You had to be pretty optimistic to think this car was going to save Oldsmobile.
I remember reading numerous car magazine articles about the Intrigue when it was launched, and the common theme amongst them was the palpable sense of hope that this car (and also the ’97 Malibu) was signaling some kind of new commitment by Oldsmobile, and by extension, GM, toward making better cars. (Sound familiar??) There even seemed to be a whiff of hope that it signaled the entire domestic auto industry was about to get serious about building class-competitive cars. I guess when a Toyonda Camcord had been so clearly better for such a long time, anything looks like it might help.
It looks helpful enough, doesn’t it? The Intrigue is really not a bad looking car–that extra 10 minutes they spent making this warmed-over W-body pop really paid off. Add in the evergreen 3800 engine, a shorter final drive, and GM’s better suspension bits and you had a pretty nice car. The sawed-off Northstar 3.5 liter DOHC “Shortstar” V6 was still a year away from launch, another case of taking a car out of the oven before it was done. (But the good engine was coming! It’ll transform the car! Best power in its class and stuff, and isn’t it pretty? Great lease rates, $0 due at signing and $14 a month for 109 months!!! It’ll be different this time, honest!!!)
Well, this time wasn’t different enough. I’m not going to bother to look up sales figures, but you seldom see the later years of this car, which ended after 2002. Like so many GM cars, this one began life as a car that felt like it was already 4 years old; a nice, fully-equipped car that’s basically a good deal using a familiar formula with familiar pieces, but nothing special.
Like many others, I’ve often felt that Oldsmobile didn’t have to go away, and if only we could’ve made them wake up and see how they were hurting themselves, they’d snap out of their stupor and start building cars worth buying again. When should we have done this, 1998? 1986? 1974? The moment the 350 Diesel was conceived? If we had done it when their slide would have been easiest to prevent, they would have laughed in our faces and partied on. No, you can’t help some people (er, businesses.) They have to want to change, and Oldsmobile didn’t. RIP, old friend.
Its real 4easy to see why the Commodore was so popular other than the 3.8V6 it shared nothing with this
Out of all the GM divisions that have been axed, I miss Oldsmobile the most.
Me too.
Me three
Me four. I do have a thing for first gen Saturns too
I agree with your feelings, guys.
The W body was the last kick at the sedan market for GM. At the time, their competition, namely Toyota and Honda, were turning out some really nice products with slick as all get out, multi-cam V-6 motors and really nice, soft touch interiors. They were good cars and people were willing to pay a premium for them.
We have to remember that the W body came from a GM where senior managers were proud that they had never driven a “foreign” car.
I am not much of a GM fan, (usually the case for anyone who has had the misfortune of working for them) and these really were not bad cars. It is just that their competition was so much better. Problem was by 1997 adequate was not good enough.
I’ll be honest and say I really loved these cars and IIRC the Intrigue was the best reviewed of all the W-bodys with many of the car mags declaring that of the W-body quadruplets the Oldsmobile was the one to get.
One thing I have noticed is that here in my corner of the world their are more Intrigues still on the road than Regals and Luminas of that vintage. (The Grand Prix is still champ of that generation for survival but please the Pontiac must have outsold the Buick and the Olds 2 to 1.)
The biggest stinker out of this was the 3.5 or “Shortnorth” engine. Apparently it was not as troublesome as the Northstar but the program still went no where. The engine was supposed to spawn an new generation of V6′s based off the architecture.
I would say all of the survivors are 1998-99 3800 Cars. You’ll still see those carry a (slight) price premium over the Shortstar cars. One, it was a horrible engine (Loud and torqueless off idle) and apparently, given it’s very Olds Intrigue/Aurora 3.5 specific, parts are hard to find.
Picture it,
Step 1: pick up an Intrigue with a bad “Shortstar”
Step 2: transplant engine and trans from a wrecked Impala SS/Grand Prix GXP
Step 3: figure out how to wipe the smile off your face…
Pictured. Make mine black without a spoiler.
That’s my boy!
I have to disagree on the Shortstar engines. I have an ’01 Intrigue with that engine and find that it suits the car better than the 3800 (comparing it to a ’98 I once rented). It doesn’t wake up until later in the power band, true, but it also doesn’t run out of breath at 4500 rpm like a 3800. Parts are definitely rarer, given the two-car only application, but I haven’t had any more difficulty sourcing them than I did for the LeSabre I had before it.
