1975 Oldsmobile Toronado - Filter-Less Pall Malls

This 1975 Oldsmobile Toronado came up during my most recent "cheap car" search. You know, those Sunday morning time wasters where I type in a lowball dollar amount into cars.com, throw the net out one-hundred miles from my zip code and then I sort by "oldest year". By the way, thanks to inflation and Covid, I've had to increase the dollar amount from $10,000 to $15,000. Shoot, it used to be $5,000. Doesn't mean I found anything worthwhile this past Sunday although I found a thing or two that was interesting. Like this big old Toro. 

From 1966 through 1992, Toronado was Oldsmobile's top-of-the-line model and was defined as a "personal luxury car". Although, frankly, there's certainly nothing "personal" about a car that's nearly 19-feet long, almost 7-feel wide and weighs closer to two-and-a-half-tons than two-and-a-quarter. 

However, for a car this big, these are fairly cozy if not "personal" inside. Then again, that big-on-the-outside, small-on-the-inside ethos was the design axiom back when cars were designed from the outside in. Gosh, as a kid, I remember seeing cars with these tufted, over-stuffed-pillow, velour like interiors and thought they were the epitome of luxuriousness. Now all I see is an aching back and seats that smell like a wet dog mixed with cigarette smoke from filter-less Pall Mall's. 

To the casual observer, this looks like any big Oldsmobile from the 1970's. If you cock your head and blur your eyes a little, you see a lot of then-current Cutlass Supreme. However, in addition to this being built on an entirely different platform than the bread-and-butter Cutlass of the time period, there's a whole lot more to the Oldsmobile Toronado than meets the eye. 

What made these cars special and unique was they were front-wheel-drivers. "Front-wheel-drive" in, save for a handful of European and Asian makes and models, a rear-wheel-drive world. And they were GM's first ever "front-drive" automobiles and the first American front-drivers since the Cord 810\812 of 1936-1937. And did America care? By-and-large? Nope. Well, I'm sure that a handful of people appreciated the engineering that went into these cars, but folks bought these things because they liked their styling or what they perceived them to be as opposed to whatever trickery engineers used to get torque to the front wheels. 

Early (1966-1970) Toronado's were marketed as large, semi-sporty, muscle-car-like, grand touring cars and got outsold by their similar but far more luxurious, and more expensive corporate cousin, the Cadillac Eldorado. That all changed for model year 1971 when both were redesigned. That redesign made the Cadillac even bigger and softer and Toronado became more like the previous version of the Eldorado. Just-like-that, Toronado sales more than doubled. 

Our '75 here is part of that Toronado reboot. This one's for sale for $12,500 which sounds like a ton of money but keep in mind, and somewhat ironically too, that a Cutlass in this shape, would be listed for at least twice that if not two-and-half times more. The irony being that in 1975, this car stickered for some $6,700 meanwhile the Cutlass sold for $4,100. Big bucks back then during the Ford administration. And between us cool-cat, Seventies car lovers, I'd rather have the Cutlass. And I'd take it in this awful eggshell blue hell as well. Comment below with your thoughts.  

 

1992 Cadillac Fleetwood Coupe - The New Old

General Motors let us Cadillac fans down big time in the 1980's. We understand they had to deal with German makes and models appealing to well-heeled younger ones but that's hardly an excuse for the series of engineering and product planning gaffes they dropped on us during the 1980's. Take their mid-'80's deVille pictured above from a 1985 Cadillac brochure for instance. Damn thing is so ugly even the yuppie models don't like it; she can't look at it while he's stupefied he bought it instead of a BMW 5-series. 

Seems like only yesterday when a smothering blanket of low-grade depression washed over my Cadillac loving, all of twenty-years old psyche when I first saw one of these. Remarkably, these sold well when first launched but when trade-in time came around Grand Ma and Grand Dad went elsewhere. Fear not. Although Cadillac sales melted consistently as the 1980's marched on interminably for General Motors they had "big" changes in store. Well, they had to do something. Any. Thing. 

For 1989 that something was their adding three additional three inches of sheet metal fore and aft (with no change in wheelbase) to the '85 deVille. They even tacked on tail lights cribbed straight from a "Brougham". While it appealed to Cadillac's core buyers somewhat as sales surged, it didn't do anything to dissuade a 40-year-old smitten with a Bimmer or a Benz to change his or her mind and buy a Cadillac instead. While I "got" what it was Cadillac was attempting to do and somewhat appreciated it even, I could tell that the design update was hackneyed and still suffered the ill-proportions the previous models had. Well, I said they had to something. 

The everything-old is new-again "bigger is better" axiom also gave rise to a new Cadillac model range they dubbed, "Fleetwood". They dug deep into tried and true Cadillac tradition with this thing; there hadn't been a Cadillac since 1976 with fender-skirts and the "Fleetwood" moniker had been kicked around at Cadillac going back generations to when "Fleetwood" was a custom coach-builder out of "Fleetwood", Pennsylvania. Prior to 1989, "Fleetwood" was a trim level on deVille models. 

Interestingly, the new-Fleetwood line also included a, be still my beating heart, two-door version. I found our stunningly mint condition subject here recently during a "cheap-car" search. It was for sale with less than forty-thousand miles on it's ticker for approximately $12,000. Yeah, I know - that's a lot of money for a twenty-eight year old Cadillac. You do get a quasi-modern front-wheel drive sedan with considerable V-8 poke and dual air bags but I hope someone got it for less than 10K. It's gone now and just as well. My wife would think I've really lost my mind if I asked her to go for a Sunday drive to just kick the tires on this thing. 

These 1989-1993 Fleetwood Coupes were really nothing more than a Coupe deVille with fender-skirts but if you have a proclivity to appreciate Cadillac design cues of yore you may actually like this. It's as though this a front-wheel drive interpretation of a 1977 rear-wheel-drive Coupe deVille and the design almost works. Almost. Works. Were it really falls apart is in being an adept attempt on GM's behalf to fight off the tony and even more expensive luxury imports. 

As I discussed before, these weren't terrible cars per se it's just compared to German makes and models they just came up way short in terms of driving dynamics. Said driving dynamics sowing the ground-work for their rise as prestige-nameplates. In more ways than one these cars were the best 1949 Cadillac's up to that point but the game had changed. The "Standard of the World" now had a standard it was judged against. This may have been a good "Cadillac" but it was not a good BMW or Mercedes-Benz. 

1993 Cadillac Fleetwood models were actually called "Sixty-Special" so as not to be confused with Cadillac's redesigned "Fleetwood Brougham".