My wife and I leased one of these shortly after we were married in the early summer of 1992. Flush with extra cash from a job promotion, I jumped at the chance to ditch the wretched 1990 Pontiac Sunbird GT she had bought straight out of graduate school three years prior. That dreadful lump deserves a diatribe of it's own but for today, I'll wax-nostalgic about that little coupe that was, save for the white paint and "High Output" version of the Quad4, all but identical to our subject here which I found for sale recently during one of my cheap car searches. This car was listed, and I kid you not, at just under twelve-thousand dollars. That's an absurd amount of money for this non-descript, oh-so-1990's-piece of Oldsmobilia. Yes, it has only forty-three thousand some odd miles on the odometer but still, twelve grand for this??
While the idea of getting rid of the Sunbird was my idea, it was my wife who chose an Achieva because she liked the looks of it. For an an early 1990's GM anything it was a good if not terrific design with a cohesiveness that bespoke of a singular designer versus a car drawn by committee. With the sports-tuned suspension ours had, after all, "SC" denotes sports coupe, it had a compliant ride and handled quite well. While I preferred the Buick built 3.3 liter V-6 that was optional, we skipped it to save some a couple of bucks for one with the one-hundred and sixty horsepower version of the Quad4.
I had bought into the mystique of the Quad4 lock, stock and barrel going back to its introduction on the Achieva's predecessor, the Oldsmobile Calais. Supposedly a world-class power-plant that was GM's first dual-overhead-camshaft, sixteen-valve four-cylinder engine since the Cosworth Vega's little twin-cammer back in the mid 1970's, on the test drive it didn't disappoint. Our Achieva weighed less than three-thousand pounds and seemingly didn't want for power but, then again, we tend to test drive cars differently than we drive them when we own them. Our Quad4 powered Achieva felt brisk compared to the ninety-horsepower Sunbird and while it didn't have quite the snap off the line my 3.1-liter V-6 powered 1990 Chevrolet Lumina Euro had, it made up for it by being far more responsive on the highway.
Of course I did the copious research I do now prior to purchasing a car after we got it and found that while critics applauded the Quad4"s robust power-to-displacement ratio, they panned the noise it made and the tractor-engine like thrashing and vibrations that came when revved near its redline. Yup, totally agree with that although it wasn't quite as obvious as they'd made it out to be. There was a "bomminess" to the Quad4 when you really got on it, that noise exacerbated by our Achieva's lacking-an-drive three-speed automatic transmission. Yes, a three-speed automatic on an early '90's car. Consumer Reports also noted it had a dubious reputation for blowing head-gaskets. Head-gaskets? The hell is a head-gasket? Isn't that something that only old-timey cars have? Surely modern cars don't have anything as archaic and colloquial sounding as a "head gasket". Well, they do.
Near the end of interminably long, forty-eight month "Smart Lease", my wife called me to tell me that there was a plume of white smoke trailing her while she drove the Achieva to and from her job. Her commute was maybe ten miles each way. To make matters worse, she said the temperature gauge was "in-the-red" and that the usually peppy car had "no-pickup". Seeing it was a lease and still under warranty, I called the dealership where we got it and a tow-truck showed up the next morning to haul it away.
Couple of days later I got the ominous call that the "head-gasket was blown" and worse yet, the head was warped and there was a possibility the block was cracked. The first all-in estimate for repairs was around twenty-seven hundred dollars. Worse case with a total engine replacement was north of five-grand. Suffice to say, my wife and I were beside ourselves. All this on a car with about fifty-five thousand miles on that that was under a lease that was about to expire. While we were under the mileage allowance for the lease, the damn car itself was out-of-warranty with it having run out at forty-eight thousand miles.
Fortunately, what with the Quad4 having the aforementioned propensity to "blow head gaskets", the service department was able to work with us and covered the cost of the repairs which was approximately twenty-two hundred dollars. Turned out they were able to machine the head and the block was fine. Pretty remarkable considering that my wife drove the car more than twenty miles with a the blown head gasket. We rode out the remaining six months or so of the lease without any further drama, the head gasket was the only trouble we had with it, but we gladly "gave it back" to dealership at the end of the term.
What with my wife expecting our first son at the time, the dealership did a yeoman's job of attempting to get us into a four-door, now 3100 V-6 powered Achieva that had none of the elan of the coupe. We didn't bite. I much preferred the lines and the power of an Eighty-Eight, but after the head gasket thing, despite the dealership's accommodations, we went with a thirty-six month lease on a flashy 1996 Nissan Maxima. A car that was absolutely flawless from the start of the lease right through the end. And perhaps one of only a car or two that I wish I had never gotten rid of. Can't say that about the Achieva.
All of which makes the asking price for this one all the more eye brow raising. Here's the listing. Bet you can talk 'em down a bunch. Check the head gasket.
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