Vintage C/D Review: 1969 Oldsmobile Cutlass S W-31 – “The Difference Between Transportation And A Trip”

 

Writing in CARS in 1968, Roger Huntington had demonstrated the effectiveness of the Oldsmobile Force-Air induction system on the hot Olds W-31 350 engine, but how did it actually run? Car and Driver tested a W-31 Cutlass in March 1969 and proclaimed it “complete soul, all the difference between transportation and a trip.”

One could accuse the Car and Driver staff of the 1960s of many things — flights of florid excess, outrageous stunts, unprovoked hatchet jobs — but editorial consistency was not one of them. Consider this opening paragraph:

Motorists the world over, here is a collectors’ item—an Oldsmobile! Improbable as it may seem, incredible as it might sound, the Geritol Brigade from Lansing has managed to build a car America has been waiting for. And this has to be a seven-point-on-the-Richter-Scale shock to every one of you who thinks an Oldsmobile is something you buy if your checking account is too fat for a Pontiac, but not quite up to a Buick. Erase the 4-door Luxury Sedan—whose excitement quotient rivals three uninterrupted hours of Vivaldi chamber music—from your Oldsmobile stereotype.

If you step around the inexplicable swipe at Vivaldi (Antonio Vivaldi, composer of The Four Seasons), you might assume from this that C/D had never tested an Oldsmobile before, at least not one that they liked, which of course they had. Maybe whoever penned this unbylined opus hadn’t seen the earlier tests, or maybe they figured it didn’t matter.

In sharp contrast to the earlier C/D Opel Kadett assassination stunt, this review is so effusive in its praise that you have to break out the picks and shovels to unearth any basic facts. Four paragraphs in, the text belatedly gets around to explaining that the test Cutlass “is nothing more than Oldsmobile’s version of General Motors’ intermediate-size A-body, in which all 2-door hardtops are built on a compact 112-inch wheelbase with an overall length just under 202 inches.” That’s a start, but if you didn’t have a 1969 Olds brochure or dealer SPECS guide handy, you might get the wrong idea about the model on test. In 1969, a Cutlass S was simply any two-door A-body (pillared Sports Coupe, pillarless Holiday Coupe, or convertible) in the mid-level trim series, which was a bit plusher than the base F-85, not as plush as the Cutlass Supreme. Other than whatever sporty impression the fastback shape created, the Cutlass S itself had no particular performance pretensions. You could even order it with a six, although most buyers ordered the Rocket 350 V-8, almost always with either the two-speed Jetaway automatic or the new three-speed Turbo Hydra-Matic 350. In this form, the Cutlass S was a typical domestic intermediate, a car of average performance, soft ride, and mediocre handling.

 

The test car’s entire claim to soul, as C/D put it, lay in a rather pricey option package. The core of this package was RPO W31, a $310.69 option that included the much hotter Ram Rod 350 engine and a cold-air induction system that Olds called Force-Air, plus some paint stripes on the hood. With this, you also had to order dual exhaust ($30.23), a heavy-duty radiator ($15.80), one of three heavy-duty performance axle options, a limited-slip differential ($42.13), and one of the optional transmissions (your choice of Ford-made heavy-duty three-speed manual ($84.26), close- or wide-ratio four-speed ($184.80), or TH350 ($205.92)). Both Car and Driver and Car Life seemed to think that the W-31 package included the heavy-duty suspension from the Olds 4-4-2 supercar, but the brochure and SPECS guide are vague about that, and the C/D data panel lists a “sport suspension” as a separate $13.27 option, with the comparatively fat F70-14 raised white letter belted tires adding another $89.52. In sum, the whole set ran you at least $586 on top of the $2,838 list price of a Cutlass S V-8 Holiday Coupe (two-door hardtop) — and over $700 with TH350. (You could save $63 by ordering all this on a pillared Cutlass S Sports Coupe, or $183 by forgoing the Cutlass trim for the cheaper F-85 Sports Coupe.)

Such minutiae was just how things worked in Detroit in those days, but C/D asserted that the W-31 package:

… also stands for what may very well be this country’s best sports sedan. It may even be that the Cutlass is one of the best GT cars ever built this side of the Atlantic River. It is not hard to imagine the Olds equally at home on an Autostrada, 1-75 or Route 40 through the Donner Pass, and there’s not a treacherous bolt in its body.

In fairness, a minority report filed by the technical editor calls attention to the fact that the Cutlass would put every sports sedan (in the European sense) on the trailer before breakfast, and petitions strongly against a great injustice by limiting its appeal.

