In today’s small but steady field of minivan offerings, most brands cover a broad spectrum from spartan to luxurious with numerous trim levels all under one model — the one exception being from Chrysler with its basey fleet-grade Dodge Grand Caravan and now its entry-level Chrysler Voyager that has taken the place of lower-trims of the Chrysler Pacifica. Yet when the minivan was a new and hot segment, with almost every brand hurrying to add one to its lineup, the idea of a dedicated luxury minivan was a reality. In fact two of them emerged at almost the exact same time, each representing very different ideas of what a luxury minivan should be.
On the one end of the spectrum, there was the Chrysler Town & Country. Beating the Oldsmobile Silhouette to the market by just a few months in mid-1989, the 1990 model year Town & Country was a very traditionally-styled, conservatively-minded minivan. A rebadged version of its K-car based Dodge Grand Caravan/Plymouth Grand Voyager siblings, which in short-wheelbase form had been around since 1983, the Town & Country featured inoffensive yet anonymous straight-edged, boxy sheetmetal.
Furthermore, the Chrysler added plenty of costume jewelry such as faux woodgrain siding, ribbed lower body cladding, chrome waterfall grille, stand-up hood ornament, lace-pattern alloy wheels, and loosely-gathered cognac leather seating surfaces. It’s honestly a shocker that the Town & Country didn’t feature a vinyl top, opera lamps, and wire wheel discs. The first Chrysler Town & Country proved just a one year affair, but a new one arrived in 1991, coinciding with the first redesign of its Dodge and Plymouth siblings.
While styling of the 1991 was more rounded and aerodynamic inside and out, the look was very similar to the 1990 model as Chrysler didn’t want to alter its winning formula too much, and all the previous Town & Country’s gingerbread add-ons were retained — including the station wagon-like wood trim which now could be deleted for gold pin striping — continuing its persona as a very conservative luxury minivan.
As North America’s largest automaker, GM hardly sat still on the sidelines through the 1980s as Chrysler fattened its wallets with its highly profitable minivans. GM’s first “bigger is better” rear-wheel drive Astro/Safari twins did little in chipping away at Chrysler’s market dominance, but its second crack at it was a much closer copy of Chrysler’s winning formula, at least on paper. After all, How hard can it be to make a minivan?
With its new U-body minivans, GM saw itself poised to gain a large portion of Chrysler’s market share. Like Chrysler, GM’s first front-wheel drive minivan was sold under three separate divisions, enabling for greater distribution and a wider range of prices, personalities, and appeal. Also like Chrysler, one of these three variants was positioned as a luxury model, in the form of the Oldsmobile Silhouette. Versus the Town & Country, the Silhouette was at the complete opposite end of the luxury spectrum, possessing none of the Town & Country’s traditional K-car qualities. Little did we know, this wouldn’t necessarily be a positive.
On the positive, the Silhouette, like its Chevrolet Lumina APV and Pontiac Trans Sport siblings, sought to be more innovative and family-friendly, with features such as dent-resistant polymer plastic body panels, an available rear air inflation kit with hose, and modular rear seats that could be individually removed and reconfigured for numerous flexible seating arrangements.
In the Silhouette, seven passenger seating was standard in the somewhat unusual for a North American minivan 2+3+2 configuration, while even more unusually, six passenger seating was an optional package for its first several years. When specified, this 2+2+2 seating configuration replaced the three middle row modular seats with two outboard-positioned modular seats with integral armrests for greater comfort, and a center walk-through aisle to the third row. Perforated leather seat upholstery was optional, though curiously when optioned, door trim panels remained cloth.
More obvious, while the Town & Country was comfortably conservative and familiar in appearance, the Silhouette radiated radical styling with one of the most ambitious exterior and interior designs of its time for any vehicle. Based on the 1986 Pontiac Trans Sport concept car, the dramatic space aged styling was unlike anything that came out of Detroit before.
