As luck with have it for this car blogger, there's a transmission shop next to my office and they work on everything old and new and, on occasion, something interesting appears in their lot like this Buick Riviera I believe is a 1992. Could be a '91, '90 or '93 as Buick didn't change much about these from year to year. All I do know is it's at least a 1989-1993. For the record, I find many things "interesting"; that doesn't mean I necessarily like them.
1986-1993 Buick Riviera's are, in my opinion (I know I'm not alone with this sentiment), part of the worst looking crop of cars that came out of General Motors Downsizing Epoch that began in 1977 and concluded with the introduction of this car and its corporate kissin' cousins, the Oldsmobile Toronado and Cadillac Eldorado in 1986.
Please note I said, "looking" as these cars were actually comfortable, nimble handlers and by the end of their run in 1993, amply powered. By no means fast, but they had enough scoot to at least keep up with traffic. You really couldn't say that about what they replaced. Trust me on that one.
GM added the Riviera to their front-wheel-drive, personal luxury car vanguard in 1979 alongside their freshly downsized Oldsmobile Toronado and Cadillac Eldorado; Riviera had been rear-wheel-drive prior going back to the original in 1963. Slicing more than a foot off stem to stern meanwhile keeping most of their girth, the new Riv\Toro\Eldo seemed better pro-portioned than GM's stubby, rear-wheel-drive, mid-size models they rolled out in 1978.
Motor Trend thought so highly of the 1979 Riviera S-Type they awarded it their "Car of the Year" honors. Buyers thought highly of them too as sales more than doubled compared to the previous iteration of the Riviera; Buick sold on average approximately 50,000 per year through 1985. Not bad for an expensive, somewhat impractical car.
That all changed for 1986 when GM took more than another foot of length off these cars and pulled some 600 pounds out of them. Problem wasn't so much GM went too far in downsizing them as much as they whipped up wonky, ill-proportioned, derivatively styled, ugly automobiles. Apparently designed during the darkest days of looming five-dollars-a-gallon gas prices, sales of the '86 Riviera, Toronado and Eldorado cratered some 60%.
For 1989, Buick "upsized" Riviera adding a whopping eleven-inches inches fore and aft but whereas Oldsmobile doing so transformed their Toronado into a (subjective) handsome car, the Cadillac Eldorado as well, Riviera remained as oddly proportioned and stubby as before. There was no dressing up this frumpy, ugly duckling.
When I saw this car the other day, I first thought it was aging better than I ever thought possible. The closer I got to it I realized I was wrong. I didn't take my own word for it either because sometimes you don't know how something you've known for half your life has aged or weathered over time. I texted a couple of photos to my twenty-six-year-old hipster son and asked him for his two-quarters on it.
Here's his reaction.
He's about the same age I was when this car was brand new too so, like father like son.
The owner of the shop says the transmission is toast and he can't find the parts to fix its Turbo-Hydramatic 440-T4. Well, that sucks as you know what that means. Shame too considering the overall shape of the thing. Shame again that someone who took such good care of this car didn't take care of something more special. Then again, taste and armpits and all, who's to say they didn't think it was special.
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