I hate to see this one go. It’s been an institution in our neighborhood since we moved here 23 years ago, at a house owned by two women a block away. But all things must pass, and so will this Aeroback, which has graced these pages twice. First time was in the CC Complete Cutlass Chronicles Part 9, and more recently, it was in this Outtake, when I saw it hooked up to their utility trailer, which sports Studebaker wheel covers.
Here’s the sign, for the Oldsmobiler. No price, but you can call if an aeroback just has to be in your driveway. It does have the “small V8”, which would be the 260 cubic incher.
It appears to have led a rather pampered life, except for the occasional trailer-haul to the yard waste recycling facility. I’m not sure about those two black-handled things poking out from below the steering column. Hmm.
There’s that trailer back there. The paint on this Cutlass is getting a bit faded, but this would make a great period piece. Just don’t tell them I sent you (they’re not totally happy about me having put their car on the web, even though it was sitting at the curb). Oh well…maybe that’s why they’re selling it; it’s been tainted.
I wonder how much the styling of the aerobacks was a preview of 1980 X body styling. The four door mid size had always been also rans for GM in the seventies so perhaps not such a big risk. When it failed GM was ready with the conventional 4 door and by the time of the fwd A bodies in 1982 the hatchback midsize experiments had moved over to Chrysler with their then upcoming Lebaron GTS/Dodge Lancer.
I hope this example will find a good home perhaps locally where Paul can continue to chronical it.
Probably alot, when GM decided to embark on massive downsizing, smaller models were rationalized. Hatches are efficient that’s why they are popular with smaller cars and overseas. Hatches typically haven’t sold well in the US on most models. Import makes have tried hatches too like Camry and 626 and they didn’t sell.
I feel stupid pointing this out, but you do realize these Aerobacks were never hatchbacks? About the time these hit the showrooms of America, VW had “finally” re-designed it’s very similar looking 3-4 year old Passat so that it had a hatch instead of a more normal trunk.
If anything, maybe that mid 70s Passat was what inspired GM, as they do look remarkably similar in profile….if not detail. (I just realized that this morning, for the 1st time.)
I am very tempted to call about this car but have had my share of “irate” sellers, thank you Craigslist.
I wasn’t necessarily talking about these cars but the X cars as well as the poster above alluded to. There was more than just styling involved but a rationalization of space and usage. However the US car buying market didn’t take to the look and sales were poor. Back in 78, most potential Oldsmobile prospects were conservative in their car buying and these aero backs were even less popular.
Oddly every Areoback I’ve seen were Buicks, I wonder what the breakdown in production was? You’d expect Buick buyers to be even more conservative. I think they look like over blown “X’ bodies, but they are rare enough now, that I’d probably give a second look if the right one came along. Just for the “novelty”
You are correct, Howard.
The 1978-79 Aeroback Cutlass and Century were fastbacks with trunks, rather than true hatchbacks like the 1980 X-car Chevy Citation and Pontiac Phoenix offerings.
Or Chevette/T-1000 (“the penny pinching Pontiac”) good,lawd 30+ years and that “jingle” is still in my head!
Those handles are either vents if no a/c or perhaps something to do with the trailer. Otherwise it looks clean. I wonder why they are selling it ? Moving ? I wonder why they cut out the Oldsmobile and added an R…
They’re getting old. I suspect that has something to do with it.
Now if they read this, they’ll really be mad at me. 🙂
You know it isn’t someone under 30 when they forget that phone numbers aren’t 7 digits anymore….
Gol dangit,back in my day,we had to…….Hey you litlle ba****ds, Get off my lawn!
I may be off here but I’d bet at least one of those handles are for trailer braking. There are probably a lot of people around here that know more than I about towing but I remember my Grampa, who towed a lot (an Airstream if memory serves), always had one in his cars, about the same place as in this car.
Yep!
The funny part is, it’s not aero. GM could just as well have made it a wagon which in Kamm form really would have had better aero.
