I was young, married, with three little kids, and another one on the way. Money was tight. My father-in-law found out my wife and I were sharing our ‘94 Grand Caravan and said “I’m going to give you my old car.” He was a loyal GM owner who had an ’89 Cutlass Supreme.
The car was two-tone silver with a generous amount of optional equipment. I remember it had the cloth interior, but it did have factory alloy wheels. It was a very aerodynamic-looking car. I don’t know what it’s technical coefficient of drag would measure, but this was the Ford Taurus era and it seemed like every car redesign was smooth shaped. My favorite part was the hood/headlight area, beautiful lines here.
A disclaimer: I don’t view these old GM products with disdain. Rather than seeing them as “Deadly Sins”, I see many of these models as usually-reliable machines accomplishing their intended purpose. They are flawed, imperfect, four-wheeled, transportation devices. It is easy to criticize, but GM got a lot right. There is no such thing as a perfect car. Every car manufactured has its Achilles’ heel.
GM’s W platform served millions of Americans for decades. The W body included the Buick Regal, Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, Pontiac Grand Prix, and the Chevrolet Lumina. The “BOP” front drive compacts debuted in 1988 and slowly replaced the GM G bodies. This was a new design, not a restyle of the G bodies. The only carry-over were the model names.
The G body was an old-school intermediate, body-on frame, rear wheel drive that debuted in 1978. At the close of the 1980s many of GM’s offerings were using V6 engines, but the tried-and-true 305 small block Chevrolet V8 was still available in the G body. Interestingly, production wound down – but didn’t cease right away. Chevrolet kept the Monte Carlo around for one extra year. You couldn’t get the Lumina right away, it debuted after its corporate cousins.
The fact that these cars were downsized goes without saying. But for the sake of a quick history lesson, let’s review. GM’s ’78-’87 personal luxury intermediates were large on the outside and small on the inside. The weight of one of these was in the 3,300 – 3,400 pound range. I gutted an ’87 Regal for drag racing a few years go and at the track it tipped the scales at 3,240. With the ’89 re-design they were shorter, lower, and their weight dropped by 400 to 500 pounds to the neighborhood of 3,000 lbs. or so. Like sticking to the Weight Watchers plan, a unibody, front-drive, and a V6, and the pounds melt away.
When calling these W cars “deadly sins” people sometimes forget about the models that came before them. Also, people forget about market share. GM owned a huge chunk of the domestic market way back when. Sales were not a problem. For example; the chassis of the Corvette was unchanged from 1968 to 1982 because Chevy sold every Corvette they could build. In a similar way, These W cars were hot sellers. There is little motivation for improvement when you sell 150,000 units per year. And of course, quality drops as production increases for other reasons too.
Sales success led to creativity in the model naming department, at least at Oldsmobile. They had so much success with the Cutlass that they began using the name on everything! There was the (regular) Cutlass, the Cutlass Calais, the Cutlass Salon, the Cutlass Ciera, etc. etc. The Cutlass I had was a Cutlass Supreme.
This car provided transportation to and from work for me. It also provided the opportunity for my wife to take the kids out with the minivan. The Olds was a roomy five-passenger car with an enormous trunk. One interesting feature was that the outside door latches were incorporated into the B pillars. Different and quirky became a pain-in-the-neck when a convertible version was planned. To keep the standard location of the door latch, the Cutlass Supreme convertible had to have a hoop (a fancy roll bar).
What I remember most about these W cars was the distinctive exhaust sound. Many GM products of this era had the tried-and-true 2.8 L V6. The exhaust systems in all of these sounded exactly the same. It had a resonating, throaty sound. The Beretta, Corsica, Cavalier, and a slew of other GM FWDs all had this same engine. I’m guessing ninety percent of them had that identical automatic overdrive transmission too.
The transmission is why I sold it. I had been delivering pizza on the side to make some extra cash and the miles racked up quickly on the little Olds. At about 200,000 the trans started slipping and like Andrea Bocelli says, it was time to say goodbye.
