Curbside Classic: 1974 Oldsmobile 98 Regency Coupe – A Car With A Dress Code (And A Drinking Problem)

 

Kind words from me about a ’70s land yacht might suggest a cold snap in the infernal realms, but I was grudgingly impressed by this handsome Energy Crisis-era flagship from Lansing, which left me thinking about the social position of the Olds 98 Regency and the kind of people bought them when they were new.

I was browsing recently through the Curbside Cohort Flickr group and came upon some nice photos by Hyperback, alias CC contributor Slant Six, of a well-preserved 1974 Oldsmobile 98 Regency hardtop. I was going to write something about that car, only to belatedly realize that he’d already done so back himself back in July.

 

Still, the 98 Regency stuck in my head for some reason. I am not one for land yachts and mostly think the ’70s were where style and taste went to die, but I had to admit this was a handsome if imposing beast, with its one-year-only dual “waterfall” grilles giving it a bit more Oldsmobile character, if that makes any sense.

 

I found a sale listing for another, equally well-preserved 1974 98 Regency, which despite its different color combination made a similar impression. This is not my kind of car, but it exudes such confidence that it surely must have been someone’s kind of car: tasteful, within its idiom; very conservative; neither ostentatious nor overly humble; and very particular in its preferences and limits of tolerance.

 

If ever a car imposed a dress code on its occupants, it would surely be this Olds, perhaps enforced by some sort of ignition interlock, like the unpopular seat belt interlocks that appeared by federal mandate around this time. This Regency wouldn’t gladly tolerate late-night snack runs in T-shirts and pajama pants — if it could, it would surely lock its doors, cut off power to the ignition switch, and sulk in the driveway until you went back inside and got properly dressed (and would it kill you to fix your hair?). Unlike a Rolls-Royce or other really expensive car, which tended to be owned by people who were actually rich and/or upper-class, and could therefore get away with a little slovenly eccentricity, senior Oldsmobiles were the province of the merely very affluent, who always had to be concerned with what the neighbors would think.

 

I discovered that throughout the ’70s, Oldsmobile advertised the 98 Regency quite often in Ebony magazine. Here’s a 1973 ad featuring Eddie G. Robinson (1919–2007), longtime coach of the Grambling Tigers, the football team of historically black Grambling College (now Grambling State University) in Louisiana:

 

Those ads further hone the picture of the target audience for this car: respectable middle-class community figures, white or Black — football coaches, senior bank managers, local business leaders, city aldermen, reverends — who needed to convey an image of solid, trustworthy success, and for whom a Cadillac would have seemed a little too flashy. There was nothing at all flashy about the 98 Regency, even with this car’s bright red “Burgundy Laredo” upholstery, and it lacks even the slightest hint of sportiness. (“Save it for the field, boys!”)

 

 

The 98 Regency debuted in 1972 as a limited edition to celebrate Oldsmobile’s 75th anniversary. It was a cross-promotional effort with the jeweler Tiffany & Company, with “Tiffany Gold” metallic paint, a Tiffany clock on the dashboard, and a sterling silver Tiffany key ring for the special Regency ignition key.

 

Regency became a regular Olds Ninety-Eight sub-model for 1973, and a sub-series for 1974, when a two-door hardtop (Regency Coupe) joined the existing four-door Regency Sedan. These were the most expensive Ninety-Eight models that year, selling 35,029 units, only 10,719 of those the two-door. Buyers with small children might have favored two-doors in this pre-child-seat era, but this seems like a car whose back seat was more likely to carry golf partners, business clients, or fellow Rotary Club members, who probably preferred not to stoop and bend so much getting in or out.

 

I found no contemporary road tests of the 1974 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight. Buff book editors (and quite a few buff book readers) of this period were increasingly contemptuous of cars like this, and few automotive editors were inclined to waste column inches on them that could be more profitably filled with hysterical agitprop about the terrors of government regulation. (True, no one liked the seat belt interlock, but watching car magazine editors of this era come out swinging in defense of leaded gasoline was simply embarrassing.) Worse, the 1974 models had the misfortune to arrive just weeks before the OPEC embargo and resulting Energy Crisis, which was already well underway by the time this car was built in January 1974, making cars like the 98 Regency seem terribly out of step with the times.