When it came down to the details, at least Oldsmobile didn’t grace the plastic sides of the Silhouette with simulated wood trim, as was de rigueur on the Town & Country. In lieu of vinyl wood trim, Oldsmobile applied a thick band of black stripes just above the bodyside moldings. Large “SILHOUETTE” decals also graced the rear of each side and the trunk, and a black painted roof was standard, giving the illusion of a glass roof as in the original concept. Unfortunately the concept’s overall styling did not translate to the production version quite so favorably, leading to a rather memorable nickname.
Now nicknames can be a good thing, but this one really sucked. As it’s well-known, the side-profile view of these minivans greatly evoked the shape of the Dustbuster, Black & Decker’s popular handheld cordless vacuum, garnering the nickname “Dustbuster minivans”. In fact, after styling, this nickname is easily the most memorable aspect of the Silhouette et al.
The Silhouette, however, earned a much more favorable nickname from the 1995 comedy film Get Shorty, where it was proclaimed “The Cadillac of Minivans”. Prominent product placement in the film also highlighted its unique feature of a remote power-sliding door, a minivan first.
Nicknames and movie stars aside, it is clear to see that luxury minivan buyers didn’t warm up to Silhouette’s shape and styling, gravitating in far greater numbers to the more conventional Chrysler Town & Country. Overall, GM’s “Dustbuster” U-body didn’t do much to Chrysler’s market dominance, with Chrysler minivans continuing to sell better than ever during the early-to-mid 1990s. These days, few beyond the community of automotive enthusiasts even remember the Silhouette and its siblings. When it came to the defining the “luxury minivan”, it’s clear to see which original competitor won.
Photos Credits to Chris Green, Will Jackson, and SoCalMetro
In the left three-quarter photo, this van didn’t look half-bad. It’s too bad GM didn’t soften the front end ski slope a bit, as suggested in this photo. It might have had a winner on its hands, instead of a punchline.
Long ago, on a day I’d rather forget, I drove one of these. It was okay but the amount of dashboard was a sight to behold. This feature likely didn’t help influence too many sales. Chrysler was proof taking a conservative approach isn’t always a bad thing.
There is somebody about a half-hour south of me who has one of these parked on his property near the road. Parked is the key word as it has undergone a body transplant onto some gnarly looking four-wheel drive chassis. I’d shudder to know what had to be done to accomplish that.
Having grown up with a nurse for a mother, seeing “O.G.” always prompts me to think “Obstetrics and Gynecology”. 🙂
These have been absent from the road for a LONG time where I live, don’t know if that’s typical but it subjectively suggests a pretty short life for these vans. These were almost kinda sorta cool, but I think the front slope was just a touch dramatic and the Previa did weird a little bit more cohesively. IIRC, these also did a good job of smashing their front seat occupants into chunky jam in a front-end collision, also like the Previa.
What’s up with the little old lady doily alloys on such a futuristic spaceship van, Oldsmobile?
I never quite understood where GM was going with these. Wouldn’t a real luxury minivan have been a Buick or Cadillac? Oldsmobile was sort of an everyman division then, with the Cutlass being one of those middle class cars like the Accord later became. And where Chrysler pursued a more traditional version of luxury, the Silhouette was, what, German luxury? Swedish luxury? Japanese luxury? If it was trying for any of these it failed.
The other luxury minivan was the Toyota Previa. It shared the Dustbusters’ problem of trying to sell a futuristic look to the luxury van buyer, and was hobbled by a lack of cylinders, but was otherwise a much better luxury minivan than the Silhouette.
There is an older couple at my church who owns one of these. It is the Mrs’s car and she has had it from new. It is like the blue one in your picture, and is simply immaculate. I have somehow missed getting shots, but had already written on these so lost interest. An excellent find, my minivan-loving friend!
Most likely, GM gave Oldsmobile a version of the minivan because the division’s sales went into a free-fall after 1986, and a minivan, no matter how luxurious, simply didn’t fit the overall direction the corporation had mapped out for Buick, let alone Cadillac.
