I found this pristine 1977 Catalina on Facebook Marketplace the other morning for sale down in Akron. Not that it matters on a car this old but there are less than 35,000-miles on its 46-year-old ticker and has an asking price of $8,500. I guess the asking price is fair - although, this is about as rental grade as it got back then and for that money, in my opinion, you could get "more car" for your money than an old bone stripper. What I found interesting about this car, though, and I never realized this before, is how much it looks like a Buick LeSabre two-door coupe from the same era.
As they say, proof is in in the pudding. Above is a 1977 Buick LeSabre. From interior accoutrements to powertrains, the Catalina and LeSabre came similarly equipped too. That meant relatively spartan accommodations, power windows, seats, locks all optional, air conditioning wasn't standard either although most came from the factory with it. Options were a la carte which is why so many cars of this era are equipped so differently. Made no sense to me then and certainly less so now why General Motors would go through the trouble if not expense of lightly disguising some of their makes and models when they were, for all intents and purposes, identical. Perhaps GM wasn't as margin conscious as we may have thought. To some degree anyway. Ha, as if.
The roof lines on the Oldsmobile and Chevrolet versions of the Catalina and LeSabre go a long way towards disguising how similar the cars are. Oldsmobile touted their exclusive, formal roof line on the 88's of the vintage; I think it makes this car look like an unfinished Cub Scout pinewood derby entry. That blind spot can't be fun to live with either. Above is a "Delta 88 Royale", if you wanted to skip the damn vinyl top, you'd have to step down to a "Delta 88 coupe". Personally, I'd "step down" to a 1977 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. Vinyl top and all.
Through my foggy goggles, the belle of the roof line ball of GM's class of 1977 full-size (B-body) coupes is the Chevrolet Impala and Caprice. That's actually three separate pieces of glass glued together, you can't bend glass like that and have it retain its rigidity; especially being as thin as it is. I'm actually ambivalent towards of GM's 1977-1979 GM "B-body" coupes but of the lot of them, the Chevrolet rows my boat the least. Save for the far out rear windshield. The rest of the car looks under-designed. Your mileage may vary, see dealer for details.
Pontiac may have been GM's "excitement" division but in terms of profit margins, they were GM's "smallest". Purely speculating if not hypothesizing, would make sense GM would skimp corners in the design and then the manufacturing process and use the Buick design on the Pontiac; if they had to have a "Pontiac" in the first place. Doing so would enable higher volume Oldsmobile to market the exclusivity of their (frumpy) "formal roof" on their 88 and it doesn't take an engineer or an accountant to surmise the LeSabre's roof had to be whole lot cheaper and simpler to produce than the Chevrolet's.
When General Motors rebooted their full-size models for 1980, the distinctive roof lines were gone on the (B-body) coupes. Gone too was the Catalina two-door; you wanted a big Pontiac with only two-doors in 1980 and 1981 you had to pony up to a Bonneville. Come 1982, though, the big Pontiac show was over - albeit temporarily. The "Catalina" nameplate gone forever too. The Bonneville nameplate lived on as a tarted up version of the intermediate Grand LeMans through 1987, then as a front-wheel-driver through 2005.
Legend has it Pontiac dealerships complained they didn't have a full-size car to sell in 1982 and 1983 so from 1984-1986, they rebadged the Canadian version of the Chevrolet Caprice and called it, "Parisienne".
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