1971 Oldsmobile F85 Town Sedan - Invisible

This beast popped up on my Facebook Marketplace feed the other day and of course I had to blog on it. Not sure what more I can say about a vehicle type I've blogged to death over the years but here goes. This is a 1971 Oldsmobile F85 "Town Sedan" and it's for sale near my home here in bucolic Cleveland, Ohio with a, I kid you not, asking price of $4,000.  

I'm not quite sure who or what the target market would be for a fifty-year old Oldsmobile four-door sedan that's not even a Cutlass. Yes, it's technically part of the Cutlass series but by 1971, what had been the model designation for Oldsmobile's "senior compacts" had been pushed to the bottom of the Oldsmobile pricing ladder and denoted their least-expensive mid-size model. However, as an old friend in the used car business used to say, "there's an ass for every seat". Perhaps the low-mileage and it being a "CALIFORNIA CAR" would be a selling point to someone up here. Although, four-grand for a car in Northeast Ohio would buy you a fairly nice, somewhat "old" but not fifty-years old, low-mileage driver. Who knows. Maybe a movie company would scarf this up as a set up piece. 

Of all of GM's wonderful 1968-1972 intermediates, the Oldsmobile's are my least favorite. Save for a two-door 1970-1972 Cutlass Supreme, so perhaps that fact drives my ambivalence towards this sorry old boat. Funny, how if it were a station wagon I'd be all over it, despite it being an Olds, especially with this patina but as this is, no way. Although I wouldn't mind kicking it's tires and stabbing the gas as hard as I could to see if the "350 Rocket" still had it or not. 

 Us car people are a fickle lot. I don't even bother trying to explain to my wife anymore what I see in one old car and don't see in another. Although, this car's invisibility to me helps me understand what folks who don't "get-cars" don't see in them either. My wife, bless her heart, does know me well enough that I believe two-door cars are good, convertibles are over-rated, five-door cars, as in stations wagons, are good too. Four-door cars are not good and should be drained of fluids and used as barrier reefs if not crushed and reborn. 

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It's not all bad, though. This '71 is a real time-machine that takes me right back to high school in the early '80's when I was shopping for my first car. I would have killed to have a V-8 powered sled like this in high school even if it had four-doors. Back then a finish-less, rusty, ten or eleven year old mid-size GM sedan would probably go for between a thousand and fifteen hundred bucks. I still wouldn't touch this now for that amount but it is interesting see something like this going for as much as it is. Is $4,000 really the present day $1,000?