When was the last time you saw an Oldsmobile Intrigue? Been a while for me. Not that we saw many of them back in the day. This 2001 popped up on Cars.com recently during one of my "cheap car searches". Asking price when I started writing this was an eye-watering $5,995, it was just reduced to a semi-more reasonable $3,995. Just under 60,000-miles on it; are you, ahem, "intrigued"?
The Intrigue replaced the 1988 to 1996 "W-body" Cutlass in the Oldsmobile lineup. I say "W-body" because Oldsmobile put "Cutlass" on just about everything they made back in the '80's and '90's. There was the "G-body", rear-wheel-drive Cutlass, the A-body, front-wheel-drive Cutlass Ciera, the N-body Cutlass Calais and the shameful Chevrolet Malibu clone they simply called "Cutlass".
Built on an updated version of the W-body chassis, originally called the "GM10" chassis or platform, Oldsmobile planned for the Intrigue to be more competitive than the Cutlass was going bumper-to-bumper against imports like the Nissan Maxima, Honda Accord and Toyota Camry. Making a not very long story short, things didn't work out as planned and Olds was out of the Intrigue business after 2002; Oldsmobile was out of the car business after 2004.
The Intrigue was a handsome car in the then "new-traditional", late '90's Oldsmobile kind of way; everything Olds did in the late '90's looked like a knock off of either the Aurora or the Antares concept car. Not a bad thing, per se, if you liked the looked of course. Problem was target buyers thought of the Oldsmobile brand as being literally for "old" people and GM's long-standing reputation for building unreliable cars had caught up to them. Oldsmobile, who in the '80's was a very strong brand in this country, despite its dubious build quality, by the '90's, could ill afford not to have a hit. At it's best, Oldsmobile sold around 90,000 Intrigues in 1998 and 1999, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the more than 600,000 Cutlass' Oldsmobile sold a year twenty years prior.
Mechanically, the Intrigue's biggest issue was its engine. Dubbed "Shortstar", this 3.5-liter double-overhead-cam V-6 was developed from Cadillac's 4.6-liter "Northstar" V-8 and while smooth, quiet and responsive, like the Northstar V-8, this engine suffered the head bolt, head gasket, oiling and water pump issues the Northstar V-8 did.
If you must have an Oldsmobile Intrigue, find a 1998 with GM's 3800 V-6 engine instead of the 3.5L Twin Cam V-6. The 3800 was a stop gap engine because the 3.5 wasn't ready when the rest of the car was ready for production in 1997. Why did Oldsmobile have their own V-6 engine in the late '90's rather than continue to use the 3800? Who in the name of Ransom E. Olds knows.
As this car is, I can't recommend it to anyone at any price point. Yes, it has low mileage but low miles on a car this old is not everything it's chalked up to be; there's no doubt a story why a car this car has so few miles on it. I bet routine, basic maintenance hasn't been done since the early days of Barrack Obama. Again, the big thing to me is the engine is a time bomb just waiting to go off. Unless you're fine with dropping four-bills on an oldie and then having to spend about that much, if not more, to fix it when the engine blows up. Which it will.
No comments:
Post a Comment