Oldsmobile had sold a lot of Custom Cruisers and Cutlass Cruisers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The minivan was being touted as the successor to the wagon after its debut, so that may have given GM another reason to bring out an Oldsmobile version.
That and the fact that Oldsmobile was desperately trying to reinvent itself as the market had dramatically shifted away from two-door coupes like the Cutlass, which was largely responsible for its success and high sales volume a decade earlier.
Buick and Cadillac had clearer marketing strategies and more solid images at this time, so Oldsmobile was a more natural choice for a brand new type of vehicle to test the waters with. The same logic is likely why Oldsmobile got the Bravada long before Cadillac and Buick received SUVs.
To JP’s question, I think the Silhouette was trying to be a new type of “American” luxury for the 1990s, though it was closest to Japanese cars in terms of their ambiance.
Have we ever talked about why Oldsmobile went into such a sudden decline?
I don’t think we’ve ever had a dedicated article to Oldsmobile’s sharp decline during the latter part of the 1980s, and now you’ve kind of inspired me to want to write one… unless you were hinting that you’d like to?
Without going into too much detail, the primary contributing factors were:
– The sharp decline in overall coupe sales which severely affected sales of the Cutlass Supreme coupe, Olds’ most popular model
– Oldsmobile’s general staleness among younger buyers who grew up with parents driving Oldsmobiles and seeing them everywhere.
– The every-closeness of badge-engineered cars shared across multiple GM divisions requiring brand image and identity to be more important than ever. Versus Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, and Cadillac, Oldsmobile’s lack of clear identity was obvious.
Wonder what the Buick version of the original Town and Country would have looked like? Here’s an approximation. A ’38 Buick panel truck, used by the Oslo police department as a patrol car and paddy wagon.
I suspect part of the problem with the luxury minivan concept is how closely it resembled the larger, traditional van conversions with their comfy, overstuffed captain’s chairs. One of the most common was the ‘Leisure Van’. The demographic of those conversion vans was definitely skewed to the older, retired crowd who liked to travel and go out as couples to the local Golden Corral. In effect, it was a shot at moving the geezers out of their Grand Marquis, Buicks, and Cadillacs.
So, Chrysler and GM figured they’d give the converted Leisure Van a try on the smaller, more fuel efficient minivan. The only surprise was they hadn’t tried it sooner, particularly at Chrysler where ‘brougham’ was Iacocca’s middle name. As the article accurately points out, it didn’t quite work with the radical, futuristic Dustbuster styling of the GM U-body.
Hah, another CC which I’ve driven, as a rental in the mid-90’s, and had forgotten all about. It wasn’t bad, but the most memorable part of the trip was stopping at a small diner or coffee shop in rural Minnesota, and getting a decent sandwich for about $2.50. That was not something you could do in California, not even 25 years ago. On my next trip to MN, I had some less memorable car, perhaps a Taurus, and I remember having to scrape frost off the windshield with my credit card. In hindsight, I’m glad it wasn’t that Silhouette …that would have been a big job.
My grandparents also had one, a gold one with the black accents up until 2000, roughly. They traded it in on a new Aurora.
Always stuck me as an odd car choice for them as all the kids were out of the house and the closest grandchildren were hours away.
A fair number of older people liked the ease of entry and exit offered by a minivan.
Great piece, Brendan. I had never thought to compare the T&C with the Silhouette until you made that happen.
The thing I remember most about these was that some of the first commercials I remember seeing for these featured actor Josh Saviano of “The Wonder Years” fame. Try that one on! LOL
A neighbour had the Pontiac version of these, the Transport I think. He hated the thing with a passion, and never washed it. It did provide useful service for the Mrs. to and from work, and on family trips out of town, but when some slight defect appeared from wear, he couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. It was replaced with an Odyssey.