Yes! These early W-Body Cutlass Supreme coupes are genuinely gorgeous cars. The facelift, with its cladding and sealed beam headlights, was a huge retrograde step in my opinion. Meanwhile, the sedan was never much of a looker with its Saturn-esque wraparound backlight and flat-panel taillights. Interestingly, Holden cribbed the Cutlass Supreme sedan styling for its ’94 VR Statesman and Caprice. No clue why.
There are a few reasons why the GM-10 cars receive criticism.
1. The launch was bungled.
Sedans should have launched with the coupes, instead of letting the A-Body sedans linger on.
2. GM didn’t know how to handle the Buick and Oldsmobile W-Bodies.
They kept the Century and CIera around for cheapskate buyers, which severely ate into W-Body sales.
3. The powertrains were imperfect.
The 2.8 V6 was a carryover from the A-Body and was more taxed by the heavier W-Body. Then there was the merry-go-round of engines, with the underpowered 2.5 and 2.2 fours in the Chevy, the short-lived Quad 4 in the Pontiac and Olds (auto only in the Pontiac, why?!), the flaky but gutsy 3.4 V6, etc etc. Maybe GM should have just put the 3.8 in all of them and been done with it. After all, that’s what they basically did for the W-Body redesign as all W-Bodies could be had with the 3.8 by the late 1990s.
4. They could have used more polish.
Build quality and refinement weren’t quite up to Accord levels and that was the car GM really had to be worrying about in 1990, even if it was smaller. Then the redesigned dashboard that came later in the GM-10’s run (to accommodate airbags) was just a nasty, plasticky mess like most everything GM put out in the mid-late 1990s. Blech. Even if you’re not a W-Body fan, you have to admit the early dashboards were at least unique from one another… Chevy had a very traditional, horizontally-oriented one; Buick’s was slathered in plasti-wood; Pontiac and Olds were more monochromatic and modern.
I really like the W-Bodies because GM tried to make them interesting. They were a good, albeit belated, reaction to criticisms of GM during the 1980s. Unfortunately, GM made a series of strategic missteps and I don’t really think these cars got better as the generation progressed. And yet the competition did… The 1993 Camry, in particular, should have scared GM. Spacious, comfortable, refined, well-built… It instantly made the Ws look old hat.
Incidentally, I saw this beautiful International-Series Supreme a couple of years ago. I love the wheels and the two-tone color scheme, but I think the most beautiful CutSup is just a plain, monochromatic ’88-90 coupe. Very pretty and an underrated design.
I’m sorry William, but these where trash. No joke, my father’s cousin won one of these right after they debuted, from a casino. Loaded with all the goodies. Horrible car. 2.8 V6 + 3/AT in white with silver cladding. Lasted 3 family reunions (so 5-6 years) before she bought another Volvo.
I had plenty of wheel time behind another as well; a good friend’s mom owned one. She was more than happy to let me handle things with her car, and again, pretty much yuck. Her 1996 Grand Am that followed wasn’t as offensive (because cheap).
The other issue was the record-breaking development costs. And that led to yet another problem; it became clear that they wouldn’t recoup it after the first couple years and GM’s solution was to take cost out of the product at the midcycle refresh. Those were facing the most content-rich Camry and Accord ever, who were no longer supply-limited from their fully ramped up US factories, which led to the GM10s being relegated to low-profit fleet sales, lather rinse and repeat until Bob Lutz shows up.
Glad you got a good one, though!
I recall reading that the W bodies were seriously afflicted with Upper Management Interference Syndrome. Too many cooks in the stew led to cars that were expensive to build, and difficult to build as the result of trying to accommodate a bunch of gotta-have-its of a bunch of got-way-too-much-ego types.
GM mechanics loved these later iterations with the 3.8. Sooner or or later the lower intake gaskets would fail. Usually sooner. Replacement started @ ~$750 with $1200 being more common. If an owner ignored the early warning signs of failure, eventually the water would dilute the oil & ruin the engine. Replacing the 2.8 with the 3.1, 3.4 & 3.8 with the plastic gaskets & Dexcool should rate as a GM deadly sin. The 2.8 might have been underpowered, but at least it was reliable. The replacement engines weren’t. It took GM a decade and a class action lawsuit to admit & fix the problem.
