Although by 1981 GM had all but worked out all or most of the kinks in them, the bottom line was any car back that was diesel-powered was a dog. And by 1985 when this impeccable Caprice Estate was new and shinier, gas prices had flattened negating most of the value proposition the improved mileage of diesel engines provided. "No-go but good mileage" worked only as long as gas prices seemed to be headed to five bucks a gallon.
At first glance it would seem that General Motor's soft-balled development of their diesel engines as there were so many issues with the first batch of them made between 1978 and 1980. For the record I'm referring to the Oldsmobile 350 cubic-inch V-8 and not the later 4.3-liter V-6's (there were two versions; one for rear-wheel-drive cars, the other for front-wheel-drive). The V-6's, while hardly powerhouses, were much better engineered and assembled than the early 350 V-8's. Fun facts, there was also an Oldsmobile 260 cubic-inch V-8 (1979 only) that had much of the same maladies the 350 had.
Truth was development of the diesels, done by GM's long gone Oldsmbile division, began in 1973 and there was copious R&D done on them; just not enough. Couple that with GM's inherrant cost-cutting and undertrained dealership service departments and GM had a public relations fiasco on their hands right up there with the Corvair. A second generation Oldsmobile diesel 350 was introduced for 1981 but by then the die was serverely cast; diesels meant "bad". So bad that there wasn't a domestic automobile powered by a diesel engine sold in this country until 2015 when Chevrolet made a diesel engine optional on their Cruze.
How this "oil-burner" has made it to 2021 in what appears to be original condition is a bit of a head scratcher.
This is a shot of the odometer and, again, from the looks of things this appears to be the "right-mileage". Perhaps no-one wanted to use "grandpa's wagon" after he passed because of the diesel engine; yet no one wanted to part with it. That's as good a tale as I bet the real story is.
Grandpa's wagon here is for sale outside Pittsburgh at one of those "sign-now, pay-later" lots with an asking price of $9,995. You know those dime-a-dozen lots dotting street corners in every rust belt town from Buffalo to Detroit; they're fronts for high interest used car loans. Hey, as long as it's legal. But asking ten-grand for this seems like, warning, pun incoming, highway robbery to me.
We take engine performance for granted today but back in the 1980's if a car had good power, and we're talking "good-enough" power not today's over-powered "power" that even Nissan Versa's have, it was hedonistic. Figure zero-to-sixty in this thing would take roughly eighteen-seconds and that's about as slow as the Society of Automotive Engineers (S.A.E.) would allow a vehicle to accelerate back then. More fun facts: the Cadillac Seville diesel of this era takes the cake as the slowest-to-sixty vehicle ever sold; 19.5 seconds. The catalytic converter on my son's 2003 Chevrolet Malibu wore out recently clogging exhaust flow and while the engine ran fine, its pick-up reminded me of slow cars from 1980's.
Somewhat similar to the rush to "electric's" that we have going on today, the diesel engine option on these things wasn't cheap. And amortizing the extra cost of the diesel engine over time, to me what with the drivability of these cars so relatively severe, has never seemed worth it. So, what's to become of our Caprice here? Part of me wishes I could inherit it and put a crate engine in it; this would be a bad-ass sleeper. However, dropping ten-grand or so to purchase it and then spend another five-to-six- to make it what it "could-be" sounds as foolish a spend as someone in 1985 opting for the diesel option on this thing in the first place. Sorry, grandpa.
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