I do get that people get attached to having a minivan in the house, they are so useful for carrying stuff. However I don’t get people who get a minivan just for a one driver no passengers shuttle to work. You’re carting around 4,000 pounds of iron (plastic?) without a real need.
I recall the confusion when Chevy had Lumina van and a car of the same name. “Hey I just bought a Lumina!” “Which one?” “Huh, there’s more than one?”
The biggest problem with these was that they were as big outside as the long Chrysler vans but only had as much usable room inside as the shorties (see what I did there?). That hood and windshield ate up a ton of usable space, leaving precious little for passengers and cargo.
Sort of a juxtaposition eh? A real misuse of space. My neighbour claimed the dustbuster van was the only one that would fit in his garage. I never went to look, but he must have had some serious debris hanging from the rafters.
Dust buster is too kind. I thought they looked like the shuttle craft from star trek. I drove one once. The slope of the windshield and the sheer size of the dash just felt weird.
Isn’t a van basically a shuttle craft?
Given the advanced technology involved, “shuttlecraft” might be an appropriate term for the current Pacifica Hybrid. I’m waiting to see a white one with ‘Galileo 7’ emblazoned on the side.
You mean like THIS one?
A co-worker at the time had the Chevrolet version. She was a GM loyalist, and was happy with the reliability. She drove it for well over 100,000 miles. She tolerated the size of the dashboard and slope of the windshield.
I could never get past the huge space between the dashboard and the base of the windshield. Just sitting in of these at an auto show brought that home.
At the time, these seemed like a Motorama show car put into production without many changes. The end result suggested why companies were wise not to bring show cars into production without many changes. Show cars tend to be designed for the designers and top brass…not people who will use them on a daily basis.
One note – I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen a first-generation Chrysler Town and Country minivan. I had completely forgotten that it even existed. The second-generation models were fairly common.
I’ve only seen one or two 1990 Town & Country minivans in my lifetime. Only about 5,000 were produced.
“At the time, these seemed like a Motorama show car put into production without many changes. The end result suggested why companies were wise not to bring show cars into production without many changes. Show cars tend to be designed for the designers and top brass…not people who will use them on a daily basis.”
The problem was the opposite. The 1986 show car had a shape much closer to the third generation Chrysler vans than the U-bodies. Of course it also had a side door which opened vertically, but either way in terms of proportion and driving position the show car was much better.
I always thought these bore a resemblance to the vintage dustbuster cordless vacuum due to the sloping front end
Just like the article stated!
LOL, glad at least someone broke out their reading glasses 🙂
And you got one in beige! So period!
Is it wrong for me to say I have a soft spot for these? I get that they fail as minivans, and that the styling is polarizing, but maybe that’s why I sort of like them. This is one of the greatest automotive guilty pleasures to me, ineffective in every way, but packed with enough charm for me to admire it in a weird strange way.
GM seemed to go through a sudden radical styling spurt, as though they couldn’t distance themselves from their boxy lookalike letter-car clones fast enough. Look what they did to the Camaro and Firebird around then too. Practicality really took a back seat to style.
You’re not alone. I think these look damn cool, regardless of the badge. It’s not just the steep front that does it for me, it’s also the gently smoothed lines at the rear. I’m not sure which U-Body is my favourite — I don’t love the Pontiac’s cladding and the black stripe on the Olds is a bit odd.
The attempt in ’94 to make the Chevy and Pontiac look more normal made those two look less cool to my eyes.
But that dashboard would have annoyed me if I’d owned one, I’m sure. And that Town & Country interior looks a lot yummier than the Olds’.
How could GM have approve this vehicle? The moment you sat behind the wheel, you had the feeling of driving from the back seat of anything else. It was ridiculous that GM thought shoppers would feel comfortable in such a horrible driving position. I remember getting in for the first time in an Olds and immediately wanting to get out again. It was a rental for overnight, since my car wasn’t ready at the Maui airport. I thought I could handle it overnight – which I did. It was a terrible driving experience.
