This 1975 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight brings me back to my pre-teen years when all was simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. Some people refer to those years as their "wonder years"; I prefer to call them my "woe-begotten years".
My fondest memory of one of these was when I got a ride home in one after a den meeting during my stint in the Cub Scouts; my mother forcing me to do so at metaphorical gun point. Although it was short jaunt, a mile at most, I was enthralled by the car and also also by it implied.
Compared to my father's hoary Ford Ranch Wagon, that big Oldsmobile was the very embodiment of everything my life was not at that point. The smooth, isolating ride, the plushness of the pillowy seats, air conditioning and music in stereo(!) wafting all around the cabin; the mom driving the car jocularly joking with us kids; it was like I was in another world. And in more ways than one, I most certainly was.
It highlighted to impish and impressionable me that there were haves in this world and have not's. Clearly my family were members of the latter.
That family also had a late model, mid-'70's Buick Electra coupe that I found to be even more opulent in a Wayne Newton meets Englebert Humperdink performing at a resort in the Catskill's kind-of-way. Having one luxury land yacht was one thing but...two?
It seemed to me that that family was drowning in money - their house was extravagantly decorated and their son complained to me about how long the flights where on their constant trips back and forth to "Vegas" and vacations in winter time to Caribbean Islands. I thought he was kidding at first and offered to change places with him.
The Great Downsizing Epoch that GM began in earnest in 1977 shrunk dread-naughts like our "Ninety- Eight" here by more than a foot and melted some eight-hundred pounds on average off their curb weight. There's scuttle butt GM was planning to down-size before the first gas crunch; the events of October 1973 through March of 1974 only exacerbated matters. I wonder how far they would have gone if circumstances and government mandates hadn't forced them to go smaller.
Our '75 here is a poster car of poor interior space utilization, I mean, look at this lack of rear leg room in a car more than two-hundred thirty inches long, and old school gas-guzzlerdom. A combination of a gigantic, carburetor fed V-8, just three forward gears, nearly two-and half tons of weight and the aerodynamics of a brick wall conspiring to deliver seven-to-nine miles per gallon. If you could afford to have one you can afford the single-digit gas mileage, right?
It wasn't as if these cars had tire searing performance either. Contemporary road tests peg a 190-horsepower, 455 cubic-inch, 4,700+ pound "Ninety Eight" like this wheezing from zero-to-sixty in 12.3 seconds with a near 19 second quarter mile. So much for the virtues of the venerated Oldsmobile "Rocket".
The downsized models were still huge automobiles but they could get like eleven-to-fourteen miles per gallon. Still terrible but everything's relative. But they lacked the stature and "look at us we're loaded" stance the larger models had. That glamorous Mounty Airy Lodge heart-shaped love-tub stance that cars like this '75 have; well, perhaps not in this awful shade of blue.
Oldsmobile was General Motors middle division on their vaunted pricing ladder and was flanked by Buick to the north, Pontiac to the south. Cadillac and Chevrolet at the top and "bottom" respectively. Oldsmobile built a "98" a "Ninety-Eight" or "Ninety Eight" in some guise from 1940 through 1996. GM shuttered Oldsmobile after the 2004 model year.
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