I might be wrong, But I think the appellation “Aeroback” is an allusion to 1940s GM fastbacks, Chevrolet “Areosedan” for example. Buick called theirs “Sedanette”, even though it wasn’t any smaller than the series equivalent sedan! Marketing over dictionary!
I have to confess that I have no love for these, or any of the Citation-class. My distaste has nothing to do with the mechanical problems that put a curse on the X. It’s an artifact of my age, I guess. I became aware of my world in the 60’s, and it was an exciting world: The STP turbine at Indy, the GT 40’s sweeping LeMans, beautiful Corvettes, sleek Pontiac GTO’s, bad-ass Hemi Cuda’s. When the 70’s arrived, all the beautiful cars were handicapped with ugly bumpers, and wouldn’t run because of the crude pollution controls. Everything I loved was emasculated – I’ll limit myself to saying ‘Mustang’ II rather than go through the pain of cataloging my hurts.
After a decade of pain and insults from Detroit, a new age was declared in 1980. GM, The Masters of The Automobile -the artists who had given us the 66 Buick Rivera, the Stingray, the Eldorado- had put their engineers and designers to work, and created the cars of our future; the vehicles we would drive into the 21st Century. When I first saw a Citation, it didn’t help that it was beige, inside and out. Such a utilitarian beauty-less powerless design with its chrome-less slabs of plastic interior and indifferent construction quality could only be the work of oppressors of freedom – Soviet engineering had won the
ColdCar War. It depressed me. I thought of it as American Lada – the people’s car. (I reserved the Trablant title for the K-car). My future had been reduced to living in a beige utilitarian slab-sided indifferently-constructed safety-bumpered safety-belted world where I was hopelessly under-powered.Short version: I didn’t care for these cars.
<a HREF="https://ixquick-proxy.com/do/spg/show_picture.pl?l=english&rais=1&oiu=http%3A%2F%2Fresize.over-blog.com%2F1200x845-d.jpg%3Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fidata.over-blog.com%2F3%2F23%2F25%2F51%2F%2FChevrolet-Corvette%2F1967-CHEVROLET-CORVETTE.jpg&sp=cdac67afc2327bbb894ee6611b30a29aWhat we lost
Not all GM’s cars of the late 70’s and 80’s were ugly. Can’t tell me a 1979 Riviera or 1980 Bonneville Coupe is a homely car.
No even in 1978, most GM cars were still eye catching. However with OPEC I, then OPEC II, and with import makes slowly but surely developing a following, GM execs at least knew that they needed to shake things up a bit especially on the smaller end of the scale. Mechanical issues aside, it is not hard to understand why the cars looked the way they did. The ‘fast back’ design whether a true hatch or not was not really a popular design in the US and even the import makes, which has unusual designs in the 1970s, reverted to a more conventional three box approach to their models by the mid 1980s and today the best selling cars are all very conventional in design. In Europe, Asia, other places the story is and maybe different.
Domestic car buyers in those days were pretty conditioned to buy the designs that had graced the showrooms for many decades so a middle aged couple that might have owned a string of Oldsmobile Cutlasses probably did not care much for the aeroback design of 1978. Now, automotive design has become so regulated plus so international that there very little difference between American make designs and import make designs. That is something of a sad thing really.
The fastback style is not that great a step from the Colonnade sedans, and was in keeping with wider trends at the time. You could compare it to the 1930s when there was not unusual to have a ‘standard’ sedan and a fastback alternative.
+1!
Hey, there were SOME bright spots!!! But from the 2/3 of the pyramid on down it was all Detroit Ladas, very well said.
I would have to agree with you. These, and the X-bodies that followed, were turds on wheels – a real disgrace considering what GM had once been capable of building. I blame a lot of this on Roger Smith’s nihilistic bend to destroy what Alfred Sloan had created decades earlier but that’s another story for another day.
My late mother-in-law had the notch back version of this craptastic piece of “rocket legacy” with a 260 C.I. engine, it would not get out of its own way; nothing on that car seemed to work right or well. There was little to nothing redeeming about this pathetic excuse for an Oldsmobile.