Once replaced with the upgraded intake gaskets or upper plastic manifold with the Buick 3800 these engines were quite reliable and more often than not would last many more years. We did many on cars we sold in the 90’s and early 2000’s and rarely ever heard anything back from the owners until it was time to buy again. We have seen loads of 3100/3400/3800 engines with replaced gaskets with anything ranging from 200-400K miles running like new.
Technically, the G body debuted in 1982, when the former RWD A body Chevy Malibu and Monte Carlo, Buick Century and Regal, Pontiac Grand Prix and Le Mans, and Olds Cutlass Salon and Supreme were being moved to the G body moniker.
The new FWD intermediates, the Buick Century (only in name), Chevy Celebrity, Olds Cutlass Ciera, and Pontiac A6000 were now known as A bodies.
The Pontiac Le Mans and Chevy Malibu 2 door coupe, both gone in the US lineup in 1982. were both A bodies till the end, with their last production year in 1981. So, when some owners refer to these as G bodies, they are WRONG, since they were discontinued, when their platform became the G body in 1982.
I used to correct know-it-alls, on G body forums all the time. 😛
The now vacated RWD Pontiac G body offering for the sedan, was now given to the former B body full size Bonneville. The Catalina’s last year was also 1981.
The Bonneville nameplate was now on the former A body Le Mans, with a new grille treatment… Although, this car was still known as the Le Mans in Canada.
The former RWD A body Buick Century sedan, was now known as the Buick Regal G body sedan…Marking the first year the Regal personal luxury coupe nameplate, was offered on a four door…Since the Century name was now on the new 1982 FWD A body platform.
As long as we’re picking nits, there was a four door Regal offered from 1974-’77.
Using “G body” for all 78-88 is a nick name for the platform. Sure, it’s not correct, but these aren’t million dollar B-J collector cars. [Maybe the GNX, but still?].
Nice report, James. And hats off for speaking up for GM’s deadly sins. Reading along I could follow your reasoning quite well until this phrase: ” quality drops as production increases”. That is not true in my view. Just about anything we people do, if playing computer games, sports, math or building things like houses and cars our results improve with practice and experience. That is why I avoid buying a first year production vehicle. Quality should improve as bugs in the design and production line are worked out. If it does not improve then management is failing. They must have taken their eyes of the quality and taken them to the raw production numbers. In other words:” slap them together, no one will notice.”——— My wife drove a ’86 Cavalier station wagon.
Agreed, hat’s off for a deserved positive review. 200k miles on a lovely car is definitely a positive ownership experience. The GM Deadly Sin theme has become a disingenuous circlejerk that plagues this otherwise -terrific site.
Very, very well put Mike.
I remember this car well. My Father bought my Mother a loaded 1988 Cutlass Supreme International Series coupé. It was a lovely, sporty car, in 2-tone grey. It developed a problem very soon however: the engine would stall, at stop lights or on the highway, for no reason. The dealer installed a “black box”, which was connected to the engine, to read whatever was going on. Nothing came from that. My father got G.M. Canada involved, and they simply told him to go away, “tough nuts” (my quote). Unfortunately, that turned my Father off from buying G.M. products – forever. He bought G.M. cars for decades. Now, my Dad is satisfied with Toyota products.
German and Asian automobile brands are the ONLY way to go.
There is no way I’d tell anyone in 2017 to keep a vehicle from a German brand beyond the lease period. These vehicles are best dumped before any repairs become the responsibility of the owner.
I am glad you enjoyed yours, but I never found these attractive. They were modern and aerodynamic, but the design lacked a theme or a cohesion that was evident in what was coming from the better designs of the competition.
I found it sad that the former style leader of the industry couldn’t find its way.
In terms of early W bodies, the Olds version of the W is my favorite followed by the Buick Regal. In the early 90’s, I really wanted a white International Series Cutlass Supreme Sedan.
The rag top was nice. One of the few 5 seat ragtops other than a jeep.
