curiosity that this package was the only way to get them on any Cutlass, you’d think the 442 would have had them as an option like the other muscle cars were increasingly offering. I’m not a fan myself, pretty much across the board. Useless as bumpers basically were as far by 1970 for low speed impacts, the chrome finish was a hell of a lot more ideal for minor parking scuffs, and if it were severe enough you could just get a new bumper without the expense of painting and the frustration of the color not quite matching. Most of the cars looked better with chrome anyway, like the 71 Mustang Boss 351, the only package with the Mach 1 grille and keyed extensions that had the regular chrome bumper, and I think its the most handsome version of the design
Interesting to mention the Mustang ‘California Special’. The insurance surcharges hadn’t yet taken hold so the CS was aimed more at someone wanting the look of a pricey Shelby GT Mustang without the price. AFAIK, those California Specials were nothing more than a Mustang coupe with Shelby foglights, a Shelby-style rear spoiler and rear brake side scoops, and a couple of side stripes. Not my style, but I guess they sold well enough on the West Coast.
As to the ‘peacock’ thing, while the Rallye 350, Duster Twister, Demon Sizzler, and Maverick Grabber all certainly fall into that category, there were a couple during that 1970-72 timeframe that could cross over into real musclecar territory.
The first was the Pontiac Tempest-based GT-37. It had a few GTO style touches and started off with a 350 engine. But, depending on the year, a 400 or even 455 could be had in a GT-37, making for some very GTO-like performance without all the Goat badging, stripes, and scoops.
But the one that really went from one extreme to the other was the ’71-’72 Heavy Chevy. Starting with a lo-po 307 V8, it could be optioned with a 350-2v or 4v, all the way up to the 402 big-block, the very same one that went into the Chevelle SS396. It actually harkened back to the old 1969 Chevelle 300 Deluxe days, when you could turn a 300 Deluxe 2-door post into a cheap SS396. IOW, you never knew if a Heavy Chevy was a peacock grocery-getter or a legitimate sleeper musclecar.
It’s a real cop magnet. Would look much better in black with yellow stripes. The one over the roof is pretty neat.
I thought that the Rallye looked pretty spiffy, and Pontiac had been doing the “Endura” bumper thing for a couple of years already. When the GTO Judge debuted it’s orange color was more suited to a muscle car. I’ve read that the Judge was supposed to be a low buck edition, but it sure didn’t look that way. The GTO was never considered cheap, like a Road Runner. My Uncle bought a Judge and it looked as good as any other GTO. The RR was cheap, but it was cool and marketed towards younger buyers. The GTX was the complete package, but the RR came standard with the big 383 engine, manual three speed, beefed suspension, and “bigger” drum brakes. And the flat black hood and beep beep horn! There weren’t a bunch of options needed. The interior is pretty plain with the standard bench, and the idea wasn’t to load it up with options, except the 440. Car and Driver wrote that the RR was suggested to Plymouth as a revamp model of the GTX by Brock Yates, who they dubbed “the Assassin.” They never intended the RR name to be anything but an inside joke.
I think The Judge started as a Roadrunner clone but John Z shot it down and instead made it an irreverent premium package on top of the GTO. Not really his best move IMO
The GT-37 ended up being more true to the Roadrunner formula, it came standard with a 350 2bbl but you could get the 400 ram air III GTO engine
DeLorean may have been right on The Judge. Chrysler found out that, after that first year, there weren’t all that many Road Runners being sold in base, strippo form. There was now a hardtop and convertible version, and most of them were getting optioned up, which kind of defeated the whole idea.
But, then, 1969 was also the first year that the GTO dropped all the way to third place in musclecar sales, behind number one Road Runner and number two Chevelle SS396. So, maybe it would have been better had DeLorean went head-to-head with the Road Runner via an equivalent, strippo version of the GTO.