Reliability-wise, they may not run until the apocalypse like a 3800 will, but they also don’t have any glaring problems early in life like pretty much all of GM’s pushrod V6s did at the time (intake manifold plenums and gaskets, almost to a one). With 162k miles on mine, it still returns over 30 mpg on the highway. Reliability of the rest of the car has been a mixed bag, but I can’t fault the power train.
So after taking the time to slam the Intrigue, you dont offer an alternative? What would have been an “Oldsmobile worth buying” in your opinion?
An Eighty Eight LSS with an interior that doesn’t warp, decompose, or self-destruct would be a start.
It isn’t that I hate Oldsmobile…think of my criticism as that of a parent that’s disgusted with their underachieving, unserious kid.
Well that’s constructive. Rather than lashing out at the critic shouldn’t you’re irritation be directed at the company that sunk the brand through their own neglect and incompetence?
I always liked Olds, right up until the end, but the ’80s cars were built like crap and the ’90s cars quickly fell apart from the inside out. GM chased away its loyal customers through repeated abuse and it didn’t have to be that way.
Unfortunately, the remaining GM apologists still insist on blaming import buyers and the ever-elusive “Japan, Inc” for the company’s troubles. Oldsmobile ads in the early ’90s told buyers to “Demand better;” perhaps if GM loyalists actually had instead of constantly defending crap like the J-car, things would be different today.
The Toyota Avalon was the best traditional Oldsmobile of the 1990s.
It’s too bad the rest of the car(s) didn’t match the reliability and longevity of the 3800
…and the next decade or two as well.
Carmine, as far as Oldsmobiles worth buying, I would have taken a Ninety Eight or one of the last Eighty Eights, especially a ’97-’98 Regency with the Ninety Eight’s interior. Yesterday I posted pics to the Cohort of a ’94-’96 Ninety Eight that was in perfect shape, including the driver’s seat. It still had the Oldsmobile Edge sticker in the window. Ice blue metallic, navy blue leather and wire wheel covers. It was sharp!
Like some of you, I really liked the look of the Intrigue when it first came out. (Intriguing?) And the ones with the 3800 were not bad cars. But as someone else said, average was not going to cut it. Even against the Taurus and Intrepid, this car was only average, and it was definitely sub-par against Toyotas and Hondas.
I hate to say it, but this probably would have sold better as a Cutlass.
I was going to say the same thing, what really hurt this car was the “Oldsmobile-we’re sorry” divisional self hate that was going on, combined with GM’s name suicide game of changing names and throwing away any brand equity that was left, people did’nt even know who made this car, they could not identify the new Oldsmobile emblem on the front and I alway thought the Intrigue name was to close to the Dodge Intrepid, if this car would have come out with the name Cutlass and the regular rocket emblem, it would have done better, the same for the Ciera replacement Malibu re-badged Cutlass.
The shoud have done what Buick did, when the FWD A’s were finally put out to pasture in 1996. Buick put the well known Century name on a W-body and kept selling it to people that wanted a Century, the same car with buckets and a 3800 became the Regal. Olds could have had a W-body Ciera with the 3.1 and then the Intrigue shoud have been a Cutlass, having a coupe available would have helped too.
That about sums it, JP. My dad, who essentially wrote GM off in the early ’80s after several lemons, really liked the Intrigue and Aurora. They looked great, but the execution was crap. Sure a 3800 Intrigue was probably pretty durable, but it felt like a rickety piece of junk compared to the Accord my dad bought instead.
Olds was so desperate to shake off its old fart image in the ’90s that they destroyed all their remaining brand equity. The “Not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign should have been the first clue, but they went ahead and threw out the Cutlass name and the familiar Rocket logo anyway. The original Aurora and first-year Intrigue didn’t wear any Oldsmobile badging whatsoever. Around ’94-’95, there was much speculation that Olds would even change its name, perhaps to “Aurora.” Stupid, stupid, stupid.
The most ridiculous part is that, after killing off the brand, GM essentially tried to remold Saturn into Oldsmobile.
It didn’t have to be that way. I always thought Oldsmobile was a stronger brand than Pontiac and Buick, let alone Saturn and would have been better suited to survive after the bankruptcy.