As a comparison here is just one example of the fantastic cars the Germans were building in the Eighties. I thought the 5 series would be the closest corollary and have the most in common with the domestic GM machines the original poster was referring to, though many of those were two doors. With the 5 series there was room for four adults or a family to ride in comfort. Then of course there was the brilliant E30 3 series. That’s another chapter for another day.
The build quality, the availability of a manual transmission, road feel, and perhaps most of all the focus on smooth turbine like inline six cylinder engines truly put almost all of what was designed and manufactured by BMW in a class by itself. The difference between these cars and what was being manufactured here in the US is shocking. There was a big difference in sticker price, this is true, but as lightly or moderately used cars these and other machines by BMW have always been a good value. Right on through the E36 generation of the 3 series BMW continued to design pretty mechanical, mostly analog cars that to a great extent can be taken apart and put back together by an enthusiast working in his home garage.
Are there others out there who bemoan the lack of availability of the inline six cylinder engine as I do? I realize that the ascendancy of the V6 is chiefly attributable to the shorter overall length of that design and ease of positioning forward and aft in the engine bay but straight six engines are so smooth and balanced and torquey that I feel we’ve really lost something along the way. The inline six is the beating heart around which BMW has designed and built most of their iconic machines.
Ultimate Driving Machine? Not so sure about that, but to get behind the wheel of a classic well maintained six cylinder BMW with a manual transmission is a truly revelatory experience. Not sure I could say the same about most of what came out of Detroit during the same time period we are talking about here.
I am no great friend to the early GM W body cars, but is there a less relevant comparison than with a concurrent BMW 5 series? Good grief, these things cost a fortune in 1989 where a Cutlass was a solid middle-class car. Was the BMW double the price?
Should the Ws have been better cars? Of course. But should GM have tried to build a $35k car and sell it for $15K? Of course not. And BMW couldn’t have done it either.
I’ve always been told that “if you can’t afford a new BMW, you can’t afford a used BMW.”
My ’86 325i was as tough as a Sherman tank, yet drove like it was heaven sent.
The cost of ownership over the ten years I owned my BMW were basically fuel and routine maintanence. I never went to a BMW dealer for service. I had a trusted mechanic who specialized in German automobiles perform all the maintanence.
As for BMW’s longevity mine made it past the 300,000 mile mark and still drove and looked like it was a year old! Boy, I miss that car.
Let’s just say that things have changed on the reliability front for BWM and other German cars since 1986.
Yep, my friend’s ’75 is SOLID. Don’t know if I could say the same of a 2000s-era one.
If you consider the German E28 lineup, with the cheaper, more sparsely equipped 518s and 520s we didn’t get, it’s not a ludicrous parallel: moderately upscale four- or six-cylinder middle-size family sedans for buyers willing to pay a premium for a posher badge. Strictly from a U.S.-market POV, of course, it’s pretty nonsensical.
The other big difference is that the E28 was a very conservatively designed and engineered car, not all THAT different from the earlier E3 (which actually got it a certain amount of criticism at the time). It was in that respect like GM taking the 1978 G-body and, rather than replacing it with an all-new FWD platform, instead given it a thorough detail update. So, in that respect, it’s apples to oranges.
I think the styling was awful. The grand prix was so plain and the Olds looked bizarre with the ugly roof. The Buick was most attractive, but still not an improvement over the g body. Thunderbird and cougar was way nicer.
The kind of thinking this writer shares with General Motors is why GM is a ghost of its former self. Yes, they had tremendous market share and, yes, a lot of people bought these cars including my own father. But their mediocrity in refinement and quality left the door WIDE open for the competition and it’s because of cars like these that were more engineered by the accounting department than anyone truly passionate about automotive engineering that the Camry is the car of choice today instead of the Chevrolet Malibu.
American car buyers have a long memory and many of them remember owning one of these or having access to them and then taking a ride in an Accord or Camry of the era. The difference in refinement is so pronounced with that horrible machine gun sound of the GM 2.8l V6 versus the smooooooth sound of the engine and the fine feel of the switchgear on the imports.
GM’s bad decisions combined with Americans’ long memories are why passenger car diesels don’t sell today in the US even though it’s been almost four decades since those horrible GM examples plagued their respective showrooms.