I could unfold my entire road map and lay it open across the dashboard. The vastness of the windshield and dash wasn’t helped in any way by the IP design. GM fixed this problem when the IP was hurriedly updated by adding a rising horizon line, breaking up the illusion.
Then there was the cheap plastic – everything. Those “removable” seats weighed about fifty pounds and could have served as boat anchors. Whatever flexibility you thought you’d have vanished when you actually tried to be flexible. GM vehicles as this time had lowest-bidder plastic interior parts from god-knows where. They felt light, cheap, and poorly made. The mouse-fur cloth interiors looked like they came out of a Cavalier.
The terrible driving position was a death knell.
Regarding the ad in the article above: “Possibly the only thing you’ll do this year your kids will approve of”
Absolutely not. One of my best friend’s family were close to buying one of these, and once she saw it, she made it absolutely certain that no way in hell would her junior high self be caught dead in one. Her brothers also likely said yuck loud enough to squash that idea. She was relieved the new car ended up a Sable wagon. Not even remotely interested in cars, she referred to it as “a fucking dustbuster”. That should tell you all you need to know how far off the mark these were.
America is such a big place I have to ask – did anyone ever actually put a handle on the rear of one of these, or is that just my warped sense of humour?
Just a trailer hitch and flatbed away. Vrooom indeed…
I think many image-conscious teenagers, kids, and adults alike had similar sentiment towards the Toyota Previa. No offense meant to anyone who owned a Previa or Dustbuster, but they were both rather goofy looking. It would be like your parents coming to pick you up from school in the Oscar Mayer Wiener mobile.
Growing up, a neighbor down the street bought his wife a Previa, which she detested for its looks and general awkwardness. She made him drive it and trade in his Camry on a Celica convertible for her to compensate!
I like her already.
Great article. And you hit the nail on the head. People wanted these minivans, or “Magic Wagons,” as Chrysler originally called them, but they didn’t want them to look like road-sanctioned Star Wars vehicles.
GM’s minivan saga, as a whole, is a sad and ineffective one.
First, there were the Astra and Safari, which were low-tech, unwieldy, not at all safe, and in production far too long.
Then, there were these unreliable and awkward first-generation “Dustbuster” unibodies, which were the Silhouette, Lumina APV and Trans Sport
After that, GM gave up and decided to just make facsimiles of the successful Chrysler minivans; those were the Silhouette, Venture, GL8 and Trans Sport/Montana. They made one with a slightly smaller footprint for the European Opel/Vauxhall market called the Sintra. Even then, they were extremely lazy, under-built, and unsafe.
Finally, GM decided to just salvage what it could by doing a thorough rework of its U-body minivans, grafting SUV-like noses to them, and calling them “sport/crossover vans.” What emerged was just about the laziest exercise in same-market badge engineering I’ve ever seen (they couldn’t even be bothered to do unique headlight assembles. Those final U-bodies were the Terraza, Uplander, Montana SV6 and Relay.
And then the Lambda crossovers (Acadia, Enclave, Outlook, Traverse) debuted, and it was curtains for the GM minivan. GM still sells the GL8 in China–albeit thoroughly reworked and probably on a redesigned platform–but not in the U.S.
What a horrible line of vehicles.
A final footnote: the styling was more successful in Europe. It meshed with the not-too-dissimilar styling of the Renault Espace. It contributed to a series of MPVs with that basic shape that currently includes the aforementioned Espace, the Citroen Picasso/Grand Picasso/SpaceTourer series, and GM’s own Opel/Vauxhall Zafira.
I was shocked to find out, Buick GL8 is still built on the old bones. They still retain the wheelbase, and similar horrifying crashworthiness ( which should be improved even with the same platform )
But on the surface it looks almost built on Buick LaCrosse bones.
GL8 was a Buick? The three-character-alphanumeric sounds more like Cadilllac nomenclature.