I have to disagree. The 1980+ X bodies marked GM’s first big step into the future of FWD, transverse engines and unibodies. They weren’t fully baked, and they didn’t last.
The 1978+ A bodies, on the other hand, were the last hurrah of what GM knew how to build well: RWD, BOF with a coil-sprung live axle in the rear. Cars like this one were still on the road many years after the last X bodies found their way to the crusher.
Yes, the 260 V8 was gutless and choked by its primitive emissions controls. But what late 70s U.S. car wasn’t cursed with that sort of engine?
Our ’79 humpback Cutlass with the 260 and the THM250 tranny gave us 10 years and 130k miles of uninspired but reliable service. By the standards of the day it was a solid, comfortable and durable car that could seat 5 in comfort and 6 in a pinch.
For the money, you could do much worse buying a new car in 1978 or 1979.
I had an ’80 Skylark and liked the styling, size, packaging, ride, interior, and economy. It sure could have used improvements in exterior paint and rust protection but meh, ALL VEHICLES in the Rust Belt could.
+1!
I loathe the Aeroback — I have personal experience with a car exactly like this one except for the color, and I have nothing good to say about it aesthetically or otherwise — but I think there were a few bright spots at the time, styling-wise. The ’79 Eldorado was a nice piece, for one. Not as handsome as the ’67, but a vast improvement over the 1971–78 variety.
I know in 1980, the 4-door Buick Century and Oldsmobile Cutlass sedans went to the “sheer-look” design, which looked better than the “aeroback” design. I know the 2-door aeroback sedans lasted until 1980.
My father bought an 80 Cutlass LS with the 305 V8 which I helped factory order for him. So it was properly optioned and a very good highway car.
I wouldn’t mind the 78 featured it looks really good although I wonder what the condition of the seat fabric might be.
I’m surprised you aren’t jumping on it yourself to drive to the CC Meet in Nashville. I guess that just shows what kind of person you are, making personal sacrifices so others can benefit. My friend in Junior High school had one of these in his driveway, it was not well-loved and they (just like myself) couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t just one big liftback. It eventually was sold in favor of a Citation (!).
Sort of the problem British Leyland made for itself with the Allegro and Princess. The Princess didn’t get a hatch until the 80s and was renamed the Ambassador. Long after the trend started.
Pinto/Bobcat too, right?
Do you suppose the Studebaker wheel covers on the trailer, combined with the R after Oldsmobile on the for sale sign have a common bond? Maybe they had a Studebaker for sale at one time, that sign once said 19?? Studebaker? Just a thought. You just never know, I was behind this Toyota Tundra recently and its owner must really have wanted a Studebaker…..
I’ll bet that’s it. It maybe even just said STUDEBAKER. If you look at the letter spacing from the word SALE above it, it just about works, the letters aren’t kerned in that font as opposed to how the word Oldsmobile is in this case. I knew people in Eugene are ecologically minded but this takes reduce/reuse/recycle to a whole ‘nother level!
Yeah, it sure looks to be a valid explanation!
Addendum: Looking at it on a PC (rather than phone) the “1978 Oldsmobile” text is in the “font’ used by Olds, Perhaps from an ad or brochure!
Found it! (or equiv)
If the word underneath were in fact STUDEBAKER, they should have moved the OLDSMOBILE piece so it said SOLDSMOBILE. Positive expectations…. 😀
LOL!
Ah, the wants that can never be fulfilled….
I was distracted by the very familiar-looking mountains in the background, and the vegetation. The street sign on the right and the church steeple on the left merely confirmed the location.
They also had to add the area code. Maybe the last time the sign was used was before cell phones and having different area codes in one place.
But…is this the only sheet of paper in the house?
We (in Pittsburgh) had to do 10 digit dialling when cell phones were still “toys for the rich”, (the reason being then, was fax machines and modems!) so expecting a 7 digit number by rote would have been in the ’80s, Your mileage may vary!