I would say that GM’s cars of today are completely competitive in every way but Pandora’s box is open, the cat’s out of the bag and the Camry continues to spank everybody else in terms of sales. And Toyota is listening to their customers and continuing to refine their cars. I’m no fan of the Camry, mind you, but just someone who studies the automotive world and sees how reality of the market works.
If you’re comfortable with where you are in the marketplace and not afraid that someone else is going to come along and take your place you’re not living in the real world. This was what defined GM of the 1980s-90s at GM with them just living with their success of the day with just okay products, leaving the door open for the competition. And that competition was happy to come right in, sit down and take a seat at the head of the table.
I would actually be really curious to see comparative data on GM quality through time. I see this common narrative that GM was so much better in the 1960s and 70s but fell apart in the ’80s. Certainly on the business side that’s absolutely true.
On the quality side, though? I’m not so sure.
I suspect if we were to look at GM quality through time, using familiar industry metrics like Things Gone Wrong, we’d see data showing us that GM cars in the 1980s overall were better engineered and better built than GM cars in the 1970s-certainly better than GM cars in the 1960s (probably better than any car from any company on Earth from the 1960s, honestly).
I suspect that what really did GM’s reputation in the 1980s wasn’t so much a decline in GM quality, but rather new competitors with higher-quality products combined with rapidly-shifting consumer expectations. GM was peddling styling that rapidly became out-of-date, a move that nearly killed Ford in the early 1980s when they were selling formal squared-off Thunderbirds and Mark VIs that look like they took Mark Vs and threw them in the dryer on High, so the style-conscious crowd was looking away anyway. Combine that with competitors that had fewer manufacturing defects from the start and good reputations by that point, and GM was already a bit behind the 8-ball.
If you build something people want and value, you’ll do ok. Ford did great through the 1980s, even though their quality (as they’d admit internally) was lagging Japanese competitors. But, Ford was also leading on style and other attributes people valued, so they still did well. GM, though? What part of automotive design-quality, style, interior packaging, performance-did GM lead on in the 1980s?
I think this is a fair point. As for ’60s quality, I’ve seen an awful lot of period reviews complaining that Chevrolet build quality was no longer what it was even by 1965, so I don’t know how good the good old days were. (The MAD parodies may be more revealing that respect!)
Build quality and reliability aren’t necessarily the same thing. Chevrolet build quality did decline in the mid-1960s. That doesn’t necessarily mean that reliability declined or declined. , too. Plus, mechanical problems related to sloppy assembly are often easier for the owner to correct than problems rooted in faulty engineering. Most Chevrolet components were well-proven by the 1960s.
There is another factor we have to consider when looking at GM as a whole in the 1960s and even the early 1970s. The individual divisions still had more control over their products. So people such as my parents, who had a less-than-stellar experience with a 1965 Chevrolet Bel Air, moved up to an Oldsmobile 88 for their next vehicle, and never looked back.
The problem was that, during the 1970s, as GM’s divisions increasingly shared major components, and lost control over the final assembly of their products, dissatisfied owners couldn’t necessarily escape shoddy products by switching to another GM division.
GM quality did decline during the 1980s. The corporation was redesigning its entire vehicle line-up, switching from rear-wheel-drive layouts to front-wheel-drive layouts. Couple that with the chaos engendered by Roger Smith’s corporate reorganization, the accountants trying to suck every bit of cost out of the new vehicles, and an overall blindness to the rising threat presented by Toyota and Honda, and it’s not surprising that GM’s quality fell during that decade.
That’s the beauty of metrics like Things Gone Wrong-they capture all of it, from people that aren’t clever enough to work their infotainment systems to engines that fail.
It’s easy to *say* their quality declined, but again, I’d need to see the data before I jumped on board. I don’t know if the data even exist-if they do I don’t know where to find them. But, given industry trends over time, it’s hard for me to believe GM took a dive. The gap likely widened between GM and the competition, but I doubt we’d see a trendline on a graph dip downward.
