1991 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser - Seriously Passé

Station wagons would get a seriously large wing in my "Jay Leno" garage. While not nearly as large as wings housing my coupes, pony and muscle cars, station wagons would get a big shed because they're cool in ways that the four-door sedans they're usually based on are simply not. And we could go on and on as to why that is too. Bottom line, you either "get" station wagons like this 1991 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser or you don't. 

This over-sized Tylenol on alloy-rims has been popping up in my "cheap-car" search for several weeks now. For sale about an hour north of Columbus, Ohio for an retina-searing $6,400, it has one-hundred fifteen thousand miles on its rapidly approaching thirty year old odometer. Seeing what it is and what the asking price, looks like the current owner paid way too much for it, it's not hard to fathom why it's been for sale as long as it has. Even at a third of the cost, which is a fair amount given that KBB.com values this at under $1,000, selling something so old and of such limited appeal is a tough putt. 

General Motors upsized their full-size, rear-wheel-drive "B-bodies" for 1991 with a questionable redesign of the Chevrolet Caprice and a somewhat less odd-looking Buick they called "Roadmaster"; rebooting the once hallowed Buick top-of-the-line nameplate from 1936-1959. Cadillac got a longer-wheelbase version of the B-body for 1993, the "C-body" and they christened it, "Fleetwood Brougham" -  which was not be confused with the Cadillac "Brougham" or the "Fleetwood". Curiously, Pontiac didn't get a new big "B" and neither did Oldsmobile save for our station wagon here they called "Custom Cruiser". Then as now, I wonder why they didn't call it "Vista Cruiser" harkening back to the great Oldsmobile wagons of yore like Buick did. Seeing that back then most people didn't custom order their new car there was little that was custom from the factory about this. 

Chevrolet and Buick got wagons versions of the freshly bulked-up "B" as well. Cadillac, of course, didn't, otherwise it would be a factory built hearse, right?, but one of the oddest things about the Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser was that it wasn't based on a "B-body" Oldsmobile sedan like the Chevrolet and Buick wagons were. Struck me as odd back then that GM went through the trouble of putting this together to say nothing of upsizing the B-body in the first place. Oldsmobile had the Silhouette mini-van and the Bravada SUV so who knows what GM was thinking with this thing. 

Sales of Custom Cruisers, not surprisingly, were dreadful. Oldsmobile sold just 7,663 for 1991 and 4,347 in 1992. Based on those numbers GM pulled the plug on the Custom Cruiser for 1993 leaving the ever shrinking, full-size, rear-wheel-drive station wagon market to Chevrolet and Buick. Ford had given up the fight on these things after 1991 although they soldiered on through 2003 with a Taurus based wagon. 

Station wagons were once a bastion of the domestic automobile market. I recall no less than ten "wagons" owned by families in the neighborhood I grew up on back on Long Island back in the 1970's. Including mine. However, with Chrysler's introduction of the K-Car based mini-van in 1984, the once mighty wagon market rapidly began to dissolve. With the homogenization of trucks as family-haulers through the 1980's and 1990's, station wagons became seriously passé if not antiquated. 

The biggest issue with station wagons wasn't that mini-vans and SUV's really did anything better than they did; the issue was image. Years ago, nothing said "Mom-mobile" (as a pejorative) like a station wagon did and the settled-down, "family" image they conveyed schlepped a less-than-hip image as well. When Mom and Dad had a date night, they'd leave the Country Squire in the garage and tooled around in the Grand Prix. For the record, those would have been my dream parents. My family had one car - mom never learned to drive and dad wasn't a car guy. Today's crossovers do everything station wagons did including having the cache that personal luxury cars had years ago. 

The owner brags in the ad for the car that this can seat up to eight - which is one to two more passengers than most of today's giant people movers can sit comfortably save for actual full-size vans. He doesn't mention if the eight church members he discusses driving one Sunday morning were actually happy campers being hammed in hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder, even in the front seat. Hope they had a negative Covid test and that they were all wearing facemasks. 

As big as these wagons were, the farther back your seating the more pinched things got too. These god-forsaken rear facing jumpers, which look like they're straight out of an episode of the "Brady Bunch", are about as supportive as a park bench. Hey, there is the added benefit of seeing the whites of the eyes of the driver who rear ends you. Don't forget to buckle up otherwise you'll hurtle through the tailgate glass like a gymnast when the car gets hit/ 

Can't say I'd ever buckle up in this one - especially given its price and mileage. A 1991-1996 Buick Roadmaster Estate, especially one with the Corvette LT-1 based engine? That's a different story. The wife would kill me regardless even if I brought this home at a third of the asking price. Perhaps you can luck out and talk the owner down. Way down.