I remember when phone numbers were 6 digits when I was a kid. The two digit exchange number hyphen followed by a 4 digit number.
I only go back as far as 7 digits, But we had the “name” prefixes like “BRandywine 1-9200” for “271-9200”. I believe in parts of NYC this practice continued into the early ’80s!
It’s funny to me how interested we all are in the for sale sign and how it came to be. Great detective work linking the hub caps with the r! One of us needs to get the guts to call and ask about it! But it won’t be me cause I don’t know the area code and that’s the excuse I’m sticking with.
I still cannot look at one of these without remembering the one owned by a girlfriend I had in the 80s. That one was in my personal least-favorite color combo of that time – pale tannish-yellow with that famous GM light brown vinyl interior. And it was sooooo sloooooow. I did not like that car at all. The relationship didn’t last that long, either. (“I will never be able to love anyone who thinks that driving one of these is OK.” 🙂 )
I used to know a guy who had been a salesman at our local Olds dealer. He once told me that they had one of these as a new car on their lot. It was a two door and had a diesel engine. He said that all the salesmen hated it because it sat on the lot forever with no one interested. He said the owner finally told him to sell it and he didn’t care at what price.
The real unicorn, and probably sales lot poison, of these would be the aeroback with the 260 diesel V8 and the 5 speed manual. It only existed in 1979. The 442 was just an option package by 79 so perhaps it too could have been included to make true curbside classic gold.
A lot of those cars ended up in fleets or as company cars in different places. Because it was a free car to someone (even if they didn’t like it) and well it got used and usually could be had at a great deal.
Wow, I’d actually PAY to see a Diesel 442! That’s just strange enough to be intriguing, no pun intended…
Your comment just jogged my memory. I don’t think it was a diesel, but there was one of these two door fastbacks also in our town that was a 442. It was silver and maroon and a new car at the time. I remember thinking “my, how the mighty have fallen” every time I saw it.
If I’m not mistaken, I think the 442 package was *only* available on the fastback. The coupe had the W-30 and/or Hurst/Olds.
Once the aeroback was gone, the coupe became the only 2-door, so the post ’80 442s were the expected coupes.
Some folks say the Borg-Warner T50 for 1979 was the first 5-speed overdrive in an American car.
Well, except for the Cosworth Vega.
Interestingly, the ’79 Cutlass could be had with 3- 4- and 5-speed manuals. I bet there aren’t a lot of passenger cars that can boast that fact.
My father the lifelong Oldsmobile fan, flat out refused to even consider one of these Aeroback cars…even looked at Chevy Malibus around 1980, but found out Olds was going to make a normal-looking Cutlass sedan, and wound up with an early-production 1982 model that was an oddball with some 1981-style trim, in a BEAUTIFUL 1982-only color called Dark Redwood Metallic…much browner than the normal maroon with the purplish cast to it.
The horrible light blue color on this Aeroback was really common in the late 70s and early 80s…yuck. I will concede that the color-keyed wheelcovers are pretty snazzy.
These were very rarely ordered for dealer inventory at Olds dealers not only because of their odd proportions but because the 2-door Cutlass Supreme was still such a good seller and the price difference wasn’t all that much. A lot of these became special orders only so they really didn’t have much of a chance to sell all that well. If someone wanted a sedan I would imagine they either went for a car the dealer had on the lot, such as a Delta 88 or even an Omega. And wagons were really popular back then, too. So these aerobacks didn’t stand a chance back then.
I know that in 1980 when the 4 door Cutlass sedans went to the “sheer look” design, sales took off. In fact, the 4-door Cutlass lasted all the way into 1987. A lot of them were sold with the 3.8 Buick V6 and some of them even had the trouble-prone Olds diesel.
On another note, seeing a car for nearly 30 years and then its is gone can be very sad!
Oh wow, this car is being sold. I hope this 38 year old car finds a good home and I wonder if the ladies own anything newer?