I owned three cutlass supremes. An 88, 90 and 97. The 88 was very unusual. It was a GFX. it had a ground effects package unlike any other model. They were very low to the ground. I had to be very careful going in and out of driveways or it would scrape. Good thing they were fiberglass, because I broke them ( front and rear ) more than once. I never could find any information on this model. It was all white, with red interior. It said GFX in 3 inch letters on the doors below the mirrors. I have seen only one other in all these years. May have been a promo by cars and concepts. I was the third owner, and was told it came from the dealership this way. It was a 2.8. But had a nice lope at idle. That little 2.8 could really go. Great 0 to 60 and top end speed. Fastest one of the three I had. Sure miss that one. The second one was a 90 international series 2 dr. Third was a 97 2 dr. None of them ever gave me any major problems. Although the 88 and the 90 I had to bring in to the local dealership on a recall to replace the cradle bolts and bushing cups .
IMO the problem with these cars and their W-Body siblings wasn’t so much the cars themselves (though there were some flaws) but rather how they compared to the competition. I still always thought the W-Body Oldsmobiles were nice-looking cars, the Buicks and Chevies not so much.
I always thought the Olds and the Pontiac were the best-styled of the Ws. I actually saw this beauty the other day in traffic and thought they’d chosen the wrong car for the weather (it was absolutely miserable out). I hadn’t seen one that clean in ages-no rust even! I actually saw an early W- Regal a couple days ago (also in staggeringly good condition!) coming out from getting my morning coffee. The Buick made a mess of the W platform-the design cues didn’t look quite right proportionally on that car. The Olds, though, I think was a real looker.
“The kind of thinking this writer shares with General Motors is why GM is a ghost of its former self. Yes, they had tremendous market share and, yes, a lot of people bought these cars including my own father. But their mediocrity in refinement and quality left the door WIDE open for the competition and it’s because of cars like these that were more engineered by the accounting department than anyone truly passionate about automotive engineering that the Camry is the car of choice today instead of the Chevrolet Malibu.”
With all due respect folks, these cars and so many other GMs of the 70s-90s won the Deadly Sin designation because GM KNEW BETTER.
30 years before, “mediocrity in refinement and quality” was NOT in their vocabulary. Instead, they led the the North American industry and everyone else had no choice but to follow.
They had their missteps of course, there was much trial and failure, but they never phoned it in. That came later, and when it did, all bets were off, decades of public trust were squandered and the competition gained the upper hand.
^ This. There is enough written evidence and first hand experience with GM’s products of the 80s and 90s to validate it’s not just anecdotal.
Part of GM’s history and the story of it’s decline. It’s not bashing because it’s true.
I have owned several of GM’s Deadly Sins. There is a reason for the blowback. I loved the cars, but I won’t claim they were superior or even equal to the competition.
Well, I have to disagree with most of you, at least about styling. I find the blue car in the second picture and the shiny orange car to be quite beautifully proportioned. I like the open, glassy, greenhouse, smooth body sides, tail lamps and integrated headlight, hood and bumper. I sat in one and found them very spacious inside. I can’t speak of any experience with the mechanicals but I do like the look.
I had a 91 lumina z34. I liked a lot about it, but the door mounted seat belts were awful. And that raspy exhaust became more embarrassing than anything else, especially when the car was cold. I won’t get into the quality issues, but I made sure to sell before 36k.
The V6 exhaust note. I asked myself at the time: ” GM “tuned” it to sound like that?”
An early Falcon farted like that under acceleration.
Nice write-up James. These cars certainly had their flaws, but styling definitely wasn’t one of them.
I inherited a late 80’s cutlass cierra off my grandpa in the early 2000’s. The binder of repair receipts that came with a car just turning 100 000 kms was a little shocking. I drove it for a couple of months until the thermostat gave up the ghost which required removing some of the exhaust system to replace and quickly put it up for sale. I managed to get a used boat and an 81 Ford econoline van with the money made off the sale. It seemed like a rocket ship by comparison to the 74 vw van I was driving at the time and the power windows and working heater and A/C were a treat. My nickname for it was the flying couch.
