1980 Buick Century - Is It Any Wonder GM Went Under?

I've had up close and personal "pit seats" to GM's remarkable decline in market share from 46% in 1980 to  less than 20% today. 

 

 

Much to Mom's consternation, Dad replaced his 1972 Cadillac with this 1980 Buick Century he bought, used, from a rental fleet company in 1982.

 

Now, there is no doubt that due to the influx of Asian and European makes throughout the 1980's that GM's once massive, near monopolistic share of the market would have shrunk significantly. However, more importantly, GM lost the bulk of that market share because they manufactured and sold cars like this 1980 Buick Century. A 1980 Buick Century that my World War II veteran father bought in 1982 to replace his 1972 Cadillac. It was just the latest in a long line of incredibly bad automobiles that my father had.

 

  

Please forgive the DeSuMa Deutscher SuperMarkt and the Euro tags. With only that picture at the top of this blog of my father's Buick, I had to find additional pictures of a 1980 Buick Century to illustrate this blog further. These pictures of a Century in Berlin, Germany, are all I could find.

 

When I was a wee little nipper growing up in the vast concrete and asphalt jungle of south Nassau, New York, vehicle break downs were a part of life. Not just for my father but it seemed everyone. Long Island roadways seemingly clogged with breaking down hulks or steaming, hood open calamaties on the side of the road; smoke and steam pouring out. One of my earliest childhood memories was of my father struggling to keep his Rambler alive because of a cracked engine block. The Ford Ranch Wagon he replaced it with having myriad electrical and mechanical issues; I remember it leaving us stranded on the Wantagh Parkway when the points wore out. My father flagging down someone who would then go to a service station to tell someone there that someone was stuck up on parkway. Life before cell phones and all. The Buick Electra and Cadillac DeVille that came after that (I guess he was doing better at work) offered no respite from unreliability. At least, one could argue, that those cars, including the wonky Rambler, had some semblance of romance to offset, to some degree, their awfulness. But that Century, every bit if not more so as horrible mechanically as anything he had before it, lacked even a shred of je ne se quois. 

 

This car is virtually identical inside and out to the Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan of the same vintage. This the embodiement of GM's famed "badge engineering".

 

That lack of mechanical reliability not to mention lack of elan or flair didn't bother my father as much as the lack of fuel economy that the V-6 powered Century delivered. Or didn't. After all, he bought the car Hertz' Used Car Sales lot on  Sunrise Highway for the wonderful mileage he thought it was going to afford him. The carbureted Buick V-6 with all of 110 horsepower and 190 foot pounds put out through a 2:29:1 rear end pushing a rolling brick of a car returned 12, maybe 13 miles per gallon in town. Certainly better than the 5 maybe 6 mpg the Cadillac gave him but still. I recall my father's enthusiasm when it returned 19 miles per gallon on a family traipse up to Mystic Seaport.  

 

The first Buick Century in 1936 was named such to denote the car's ability to accelerate to 100 miles per hour, or as they referred to England, "doing the Century". My Dad's Century was so underpowered that it struggled to get to 100 mph let alone do the century.

 

Then stuff stated breaking. With only a limited 12 month warranty from Hertz on the power train and thirty days on everything else, "everything else" started going on it the second those thirty days were up. The legend of GM "Metric" transmission failure being all true as well. At least that was covered. When the AC blew out on another trip I thought my brother and I would suffocate in the back since the rear windows did not go down. They didn't stop working, the rear door glass couldn't roll down since there wasn't any room in the door as the angle of the door was compromised by the rear quarter panels. When mom would light up a Pall Mall it was all we could do to not barf all over the "panty cloth" upholstery.

 

 

My Dad's Century had steel wheels not the alloys that this car has.  The rear wheels on my Dad's Century rusted onto the drums making them impossible to remove.

 

In addition to being unreliable and delivering mediocre at best fuel economy, the Century was not a good family car because it was just too small inside. The drive shaft "hump" taking up a remarkable amount of room in a car that was approximately the size of a modern day Buick LaCrosse; the LaCrosse's rear passenger compartment being as spacious as it is because of the space efficiency lent to it by being front wheel wheel drive. We missed the spaciousness of that Cadillac, that was for sure and we gave up a lot for the sake of fuel economy. Many American families did thirty, thirty five years ago. Many of those families then moving onto space efficient, fuel efficient, superbly engineered makes and models from Asia and beyond. Is it any wonder GM went under?

 

 

Going from a car as large as a 1972 Cadillac to one as small as this Buick Century always perplexed me. Seeing the apparent err in his ways, Dad replaced this Century with a 1979 Cadillac that proved to be every bit as mechanically unreliable as anything he had before. Including of course, this Century.

 

This picture was taken between February of 1982 and June of 1983, a sliver of time in my life when I had that red Comet parked behind my Dad's Century. When I replaced that Comet with my beloved Cordoba, my father quickly fell in love with the size of the Cordoba and the power of its 360 V-8. What's more, the Cordoba's fuel economy was not much worse than what the little Buick V-6 could muster. Not to be outdone, my father got rid of the Century and replaced it with (drum roll and fan fare, please) another Cadillac (a 1979) that was, no surprise, every bit the hunk of junk anything he had before it was. BTW, if you look closely at this photograph you can see my father behind the wheel of his Buick Century.