The musclecar that ‘should’ have been number one in 1969 was the Fairlane Cobra. With its underrated 428CJ, it was the new, bargain-basement screamer. I can only guess that Ford’s past reputation as being an also-ran in the musclecar wars kept performance car shoppers out of Ford showrooms.
I think that’s actually the ingenious part of the Roadrunner, draw the customers in with the tantalizing base price and move them out with the car they wanted but optioned similarly to the GTX, which ironically was never all that successful for Plymouth. The Roadrunner invigorated the whole Plymouth intermediate line, which is at the end of the day a successful business strategy, not so much for Pontiac. The Judge was just a package on top of an already pricey package, it just was another thing for the existing buyers of GTOs would spring for, and as you said sales for the GTO line were now in decline, The Judge didn’t help at all. The kind of buyer for a Judge was probably uncomfortably close to Warren Oates character in Two Lane Blacktop
Ford had a few factors; as you mention their street performance reputation didn’t match their total performance sales pitch until the 428cj and I’m sure most people at the time just assumed that would yet be another engine that Chevys would show their taillights to, but also the Mustang. That was always the iconic cool Ford, a problem other notable products to this day are doomed to live in the shadow of – hence why the Mach E is called a Mustang, if you can’t beat it, join it (to the dismay of many, myself included) – if you wanted a 428CJ in 1969 you’d buy a cool new Mach 1. I imagine the styling is a factor as well, the 69 Torino looked very dated with its crisp boxing’s that clearly harkened back to the 66 design, the fastback was borderline ungainly(like the 66-67 Charger) and the notchback was dull. The 68-70 Chrysler B bodies were “dated” compared to the 68 GM A bodies but I think they appealed to the many people were still quite fond of the well received 66-67 designs, which may well have been a strategy for Chrysler in those “play it safe” years for design.
I once read that 25% of the total 1969 Plymouth intermediate production were Road Runners. There’s even a story that when it was evident the Road Runner was a hit, eventual Chrysler co-president John Riccardo wanted to expand the Road Runner into its own model series with sedans and wagons. I wonder how that would have worked.
And, yeah, I’ve wondered if Warren Oates in his GTO in Two-Lane Blacktop was a subtle dig at what had happened to the grass-roots style hotrodders who knew there stuff but were being overtaken by generally clueless guys like Oates who just wandered into a new car showroom, plunked his money down, and left with a supposedly fast car. There’s a terrific scene in the movie when Dennis Wilson walks into an auto parts store and asks for a Rochester Quadrajet carburetor rebuild kit for Oates’ car to get it running right. He then races James Taylor in their ’55 Chevy (the same car from American Graffiti) with Oates as a passenger.
The Rallye 350 was just Olds exploring a potential direction for future musclecar sales that simply didn’t pan out. It’s worth noting that, by 1973, the base engine in the B-body Road Runner was down to the 318-2v. You knew which ones they were, too, because the hood scoop stripe didn’t have an engine call-out on those cars.
And although Oldsmobile’s musclecar efforts were fading like everyone else, it’s worth noting that the regular Cutlass was one of the hotter domestic sellers throughout the remainder of the brougham-tastic seventies. IIRC, there might even have been one or two years when it was the top seller of all cars.
Went by Bond Oldsmobile, Cadillac, AMC in Huntington, Indiana in 1970 one night and they had new Rally 350 in the show room. The car was stunning and looked fast!
Tried to get my dad to trade in the 1968 Cutlass S and get the Rally 350. Well, he wasn’t having any of that notion. Went back in the day time and drooled on the car and got thrown out. I am almost 70 years old amd still love the car!
Still love the Rally 350.
They might have sold a few more if they were offered in other colors besides yellow. (At least everything that I have seen shows that these were only available in yellow.)
The lo-budget muscle cars that they Rallye 350 were supposed to compete against came in a wide variety of colors. Mopar was offering up a whole slew of bright, in your face paint colors, not just yellow or just pink or just purple.