If I remember correctly the corner of the front doors were at a sharp point so that people were getting hurt getting in
I think it was “fixed”with a warning sticker
Kyree, I saw a GM toaster van (Safari or something) not too long ago. It was in like one year old condition, and it still had the original pinstriping on it, and original paint. To me, those seemed top heavy, and as you said, unwieldy. Of all the original interpretations of what a minivan should look like, between the Safari, the Aerostar, and the Chrysler, there was no contest. Iacocca’s van knocked it over the fence for a round tripper.
My ex wife’s aunt had one of these… Pontiac version I think.
She left a bunch of GM parts in my shed from her days as a P/O/GMC tech.
I think I still have a couple of window regulators for these, as they’re wont to stop working, so my ex stocked them for a quick repair to her aunt’s car. Her uncle had a Lumina at the time (the sedan, not the van… and I still don’t understand why they named two OBVIOUSLY different vehicles Lumina, but I digress….). His Lumina used the same window regulators as I recall.
“It’s honestly a shocker that the Town & Country didn’t feature a vinyl top, opera lamps, and wire wheel discs.”
I’m pretty sure the wire wheel covers were an option on the first gen Voyager/Caravan, so I would assume that option carried over to the T&C as well, unless Chrysler had dropped that option on all the minivans by that time.
I know this because when my parents ordered their first Voyager in 1984, I saw the wire wheel covers in the brochure and I begged my parents to order them, because at that age I thought wire wheels covers were just the coolest thing (I called them “wire in the tire” at that age). They did not order them; they went cheap and got what I assume were the base wheel covers, just plain unadorned discs with a Pentastar in the center.
When the first T&C was released, I was in love. By the time the second baby came along, I was seriously considering how to purchase one. I wanted one of the original white ones, but at the time, even though these were used cars, they were recent and held their value pretty well.
I remember seeing the TransSport minivan concept in the pages of Autoweek back in the day; but the production van was fairly different. For all of folks complaints about them, they were flexible and rather nice to drive in the 3.8L versions. Several friends of mine had the Oldsmobile versions (as used cars) and they got decent service out of them.
For a while, I had MY mid-2000’s examples of all three domestic minivans in my family, I could go out and drive them side by side to see the differences. The Caravan and Grand Caravan were my favorites, but the U vans were right behind them.
A few years back when I got my current van, I found a minty 1996 Pontiac TransSport for sale. I really wanted to buy it, mostly to keep my Pontiac string of purchases unbroken, but I decided that no matter how nice it was, I really didn’t want to daily a nearly 20 year-old car. I felt like it was just asking for trouble, and it would have been no matter who built the car. Bummer.
I forgot! I do have a Dustbuster of my own… It’s just… very small…
I wonder why both the mirror caps are missing on the gold one…These were interesting I suppose for about five minutes, the styling did mesh with the Cutlass Supreme and some of the rest of the line at the time, but it was such an also-ran compared to everything else. No, haven’t driven one, haven’t ridden in one either that I can recall, I’m sure it was likely just fine, but sometimes polarizing styling is genuinely a bad thing.
When I think about the Cimarron, or the more recent XT6, I can see one of these with a Cadillac badge slapped on it.
Had GM waited a decade or two to make the U-Body, it would’ve been spot-on with the seating configuration as it’s now used in almost every 3-row crossover & SUV, having 3 in the 2nd row & 2 (or 3) in the 3rd. The 2+2+2 configuration is currently used in long-wheelbase versions of the Ford Transit Connect; I think it actually comes that way STANDARD & the 7th seat is optional. For all the early U-Body’s faults, the modular seats & dent-resistant body panels were truly great ideas for a family vehicle. I don’t know of any other vehicles with these features, same for the Dutch Door option on the Astro/Safari (my ’05 has it).
As ordinary (in a good way) as all the 1st & 2nd generation Chrysler minivans look, there’s one unique quirk to the design that I’ve noticed–why was the sliding door handle turned sideways as opposed to the other doors?