Speaking of short editorial memory, the claim that the W-31 Cutlass would be “equally at home on an Autostrada” immediately brings to mind a certain C/D feature two years earlier that tested a Pontiac Le Mans Sprint in Europe, with decidedly unimpressive results. That test had been the brainchild of some Pontiac PR genius rather than the C/D staff, but either no one involved had learned their lesson or, more likely, C/D figured the hyperbole made for good copy whether or not it made any sense, as with their later comparison of a 1973 Olds Cutlass Salon with a Mercedes-Benz 450SE. (Incidentally, I think the technical editor mentioned in the text was longtime C/D stalwart Patrick Bedard, who joined the magazine a year or so before this issue appeared.)

 

In any case, the real focus of the W-31 package was the engine. If your knowledge of these older GM engines is hazy, you should be understand that the Oldsmobile Rocket 350 was not the same engine as the more familiar Chevrolet 350, or the Buick or Pontiac V-8s of the same nominal displacement; in those days, each division still designed and manufactured most of its own engines, although corporate policy forced them into similar displacements. The Oldsmobile 350 was particularly oversquare (its stroke-to-bore ratio was only 0.834), and around 40 lb heavier than a Chevrolet Turbo-Fire 350. In standard form, the Olds Rocket 350 wasn’t what you’d call hairy, but the W-31 Ram Rod 350 had the bigger intake and exhaust valves from the larger Olds Rocket 455, a bigger Quadrajet carburetor, a de-clutching fan, and a much hotter camshaft with 308 degrees’ intake and exhaust duration and 0.474-inch lift. Car and Driver was over the moon about this:

According to the technical editor, “it has lots of cam,” which no one can dispute. Lots of lift and lots of duration and all of the attendant joys and evils that that kind of excess entails. Three hundred and fifty quivering cubic inches of soul at its normal 700 rpm idle and the shift lever jitters away beside your knee like Hurst had the palsy. Listen to the exhaust. It’s music—like Big Brother and The Holding Company were having a session at the far end of those pipes, never hitting the same note twice in an unending series of combinations. Only one tenth the volume, but the same sound you hear from a Group 7 racer warming up in the pits. Irresistible aluminum and forged steel intrigue. All the while, those who appreciate the subtleties of engine design savor thoughts of long-duration cam lobes opening the exhaust valves early in the exhaust stroke, while the pressure is still high so the hot gasses can explode into the pipes in great cascading waves. Since both valves are held open simultaneously for an abnormally long time during the overlap period, it is an indecision on the part of the burned charge as to which valve to use for exit that causes the random idle. We could love the whole car for its camshaft alone.

 

 

Oldsmobile conservatively rated the W-31 engine at 325 gross horsepower, but in the aforementioned CARS article, Roger Huntington had calculated its actual net output at the clutch as 310 hp at 6,000 rpm. With late ’60s technology, this kind of specific output came at some cost, as Car and Driver observed:

Don’t expect the W-31 to have the docile temperament of a work horse. It is always civil but not without character as you would expect of a medium displacement engine in this state of tune. Since it doesn’t produce much energy at low speeds the wide-ratio transmission is the best solution for stop and start driving. … Although the W-31 is great fun to drive, everyday Oldsmobile drivers may find it is a bit too nervous at low speeds. You have to feather the clutch to get launched, and once under way it chugs and bucks when you try to idle along in gear. This is one of the evils of that camshaft, but then there are the good times, too. Once the tach needle reaches the four digit numbers the problems are over. Everything goes quiet—the calm before the storm. The storm arrives at 3600 rpm. leaving no doubt that all of the off-idle weakness is a small price to pay. You know it is a new generation Oldsmobile when the tach will buzz right up to its 6000 rpm redline with such willingness.

You might be wondering why Oldsmobile would bother offering this engine when for less money, customers could just buy an Olds 4-4-2, which shared the same bodies and chassis, but had a Rocket 400 V-8 with 50 more cubic inches of displacement, making the same or greater nominal power as the high-strung 350 with less fuss and only a little more weight. As the text on the previous page alluded, the hot 350 was intended mostly as an insurance dodge. Oldsmobile marketing was surprisingly upfront about this: The 1969 “W Machines” brochure said outright that W-31 was tailored to avoid triggering the punishing surcharges auto insurance companies had begun imposing on high-performance cars, so that “insurance is cheaper and easier to get.”

