This 1975 Oldsmobile Toronado came up during my most recent "cheap car" search. You know, those Sunday morning time wasters where I type in a lowball dollar amount into cars.com, throw the net out one-hundred miles from my zip code and then I sort by "oldest year". By the way, thanks to inflation and Covid, I've had to increase the dollar amount from $10,000 to $15,000. Shoot, it used to be $5,000. Doesn't mean I found anything worthwhile this past Sunday although I found a thing or two that was interesting. Like this big old Toro.
From 1966 through 1992, Toronado was Oldsmobile's top-of-the-line model and was defined as a "personal luxury car". Although, frankly, there's certainly nothing "personal" about a car that's nearly 19-feet long, almost 7-feel wide and weighs closer to two-and-a-half-tons than two-and-a-quarter.
However, for a car this big, these are fairly cozy if not "personal" inside. Then again, that big-on-the-outside, small-on-the-inside ethos was the design axiom back when cars were designed from the outside in. Gosh, as a kid, I remember seeing cars with these tufted, over-stuffed-pillow, velour like interiors and thought they were the epitome of luxuriousness. Now all I see is an aching back and seats that smell like a wet dog mixed with cigarette smoke from filter-less Pall Mall's.
To the casual observer, this looks like any big Oldsmobile from the 1970's. If you cock your head and blur your eyes a little, you see a lot of then-current Cutlass Supreme. However, in addition to this being built on an entirely different platform than the bread-and-butter Cutlass of the time period, there's a whole lot more to the Oldsmobile Toronado than meets the eye.
What made these cars special and unique was they were front-wheel-drivers. "Front-wheel-drive" in, save for a handful of European and Asian makes and models, a rear-wheel-drive world. And they were GM's first ever "front-drive" automobiles and the first American front-drivers since the Cord 810\812 of 1936-1937. And did America care? By-and-large? Nope. Well, I'm sure that a handful of people appreciated the engineering that went into these cars, but folks bought these things because they liked their styling or what they perceived them to be as opposed to whatever trickery engineers used to get torque to the front wheels.
Early (1966-1970) Toronado's were marketed as large, semi-sporty, muscle-car-like, grand touring cars and got outsold by their similar but far more luxurious, and more expensive corporate cousin, the Cadillac Eldorado. That all changed for model year 1971 when both were redesigned. That redesign made the Cadillac even bigger and softer and Toronado became more like the previous version of the Eldorado. Just-like-that, Toronado sales more than doubled.
Our '75 here is part of that Toronado reboot. This one's for sale for $12,500 which sounds like a ton of money but keep in mind, and somewhat ironically too, that a Cutlass in this shape, would be listed for at least twice that if not two-and-half times more. The irony being that in 1975, this car stickered for some $6,700 meanwhile the Cutlass sold for $4,100. Big bucks back then during the Ford administration. And between us cool-cat, Seventies car lovers, I'd rather have the Cutlass. And I'd take it in this awful eggshell blue hell as well. Comment below with your thoughts.
No comments:
Post a Comment