The W Cutlass saw the sealed beam headlamp’s last stand, with a unique and very pricey piece that only fit a handful of cars.
These could have been quite an attractive car, if the wheelarches were a bit smaller (closer to the actual tyre size) and shaped rather than being semicircular holes in the body. The rear one in particular looks awkward.
A curse of the GM-10 cars, and indeed most 1980s FWD GM products…
That had a lot to do with the tire-chain laws that were in place in the US at the time. They’ve since been relaxed, but then they were required to have an enormous amount of space around each wheel.
I bought a cream puff from the original owner when it was three years old. It was a great car until a tractor trailer illegally changed lanes in the Lincoln Tunnel and pinned me against the wall. The car was totaled, I was covered in glass, but fine.
I rented one of those “beautiful” ’88 Cutlasses while I was in LA for two weeks back in the summer of ’88. I couldn’t believe how delicate and poorly built the car was.
The driver’s side door pull broke off when I went to pull the door closed, there were squeaks and rattles, and a lot of road noise in the cabin.
The 2.8 V6 had merely adequate power, the steering was terribly numb and typically over boosted, stupid digi-dash instrumentation, fussy ergonomics and the brakes felt overworked in light traffic.
The seating comfort and visibility were the only accolades from a driving standpoint.
Every minute that I was behind the wheel of that cruddy Cutlass I became severely homesick for my ’86 BMW 325i. It’s not a very nice feeling to be separated from one’s BMW driving a horrible, poorly constructed car, like that Cutlass I suffered with.
As I understand it was the ’88 Cutlass that basically led to Olds’ slow but steady demise.
Ah yes, I had one of these! My then-fiancé had blown up the Chevette she used to drive (90k miles of neglect finally came to a head and it mercifully threw a rod). She needed wheels, so we went looking for a replacement that absolutely was NOT a Chevette. Her dad was a GM retiree (and is still kicking at age 84!) so that pretty much meant a model from the General.
We came across a 1989 Cutlass Supreme International that looked exactly like the one in the top picture, except that it was black instead of burgundy. It was pretty much loaded and decently priced. I helped her get it, married her 11 months later (just had our 23rd anniversary a few months ago), and we kept it for 4½ years until just before our firstborn was to arrive.
It had the VF dashboard and trip computer and electric everything. 16″ wheels, rear bucket seats (it was strictly a 4-seater), and alas the 2.8 V6. Another commenter called the exhaust note “throaty”. I more likened it to gargling with Listerine, which is a form of “throaty” I guess :-). 1989 was the last year, IIRC, for the 2.8, and although GM had finally worked all the bugs out of that one, it was undersized for a Supreme, and as a result, it never got more than 25 MPG, which kinda disappointing. It wasn’t overly quick, either, which was a blessing in disguise because the 4-wheel disc brakes weren’t as effective as they should have been (seems to be a recurring theme with W bodies).
We owned the car from 58k all the way to 121k and drove it everywhere. It was reliable, and a comfortable cruiser. It came with a 30-day warranty, and the engine control computer obliged by dying on day 28 of that warranty (whew!). I put a set of tires, battery, and an alternator on it, and that was it. Never had electrical problems considering it had power everything. However interior quality sucked. I kept a can of spray glue in the glove box to use on interior pieces that fell off! Even the plastic glove box door had to be cobbled together to keep it from falling apart!
I do believe if I had to do it over again, I might reach back for an 87 G-body.
Disagree with a few small points:
“The “BOP” front drive compacts debuted in 1988…” ?
Were not compact cars, but middies.
“The W’s were hot sellers…”
Not quite like GM’s decades long dominance in mid size class, and led to decline of market share. The old Buick/Olds A bodies ended up taking more sales til ’96. The price/volume leader Lumina never matched Camry/Accord/Taurus level sales, also. And Cutlass Supreme W body never got into the top 10 as the elder RWD models.
And, a minor quibble, “Chevrolet kept the Monte Carlo around for one extra year.”
The 1988 Monte Carlo and Cutlass Supreme Classic were an extra model year, but only built for a few months ended December 23, 1987. Last RWD model built was Buick Regal GN, which were still tagged 1987.