 

In any case, C/D liked it a lot, and they also liked the chassis:

If we are enthusiastic about the powertrain in the Cutlass, then we are completely smitten with its handling. It is superb—easily the best compromise between ride and handling we’ve ever found in a sedan. No bouncing, floating or pitching and no cringing in your seat when a chuck hole looms. Most people don’t realize that shock absorbers can be too hard as well as too soft, but Oldsmobile does and they’ve picked that exact area in the middle which makes everything right. But this is only part of the car’s handling virtue. Even with 56.5 percent of its weight on the front wheels, the Cutlass has a fine balance that is almost never found outside of 2-passenger sports cars—neither understeering nor oversteering, but responding instantly to the driver’s minutest correction. The Cutlass will drive around pebbles in a corner at speeds that would confront some of its competitors with a lie-down posture and would have them grinding off the letters on their front tire sidewalls. All of this is no coincidence because the W-31 now shares the 4-4-2’s suspension components. You can recognize the handling Oldsmobiles instantly from the rear. If the one you are following down the road has a rear anti-sway bar sweeping across the car just below the rear axle don’t even bother to try to keep up if you’re not driving expensive Italian or expensive German. The only improvement we would suggest would be variable ratio power steering which is not available in the Cutlass. The standard power steering (called Roto-Matic. which shows that all the old style product describers haven’t been turned out to pasture) requires 4.25 turns lock-to-lock which is too slow for our tastes.

In most respects, the Olds A-body sport suspension followed the usual Detroit heavy-duty suspension practice of cranking up the spring rates to keep the body under control and the axle in line. This suspension’s main claim to fame, borrowed from the “Police Apprehender” equipment from which this chassis was originally derived, was adding an 0.875-inch rear anti-roll bar, which increased the rear tires’ slip angles enough to mitigate the relentless understeer that U.S. automakers of this era generally considered an essential safety feature.

 

With a decent coordination of spring and damping rates, this approach made for tidy handling on smooth pavement or a test track. Grip wasn’t abundant with the F70-14 tires, especially on wet pavement, but if you were brave and had plenty of room, you could hang out the tail and drift through a turn. C/D didn’t discuss how the test car fared on broken pavement, but their previous European expedition with the Pontiac Le Mans Sprint had revealed the limitations of the American “when in doubt, clamp it down” school of chassis design: a loss of composure on rough surfaces and a harsh ride on anything but fresh, even tarmac, a consequence of the car’s substantial unsprung weight. As C/D admitted, the Olds heavy-duty suspension also suffered severe axle tramp in panic stops.

Brakes were a weak point of the A-body F-85/Cutlass generally, and the W-31 package made things worse. C/D explained that “one of the evils of that lovely camshaft is that it reduces manifold vacuum at idle below the minimum required for power assist.” Since Oldsmobile was reluctant to offer front disc brakes without power, this meant that you were stuck with the standard unassisted 9.5-inch cast iron drums, in a car with a curb weight of 3,650 lb and enough power to top 120 mph. The results were disheartening:

The very best stop we could manage from 80 mph required 305 feet (0.70G) and most stops were far longer. Almost every braking problem was represented: premature rear wheel lock-up, rapid fade and a kind of non-uniformity of performance which caused certain wheels, particularly the right rear, to lock up well in advance of the rest of the team.

 

C/D claimed that the W-31 package could be ordered with non-power front discs, which I’m not sure was actually true. Around this same time, Car Life tested a W-31 Cutlass equipped with unassisted disc/drum brakes, which had much greater stopping power (they recorded a deceleration rate of 30 ft/s², 0.94G), but also much higher pedal effort and similar problems with rear lockup. However, their test car was apparently some kind of engineering test mule, and the Car Life editors said that Oldsmobile engineers didn’t yet know if either the unassisted discs or an experimental brake booster they were working on would actually be offered to the public. Both the W-machines brochure and SPECS suggest that the eventual answer was no. Buyers at this time seldom ordered discs if they weren’t standard — the take rate on 1969 Olds intermediates was only 10.7 percent — but not even having the option was grim.

 

Although you could dress up a Cutlass S fairly nicely, you had to dip into the options list if you wanted it to be any fancier or sportier than the usual secretarial pool Cutlass. In particular, bucket seats, which were standard on the 4-4-2 (and convertibles), were an extra $68.46 on a Cutlass S.

Car and Driver acceleration times have almost always been quicker than those recorded by other magazines — sometimes due to more aggressive technique, sometimes due to hand-waving approximation (hand-held stopwatch times against allegedly corrected speedometer readings), sometimes due to dubious stunts. Their 2.2-second 0 to 30 mph time strains credulity: By their own description, this was a peaky engine in a heavy car with a middling (3.42) axle ratio, which is not a recipe for strong launches. I would buy the quarter mile time (14.5 seconds at 97.2 mph) if it was recorded by drag strip timing lights with one aboard — the W-31 engine had a lot of power, and the Force-Air system added more at higher speeds. Car Life, testing a W-31 Cutlass with TH350 and 3.91 axle, managed 14.9 seconds at 96.0 mph with two aboard, and in CARS the previous summer, Roger Huntington clocked a well-prepared F-85 W-31 with some mild alterations (remapped spark advance, tubular steel headers, a 4.66 axle, Super Stock tires) that broke into the low 13s. The power was there, just not so much off the line; Car Life‘s 6.6-second 0 to 60 mph time sounds more plausible than the 6 seconds flat Car and Driver reported.

