This 1978 Buick LeSabre popped up again the other day as I was perusing Marketplace for parts for my '91 Corvette. Seems the owner\poster of the ad can't seem to get rid of it; note these pictures are in front of the storage facility where I think it's safe to assume it's kept. Makes for somewhat interesting production value although it tells me they just want it gone. Problem is, although they've dropped the price significantly, even at $14,000, it's still a tough sell. Why?
It's a tough putt because it's a LeSabre Sport Coupe - that means there's good there's good news and not so good news. The good news is that along with some cool black out trim, yummy Buick alloys and fatter tires, it has stiffer springs and shocks, sway bars fore and aft, in an age when that was not a given, and a quicker steering box ratio.
You also get this snazzy steering wheel. Too bad the rest of the interior isn't up to snuff; this interior looks like a couch my parents bought from Sears around the time this car was new. Well, this is a LeSabre - a Buick for the value conscious customer who wanted the prestige of a Buick but didn't want to pay that much for it.
I know. Seeing Buick was slotted just below Cadillac on the GM pricing ladder, that never made sense to me either. By the late '70's, the lines between their divisions had blurred to the extent they were all but invisible.
The bad news is, although you get all the handling goodness I mentioned above, this car is powered by Buick's first generation, turbocharged, 3.8-liter V-6.
This engine is the grandfather of the vaunted turbo V-6 that was the terror of the drag strip in the mid '80's. In fact, that engine in the Buick Grand National and GNX made those cars the fastest accelerating cars sold in America for a short time. Granted, said performance came at a huge expense at the gas pump that nullified any fuel economy dividends afforded it by being a six-cylinder engine but let's not split hairs.
Also available in the Buick Regal and Century coupes, auto scribes at the time chose their words carefully to describe their experiences driving the primitive turbo Buicks. While "faster" from zero-to-sixty by a full second and two-and-a-half seconds quicker to ninety than a Buick 350 V-8 powered LeSabre, they danced tactfully around the wonky dynamics of the blown V-6.
Essentially, what is now known as "turbo lag", the "turbo boost" of the little turbocharger packing just six pounds of boost, took forever to build up enough steam to make a difference to the seat of the driver's pants. And the extra punch was quickly expunged and there was no more added scoot until the turbo built up boost again. When there was no turbo scoot, you had a big Buick with a relatively tiny engine.
While the turbo V-6 did get three-miles-per gallon more than a Buick 350 did and was, again, "faster", the kooky nature of the turbo turned buyers off on test drives.
Buick sold only 8,000 or so LeSabre Sport Coupes with the turbo option in 1978 and 1979 making our literal golden oldie here quite rare.
