My wife spotted this the other day at a used car lot when we were down in Akron and, mistakenly, I first thought it was a Chevrolet Monza. However, as we got closer to it I saw that it wasn't a Monza but an Oldsmobile that wasn't so much the Monza's corporate cousin as it's corporate clone. This, friends, is an Oldsmobile Starfire.
I hopped on the dealer website and found it's a 1975 and they're asking, hold onto your bell bottoms, $14,995 for it. No, the "1" in front of the "4" is not a typo. Even if it was I'd think asking five-grand for this would be a stretch.
Can't fault the dealership for asking that although if someone was to spend that much on this I'd like to know what other questionable financial decisions they've made. NADAGuides.com pegs this at around $1,800 - that's high retail too on a car that's presumably in showroom condition. This thing might be in good condition but it's far from perfect.
Contrary to what some may say, these cars were not General Motor's salvo at the first gas crisis that struck in the fall of 1973. Timing would suggest otherwise but seeing that it takes upwards of three-years for a manufacturer to bring a car to market and with these cars debuting in the fall of 1974, that timeline doesn't work.
So, these cars were well on their way to market when the gas crunch hit and were actually GM's response to the Ford Mustang II. The Pinto based Mustang II, what I refer to disparagingly as "The Deuce", was a result of plunging sales for the bigger is not better 1971-1973 Mustang and the entire cooling off of the muscle and pony car market. Not to mention America's growing interest in smaller cars. Got to hand it to Lee Iaccoca or Henry Ford II, aka the other "Deuce", or whomever thought of it, Ford caught lightning in a bottle when they rolled out "The Deuce" just as the OPEC oil embargo started in October 1973.
Based on the Chevrolet Vega\Pontiac Astre or GM "X-body", there was vile rumor and speculation that these cars were, much like the Mustang II replaced, in literal and figurative sense the Mustang, to replace the Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird. Whether that was true or not, legend has it an internal lobby at General Motors saved the Camaro and Firebird. With the Mustang all but gone, GM had the "sporty-car" lane all to themselves and enjoyed quite respectable Camaro\Firebird sales for the rest of the '70's. Chrysler getting out the game after 1974 no doubt helping GM as well.
What's most curious about our white-on-red fastback here, aside from the absurd asking price, is that General Motor's bothered with it in the first place. Oldsmobile was General Motor's middle-middle brand of middle-priced offerings that included Pontiac just below it, on the blurry if not infernal GM pricing ladder, and Buick just above it. Why they felt the need to market an Oldsmobile and Buick version of these cars, heck, let's throw Pontiac into the mix as well, is a marketing question for GM that us mere car-geek mortals will never be able to get an answer to. Especially seeing how similar all of these were to each other and how they abandoned the compact car market for all their divisions save for Chevrolet after 1964.
The Oldsmobile Starfire moniker first appeared on a convertible show car in 1953 and from 1954-1956 it was placed on convertible 98 models; all Oldsmobile 98's for 1957 were "Starfire 98's". They brought it back in 1961 when GM marketed a convertible Oldsmobile 88 with bucket seats and console as presumably a strike at Ford's very successful four-passenger Thunderbird. Pontiac followed suit in 1962 with the Grand Prix, Buick as well in '62 with the Wildcat. All construed to be full-sized sports cars, a notion that was fairly oxy-moronic at the time and never really gained sales traction.
There was some variance under the hood between the Monza and the Starfire. Chevrolet Monza's came with Chevrolet's 2.3-liter, overhead cam inline four-cylinder engine as the base power-plant, yes, the same 2.3 of Vega infamy, meanwhile a 4.3-liter version of their small block V-8 was available as a...power option? With all of 110 net brake horsepower, hard to fathom there was any real performance gain with the V-8 over the inline-four; especially since V-8 Monza's only came with automatic transmissions.
Oldsmobile and Buick's versions of these cars, the Buick was known as the Skyhawk which was not to be confused with the Buick Skylark which come 1975 was a Chevrolet Nova clone that had been known as the Apollo for 1973 and 1974, were powered by Buick's new\old V-6 engine; freshly bored and stroked to 3.8-liters and making about as much poke as the Monza's 4.3-liter V-8. I say new\old because in the late '60's, GM had sold Jeep the tooling to the Buick V-6 they came out with in 1962. They bought it back from Jeep in the early '70's.
We can only speculate as to why GM bought their old Buick V-6 back from Jeep. Jeep probably could have used the cash and it must have been less expensive to buy an existing engine back than to come up with another one. GM most likely needed another engine for these cars since the engine they were allegedly supposed to have, the Wankel Rotary, proved problematic, unreliable and was difficult if not impossible to get EPA emissions certification for by the time GM needed them.
That's probably right on the money knowing what I know about such things. Another question for the GM gods that I'll never get to ask. Speaking of questions, I probably ask if the dealership in Akron that's selling this thing thinks they can get fifteen-grand for it. But what's the point. Still fun to think about.
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