“Rickety piece of junk.” I think that covers their whole model line. Then and now.
I remember that the Intrigue was prominently featured in the X-Files movie which came out the same year the car was introduced. The movie was referenced in most of the Oldsmobile advertising too.
Other than owning at one time a 67 C-10 and a 74 Camaro, I’ve not had much experience with GM, but I always thought the Intrigue was the best looking of the GM’s at the time. I spent a week with a rental Malibu of the same period and I remember thinking, “dang, this Chevy is a pretty good car”. Based on comments above, I guess a long term ownership of one would have changed my mind.
I agree with jpcavanaugh, calling it a Cutlass would have been the prudent marketing move.
Wayne, if you only knew.
In early 2001 I was working at a little Olds dealer in tiny Roscommon, MI. Compared to the other GM cars sitting on the used car lot, the Oldsmobiles seemed to offer just enough differences that made them interesting to me. The Intrigue was a really nice car-new. My boss had a bad habit of going to auction and buying up high mileage rental cars and older off-lease models. The cars from the rental fleets, while no more than a year or two old, felt just plain old and worn out! People would ask me what I thought about the Intrigue, and I would always say it’s a really nice car, just don’t buy a used one.
Nevertheless, I still miss Oldsmobile…
yep
I actually test drove one of those. It looks great inside and out, what brings the car down is all these GM parts bins inside, back when GM’s parts bins weren’t up to the competition. The traditional GM brake feel is what turns me off the most.
The Intrigue had really nice clean exterior styling and while dated, the 3.8 liter V6 was an efficient powertrain.
As others have mentioned, what really let the Intrigue down was the interior. The Accord and Camry of the same vintage had really nice soft-touch interiors with plastics that have aged well even to this day. The Intrigue interior felt awful and plasticy from day 1.
My dad and I test drove a new one with the 3.5 liter Shortstar in 1999, as a potential addition to the family fleet. After the drive, he stated there was no way he was going to pay $28k for a car with an interior as bad as the Intrigue’s. It rattled on our test drive. Can’t help but wonder what it would have been like in a few years.
Friend of mine has one of these, what really gets me is the design of the truck/taillights. In that the flow of water from the lip around of trunk is directly over one of the bolts for the taillights. And to boot, they didn’t even put a real fastener on it, just a plastic clip to hold the trunk liner in. The result being a trunk full of water from a PNW winter. I was amazed on seeing this, I knew 90′s GM are poorly designed, but this takes the cake. /rant over
I actually have an Intrigue as my daily driver, a 2000 model with the 3.5. The maligned “shortstar” isn’t as torquey as the evergreen 3.8, but it’s more refined and returns a consistent 28 mpg. The interior is handsome enough, but as others have said is not put together as well as the Japanese competition. Where these old W bodies shine is as inexpensive commuters. Really, they are not as bad as some would think – and because of their “orphan” status, they can be had for next to nothing. I’m closing in on 175,000 miles with no problems other than a couple of wheel bearings and new front rotors. To me the styling is very good – conservative but not anodyne like the CamCord. The money I save by not having car payments and high insurance rates goes straight into the motorcycle collection. Brilliant! When this one gets north of 200,000 miles, I’ll go buy another. Or maybe it’s time for a panther . . . . .
Thanks for the counter-response. While I didn’t own one, my in-laws had a 1998 with the Buick V6. My FIL loved that car; when my MIL insisted on a new car (ca. 2005), he fought her to the very end. Theirs did have a few issues, wheel bearings, warped rotors and something else that I don’t remember right now. The car was not totally trouble free, but few rarely are.
I had occasion to drive it frequently, for a car that size, it was a great driver. It could handle the hilly, curvy roads of NE Ohio with ease. The 3.8 gave great gas mileage, and I’m a fan of the W bodies, for it’s relative space to size of car ratio.
I have a friend who is an absolute Honda fan. Over one holiday visit, his Honda was in the shop, so he rented a car to come out here. He ended up with an Intrigue as the rental car. He admitted to me that he thought he would hate driving the car. As it turns out, he liked it a great deal. He never did buy one, though.
I agree with others that it would have been better marketed as a Cutlass, even though the Cutlass name had been diluted with so many variations across different GM platforms. Of course, I’m one of those folks who thinks that the Saturn division was a complete waste of resources, and the idea of “twinning” Olds with Saturn was even a worse idea, if that were possible.
