Although I had a 1982 Riviera that was the worst automotive purchase of my life, actually, forget "automotive", it was the single-worst purchase of my life, despite my loathing of the damn thing because it broke constantly, to this day I appreciate it's handsome, retro-inspired styling. I gave my '82 away for a song after less than two-years of owning it because it was just too damn unreliable and that hurt big time seeing how much I time and money I spent on it and it was not inexpensive to purchase in the first place Still, I look at any 1979-1985 Buick Rivera, particularly convertibles like the one "Seb" (above) drove in "La-La-Land" (great movie btw), and I'm smitten just as I was when I first got mine all those years ago. Smitten, of course, until the hunk of junk snake bit me for the first of many, many times just a month after I got it. But I digress.
Today's automotive soliloquy, however, is not about that gorgeous piece of crap I owned years ago but about the heaps of pure disgust that replaced them, Buick's infamous 1986-1993 Riviera's. Our oh-so-'90's blue on blue Riviera here is from model year 1992 and is yet another gem I found on Facebook Marketplace. With an asking price a mere $2,500, seeing the shape its in, low mileage and my wanderlust for cheap old cars in showroom condition this would beg for my attention except for one thing - even after all these years I still find these things so revolting looking I can't even think about just calling on it for a test drive. And it's like less than fifteen minutes from my home too.
My disdain for these these "new-Riviera's" runs deeper than the fact they were such a departure from not just the iteration of the brand that I owned but from every General Motors personal luxury car of yore that I loved. Runs deeper as well than it was so small, tiny even although that certainly didn't help matters. Nope, frankly, the biggest issue was that, quite simply, they're so damn ugly. My '82 may have been a falling-apart jalopie but it at least was a good looking pile of trash. This thing? I'm not going to go into a pretentious design study of it but safe to say, aesthetically, it was a disaster.
GM quickly deduced they had a problem on their hands with these cars and attempted to up-size them but the half-baked grafting on of sheet metal for 1989 did little to dissuade my opinion of them. That extra sheet metal, that did wonders for this car's corporate siblings at Cadillac and Oldsmobile, doing little more than just exasperating a ridiculous if not absurd design.
Don't take my disdain for these cars as gospel either. When sales crater up to seventy-percent year over year after a model is reintroduced, objectivity be damned, something went seriously if not fatally wrong. Flint, we have a problem.
At least GM tried to do something about it but they had cooked their golden goose. Even by the time they rolled out the Riviera they should have rolled out in '86 in 1995, the market had changed wholesale. Well heeled buyers looking to impress the Jones' having moved onto luxury import makes and models or worse, sport-utility vehicles. And we're talking several model years before Ford introduced the first domestic luxury SUV, the game changing 1998 Lincoln Navigator. Just like that, personal luxury cars, premium or otherwise, became niche products.
Buick got out of the personal luxury coupe game after 1999, Oldsmobile had bailed after '92. Cadillac, bless their hearts, held in there through 2002. Hey, if you're interested in this comment below. Perhaps I can hook you up. Just don't ask me to go with you on the test drive. It's would just be too painful for me.
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