 

However, Motor Trend had previously done a comparison test of the 1972 Ninety-Eight, Buick Electra 225, and Mercury Marquis (see GN’s earlier Vintage Review), from which we can extrapolate a bit. That test’s Olds 98 two-door hardtop recorded a 0 to 60 mph time of 8.7 seconds, with the quarter mile in 16.3 seconds at 86.2 mph, quite good for such a behemoth, but its 455 cu. in. (7,450 cc) four-barrel V-8 guzzled gasoline at the rate of 11 miles to the U.S. gallon. By 1974, the Ninety-Eight had gained 222 lb, due largely to the new 5-mph bumpers, while the big Olds V-8 had lost 15 net horsepower, which undoubtedly did little to enhance either acceleration or fuel economy. (The Ninety-Eight could be ordered with dual exhausts, which gave the 1974 Ninety-Eight 230 hp, five more horsepower than in ’72, but it doesn’t appear that either of these Regency Coupes has that option.) The numbers with which Lansing was more immediately concerned were 3.4, 39, and 3.0, which were the 1974 federal emissions limits for hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and oxides of nitrogen, respectively, measured in grams per vehicle mile; the HC and CO limits were about to be tightened significantly for 1975, to 1.5 and 15 grams per mile.

 

The oil crisis added a new wrinkle, which sent Ninety-Eight production plummeting from 139,324 units in 1973 to 73,417 in MY1974. During Senate hearings in July 1975, Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge admitted that the embargo had prompted him to park his own six-year-old Olds 98 in favor of “the smallest Cutlass I could find,” although Talmadge told GM president Pete Estes that he was very disgruntled to find that the 1974 Cutlass got even worse mileage. Estes assured him that the 1975 models, which would adopt catalytic converters to meet the tougher HC and CO limits, would have much better fuel economy, but the EPA’s 1975 Gas Mileage Guide for New Car Buyers credited the 455-engined Olds Ninety-Eight with a meager 12 mpg city, 16 mpg highway on the rather optimistic early EPA cycle.

 

Sales rebounded a little for 1975, to 82,395, and a bit more for 1976, but it took the arrival of the more efficient downsized 1977 models to really restore the Ninety-Eight’s commercial momentum. 1977 production hit 146,515 units, more than four-fifths of those of the Regency.

 

This was the tightrope upper-middle-class cars like this had to walk in this era: Customers in this segment didn’t want to appear too concerned with cost (the price tag for a 1974 98 Regency Coupe started at a hefty $5,404, with the tab for a loaded example like this running to more like $6,500), but at the same time, they couldn’t necessarily afford to appear too unconcerned about obvious profligacy, lest it send the wrong message to constituents, business partners, parishioners, or trustees. (Both middle-class drinking and a certain amount of middle-class graft might be overlooked if handled discreetly, but unseemly extravagance could be risky even for someone who didn’t have their hand in the till.)

 

Prior to the 1977 downsizing, the 98 Regency sold in relatively modest numbers by GM or Oldsmobile standards, but both of the examples pictured here seem like cars that the original owners could have lived with, as the Ebony ad said, “for a long, long time” — probably garaged, and likely washed and waxed more frequently than most. (As always, some exceptions apply.) A 98 Regency owner might have smoked in their car (many people still did in 1974), but they probably wouldn’t have tolerated greasy fast food detritus or muddy sneakers on their cut-pile carpeting.

After all, this just wasn’t that kind of car, even if it did have a drinking problem.

Related Reading

Curbside Classic: 1974 Oldsmobile Regency 98, 2-Door Hardtop – The Great White Olds (by Slant Six)
Vintage M/T Review: 1972 Buick Electra 225, Mercury Marquis & Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight – Motor Trend Evaluates The Upper Middle Heavyweights (by GN)
Curbside Classic Capsule: 1972 Oldsmobile 98 Coupe – A Cheaper Coupe DeVille (by Paul N)
Curbside Classic: 1972 Oldsmobile 98 Hardtop Coupe – “Not Just Another Pretty (Huge) Car” (by Longrooffan)