1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass International Series - Mullet and All

Is it me or are prices of used cars starting to cool off a little. Might have more to do with a pending recession than anything else. Take this very nice 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass International Series for instance. A scant 99,000 on its digital ticker and an asking price of $6,990. Price reduced a cool thousand too. I swear six to ten months ago this would have been a $10,000 car. It's for sale in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, east of Columbus and it's a solid two-hours from me. Oh, if it were only an hour or so closer. Then again, probably a good thing it's so far away. 

Seems like only yesterday I was picking up my god-forsaken, 1982 Buick Riviera from Celebrity Oldsmobile in Massapequa, New York on god's green earth Long Island in early January 1988. I was filling out the paperwork when one of these caught my eye in the showroom. For a rear-wheel-drive loving, all-American kid from Baldwin, home of Baldwin Motion I might add, it was the first time in more than fifteen years that a "new car" actually caught my eye. I felt like I was a kid growing up in the Sixties! Is that what it was like? Every fall getting blown away by some new offering from Detroit? I really was born ten to fifteen years too late. 

Of course, with my being all of twenty-three and my driving record looking like that of a felon, I couldn't touch the insurance payments on something like this let alone make the monthly payments on one. And my parents were in no financial shape to help me either. Not that I think it would have occurred to them to help if they could anyway. Sigh. That's why the cash purchase of that horrible Riviera sort of made sense. Well, at the time anyway. 

General Motors spent billions on their gaggle of 1988 intermediate coupes that also included the Buick Regal and Pontiac Grand Prix. Chevrolet had to wait until model-year 1990 for their first foray at the new "GM10" platform. And that first dalliance was the first four-door GM10 introduced at Disney Land; that's the one in California. Meh. The coupe came later, and I scarfed one up soon as I could to replace that crap-tacular Riviera. Over the past, gulp, thirty-two going on thirty-three years, I've had five "GM10" or "W-body" Chevrolet Lumina\Monte Carlo's. What can I say? If I could grow my mullet back and not look ridiculous, I'd do it too. 

Problem with the "GM10's" was that GM only offered them as coupes at first. Not a problem for me, of course, but with Ford having rolled out their game changing Taurus in 1986 as a sedan only, GM missed the opportunity to take Ford on bumper-to-bumper in the family car battle. 

The problem with the stylish Cutlass, especially the "International Series" like our lovely subject here, is that they were underpowered. GM played it safe and offered them at first with only their 60-degree, 2.8-liter V-6 that made all of 130-horsepower and 185 foot-pounds of torque. Not exactly a ton of power to motivate a 3,400-pound car. Especially with an automatic like this has. They did offer a five-speed but good luck finding one of those these days. I mean, these things moved if you floored the gas all the time but that gets old. And it kills your gas mileage. 

Meanwhile, their far more adequate 90-degree, 3.8-liter V-6 making 170-horsepower and 220 foot-pounds wasn't available. Fun fact, Oldsmobile never offered that engine in a GM10\W-body Cutlass. Most powerful engine ever offered in one was the "LQ1", 3.4-liter, "Dual Twin Cam" V-6 based on the 2.8-liter V-6. That engine has its fans, I'm not one of them. The infamous Quad4 was also made available as the base engine starting in 1989. Not much of an improvement over the 2.8 V-6 if you ask me. 

Yeah, I can talk myself out of most things and I think I've successfully talked myself out of this thing too. If it were closer and maybe had an asking price of $5,000, I shudder to think about what I might do. It screams "Eighties" and I'm not sure in a good way or not. My instincts tell me it's not. Also, I'd have to do a ton of mental gymnastics to convince myself I wouldn't care if I was construed as that old guy who's stuck in his past. Mullet and all.