 

As for the 132 mph estimated top speed, I’m skeptical: Despite its power, the A-body was pushing a big wall of air at higher speeds, and the C/D data panel says their highest actual test speed was 115 mph. On the other hand, Car Life claimed to have pulled 128 mph at 6,600 rpm on the Orange County Raceway with 3.91 gears, so, maybe? The thought of stopping from such speeds with the unassisted drums seems like a strong deterrent to further explorations in that area, however.

 

The as-tested price, $4,102.23, is rather daunting for a “junior supercar,” as Olds called the W-31; per MeasuringWorth, that’s about $35,537 adjusted, with a relative value of $39,200 in January 2025 dollars. I assume someone ordering a W-31 econo-racer in 1969 would probably skip a lot of the accessory groups and deluxe molding dress-up stuff, but that idea never seemed to compute for automaker press relations departments, keen to ensure that press cars would photograph well. Starting with an F-85 Sports Coupe and strictly limiting the non-performance options would return a price more like $3,400.

 

The C/D test car had the Olds “Rocket Rally Pac,” an $84.26 option that included coolant temperature and oil pressure gauges in the leftmost pod and a concentric tachometer and clock in the right-hand pod. As the photo below reveals, the tunneled binnacles may have reduced reflections, but didn’t make the instruments very easy to see.

 

With the passage of time, topical references can risk becoming impenetrable: The text’s “Dr. Haddon” was the late William Haddon Jr., M.D., the Harvard-trained injury epidemiologist who was the first head of the National Highway Safety Bureau, predecessor of the modern NHTSA. At the time of this article, he had just resigned to become president of the Insurance Industry for Highway Safety, but in his previous role, Haddon was directly responsible for the original U.S. federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards — including FMVSS 201, which required interior padding to protect occupants in interior impacts.

 

The separate high- and low-level ventilation systems that earned C/D‘s cautious praise were actually two separate options on the 1969 F-85/Cutlass, called Flow-Thru and Forced-Air (not to be confused with the Force-Air ram induction system). GM was still feeling its way with flow-through ventilation in this era, making the deletion of vent windows from hardtop body styles seem premature. Incidentally, the woodgrain trim on the C/D car was also optional, a $10.53 extra the black car in the color photos doesn’t have.

I think Car and Driver was right about the institutional schizophrenia at Oldsmobile. General manager Harold Metzel and chief engineer John Beltz had given Olds more verve than Metzel’s predecessor Jack Wolfram would have ever tolerated, but Oldsmobile advertising in this period was frankly embarrassing, and Olds sporty cars remained slow-selling second-stringers, although they earned respect where they did show up. The 98 Luxury Sedan the anonymous C/D writer had sneered at in the opening paragraph was really more the division’s sweet spot.

As C/D predicted, the W-31 was rare. The alleged “hordes of youthful, car-loving buyers clamoring for 6000-rpm valve trains, deep axle ratios, and all manner of lusty-but-frowned-upon-in-the-higher-circles devices” failed to materialize; Olds had built just 742 W-31 cars for 1968, and would build only 913 for 1969, followed by 1,352 for 1970, its final year.

 

Verve or not, the W-31 was really too specialized for most customers, even the performance-minded Youth Market, and I’m pretty sure the insurance-beater strategy didn’t work for long. (Actuaries and insurance adjusters may or may not have soul, but they can read, and the performance thresholds that would trigger prohibitive insurance surcharges kept getting tighter — the biggest single culprit in the demise of the muscle car market in the early 1970s.)

Meanwhile, Olds sold 56,616 Ninety-Eight Luxury Sedans for 1969 and another 48,382 for 1970 — while a new recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons from violinist Alan Loveday and Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields (conducted by Neville Marriner) went gold, selling half a million copies on Decca’s UK Argo label in the early ’70s. It is of course a very different mood than the lope of a high-overlap cam backed by Janis Joplin and Big Brother & The Holding Company, but it’s not bad driving music at that.

Related Reading

Curbside Classic: 1968 Oldsmobile 4-4-2 — A Hot Number (by Paul N)
CC Capsule: 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass S Coupe And Speed Boat: Suddenly It’s 1973 (by Paul N)
Cohort Outtake: 1969 Olds 442 Convertible – Can I Borrow It (Or The Buick) For The Weekend? (by Paul N)
Pontiac Ram Air II, Oldsmobile Force-Air Induction, Chevrolet Cowl Induction – Did These Ram Induction Systems Actually Increase Power? (by me)