I rented one of these in 97 or 98.
I was actually kind of impressed with it.
Had decent power, rode well, sort of handled ok.
I caught myself thinking, I might be able to live with this car.
Then I remembered the nightmare GM products that my parents and grandparents owned and I got back home and hugged my Jetta tight.
The first GM product that I finally broke down and bought was a 1997 Buick Le Sabre. I bought it in 2005. Had about 60k on it. The previous owner was a mechanical engineer.
The documentation ‘folder’ was over 2 inches thick.
I knew that I was in trouble when I totaled up how much he had spent on keeping this car running. In his 8 years of owning the car, he had spent about $14,000 in maintenance/fixes on the car. Most of the money was for repairing things that should not have needed to be repaired on a low mileage, non-ancient vehicle.
I owned the car for 5 years and spent at least $1000/yr on keeping the darn thing running (not including general maintenance).
When it started eating radiator fluid at 110k, I finally had a good reason to escape GM hell.
The second was a 2010 Pontiac Vibe base model with Automatic transmission. I know it was really a Toyota, but it did have the Pontiac name. Thought I was getting a car I could pass down to my kid who was going to college in a few years. NOPE.
The car suffered from automatic acceleration issues.
Seriously, cruising down the highway and the car would suddenly act like I had floored it.
Or, driving down the road in lite traffic and the car would suddenly accelerate (as much as it could).
I could take my foot off of the gas and the car would keep on accelerating.
No floor mats in the car and the gas pedal was not stuck to the carpet. Heck, pushing or pulling on the pedal with my feet made no difference at all once the car decided to accelerate on its own.
The two fixes were to slam on the brakes and turn the car off once it stopped (but was still trying to accelerate) or to put it in neutral and slam it back into drive.
After Pontiac and Toyota told me that it was all in my head, I traded the car in. I owned it for about 7 months.
Every time I start lusting after a Corvette/Caddy Brougham, I think back to GM hell and I am cured from Corvette-itis…for a few days.
That Vibe was 100% Toyota in the drivetrain department and not the first time I have heard of these issues with either the Vibe or Matrix.
A bit surprised at the 1997 LeSabre being that bad. Besides the expected 3800 upper and lower intake manifold issues these H-body cars were generally pretty solid choices. Once the manifold was replaced and the lower gaskets re-sealed with upgraded components these engines were usually fine for many hundreds of thousand miles later. We have sold so many of these cars over the past 20 years it hurts my head to think about it. If anything these and the Park Aves were some of the more reliable vehicles in our fleet and many friends and family members had pretty favorable things to say about them.
“What I remember most about these W cars was the distinctive exhaust sound. ”
100% concur! One of the most distinctive sounds of my childhood was the sound of a 60deg GM V6 under acceleration. A rapid, chortling staccato that crescendo-ed then was silent as the trans shifted to high gear.
My Aunt’s 90 Beretta GT was like a spaceship to 4 year old me with that 3.1 V6 and its warbling exhaust.
My co-worker had this car’s twin brother, a 1988 two tone painted Grand Prix LE coupe in red/silver with the 2.8 and 4 speed automatic. They bought it brand new in October of 1987 and it replaced a rather troublesome Ford T-Bird of the early 1980’s. By the time I started working with him in 1997 the car was almost 10 years old and the wife gave him the car to use to go back and forth to work in which was 30 miles each way for him. In the 200K miles that he owned the car the only things of note that went wrong were the typical rear brake calipers and the overdrive 440 transmission was starting to slip off the line. Otherwise they loved it and his wife replaced it with a 1997 new style Grand Prix sedan in GT trim with the 3800 V6.
The 1997 GP did eventually need it’s intake manifold replaced but the brakes never gave any trouble and the newer 4T60 transmission never failed the entire time they owned the car. The 1997 went over 200K before it was wrecked by their daughter in a bad Winter storm sadly but thankfully she was okay. the car not so much. This was in 2009. They now have a Lincoln MKZ AWD sedan but still talk about those two Grand Prix’s and miss the sporty personality they conveyed.