If it has a 260, then this is a rare example of when a 307 quadrajet would be an improvement. But then again if you are going to go to the trouble of an engine swap, might as well make it an Olds 350 and do it in a state where you don’t have to smog check that sucker.
I assume they are planning to move on to a Subaru now.
Going? Hopefully that roachback is going straight to the crusher!
Good riddance. Is it any wonder I hated GM for all those years?
Wow, this car lasted almost 40 years and you want it crushed? I am one of the 3 people on the planet who thinks that the original VW beetle is a crappy car and all Japanese cars before 1980 were ugly as all he**, But they have history and people who love them, I won’t have ’em crushed. And while I was not a fan of this body style, It had what it took to give 4 decades of service, and there is surely (don’t call be Shirley..) someone out there is a fan, I am not a fan of “modern” (mid 20th century) architecture, but I don’t advocate wholesale demolition of buildings just because I dont “care” for it. If only my feelings about it at all mattered there would be no 1933-1945 Mercedes Benzs left, after all Hitler was a fan……..
Why so much front overhang on this car? If I didn’t know otherwise, I’d guess these had a transverse engine and front drive. This briefly seemed common in the late ’70s and early ’80s
I wonder if the stylists didn’t do that so that the front-drive cars, which actually needed a bit more front overhang, wouldn’t look so out-of-place. For me, quite a few 1980’s rear-drive cars had the styling ruined by having the front wheels tucked back right next to the doors.
I test-drove a new Buick aeroback that had V6 and 5-speed, and was light green all over. The car handled and drove out more like an S-10 pickup than like a car; thoroughly unremarkable.
As a 13 year old, I found it interesting that the ’78 mid-size GM cars from the more upscale, conservative, “soft” divisions, Buick and Olds, had “aerobacks”, which were more “European looking”, and Pontiac and Chevy did not.
I thought the Pontiac especially, but Chevy also, looked good with their 6 side windows.
I thought the square sedan look, which replaced the graceful C-pillar and window with a fat, ‘formal’ C-pillar in 1981, looked ugly.
I also found the 1980 restyle of GM’s big cars made them uglier–it too had an upright, ‘formal’ C-pillar. As if the emasculated performance wasn’t penalty enough (except for the Chevrolets with 305 and 4-speed automatics–in 1980, the 305/350s were getting replaced with 260/301/267 or 252 V6—but I digress)
Also, my family’s experience with the 260 V8 and auto in our 75 Pontiac Ventura, bought used, was very positive. From 30-95k miles, very few problems–with the whole car, engine included. The engine may have had the power of a mediocre in-line 6, and the gas consumption of a 350, but it ran flawlessly in any weather, and was trouble-free (one elect. ignition module at 40k, the only thing I recall went wrong)
I learned in that car, that to induce wheel spin and the tire squeal that accompanied it, it was necessary to find loose sand in April/May (leftover from winter snow removal), gun the engine in neutral, and drop the column shift into D. While not a regular occurrence, the car did not seem to suffer…..
I love this site!
Agreed on the 6-window roofline being superior to the “formal” roof that appeared in ’81. The 267 actually wasn’t that bad in the Malibu–ran out of breath easily, but it had enough torque to get out of its own way around town. More power than the 260 anyhow. In a Caprice, with several hundred extra pounds of weight, probably a less positive experience.
Wasn’t the contemporary Buick Century Aeroback available with the turbo 3.8L?
Oh, man. I’ve always had a soft spot for these for some strange reason (probably related to my ownership of two platform-mate Malibus). They’re just so unusual! And I strongly prefer the Olds version to the Buick. So this one is just about perfect. It’s even a color that I strongly associate with late 70’s A-bodies.
It’s really a good thing that this is on the opposite coast. Good for my wallet, and for my marriage. Because if it was close to me I might have done something inadvisable.
Hopefully it goes to a good home, and someone that will give this underappreciated CC some well-deserved love.