But that’s all water under the bridge now.
Although we never got Oldsmobiles new here (well not in the last 60 yrs anyway), I was always taken by the car magazine pictures of the front end design. It really is rather distinctive – and a tidy bit of family resemblance to the Aurora (a great looker in the original shape). But having now seen what the Intrigue’s back end looks like, I have to say it’s the diametric opposite of the front; it’s so generic it could be anything. The tail-lights look like those on the mid-90s Mitsi Lancer coupe, the spoiler looks like a bit of carelessly melted plastic, and the overall effect is one of “meh”. It’s like they were enthusiaistic at the front and gradually ran out of energy as they worked towards the rear end. I still like the front though…!
I’m sad no one noticed my Lincoln on the edge of picture 4!
I recall that when the Intrigue was introduced one of the automotive press publications did their usual review and totally panned the car. (I think it was the Detroit News but am not positive.) Seems they got a regular production model, not one prepped and inspected for press review. The car the reviewed had lots of manufacturing glitches, loose parts, rattles, etc., etc., etc. Olds showed up the day after the review ran with a fully inspected/corrected Intrigue that was really nice but the damage had been done. Another nail in the coffin.
Intrigued?
I loved the ads because they featured an Amtrak Superliner train racing across the west, ala “Orient Express”.
I liked the car, too. That, and the Aurora. Too bad Olds had to go. I still miss the Cutlass 442…
The wife has been driving a 2001 Intrigue since April 2003. We bought it from an older guy with 15K on the clock. It virtually was a new car. I cannot even remember half the things that have gone wrong in the last 9 years. The car has almost 100K now. Transmission rebuild, ignition lock switch, exhaust resonerator, power steering lines, AC, blower motor, brakes numerous times, etc.
However, this car still looks good after sitting out in winter and hot sun. The cheap interior still looks good. The carpet could use a shampoo, but still nice. The car has quirks, such as not starting, wait 10 minutes til the security system resets. The turn signals go out occasionally until the 4 ways are played with. Uses a quart of oil every 1,000 or less. AC is not currently working.
All in all, the transmission rebuilt at 55K and ignition switch, (both out of warranty) were the only items I could actually fault the car for, in addition to the security system starting problems. Yet this car cost $ 26,000 new. Getting it for half that made it a good car. I’d have had fits paying $ 26K for this car, and paying $ 1,700 for a tranny rebuilt and $ 350 for an ignition switch. The Olds Intrigue was not a $ 26K car.
“…you seldom see the later years of this car…”
Or maybe you’re like me, and can’t distinguish them from the Aleros because you never paid enough attention to anything Oldsmobile was trying to sell in the 1990′s. Yes, it’s sad that GM chose that nameplate to kill, but really, considering what they were doing with it, why not?
Yes, as painful as it is to admit, the decision to phase out Oldsmobile was almost a mercy killing by that point.
Towards the last days of Oldsmobile, they were playing around with a performance brand like Pontiac did with the GXP series of cars, Olds called theirs OSV, Oldsmobile Specialty Vehicles, there was an auto show Intrigue concept with the Auroras 4.0 litre V8 stuffed inside, an Alero with the 3.5 Shortstar and an Alero with an Aurora V8 too, plus a tweaked Bravada and Shillouette concepts as well.
Looking back at the promising Intrigue, I’ve always thought it sad that Oldsmobile was the division that got itself cut in the early 2000s, when it was the one that had shown so much promise in preceding decades.
My parents bought a 1994 3.1-liter V6 Cutlass Supreme new–it was their “we’ve arrived” vehicle at the time–and they only got rid of it when the family mechanic pronounced its meticulously-maintained engine (oil changed every 3K miles, etc) a lost cause at 80K-something-miles in 2004.
Mind you, I recall my mother freaking the f*** out when the steering column began smoking on the drive home from the dealership, so it may have been a lemon all along.
Still, it’s unfortunate that a company that turned their corporate architecture into such cars as the Eighty Eight LSS, Intrigue, Alero, and other reasonably worthy vehicles ended up getting the axe. You get the feeling that the engineers at Olds were doing their damndest to hold things together, and one can only hope that those lessons were absorbed into the GM labyrinth.