(first posted 7/19/2016) Joseph Dennis has a knack for capturing wonderful images when he visits his hometown of Flint, Michigan, like this Oldsmobile Delta 88 and this Pontiac Grand Prix LJ. These cars look to have been special ordered and loaded with goodies, likely by GM employees who knew their products well and knew exactly which option boxes to check. It’s no surprise that they are still treasured today, as the right equipment could transform these cars. That is certainly what Car and Driver found back in December 1978, when they tested this fully loaded 1979 Pontiac Grand Prix LJ.
By necessity, downsizing stripped away many of the extravagant styling elements that had made previous Grand Prix one of the darlings of the personal luxury set. However, the optional 2-tone paint, genuine wire wheels, abundant power assists and pillowed velour upholstery worked to reassure buyers that this GP could still stand out from the pack as a Seventies-style showboat.
The real magic of this particular Grand Prix test car was that it featured Pontiac’s Rally Tuned Suspension option, which added a number of upgrades to the suspension, a modified steering ratio and larger tires. The end result was a car that handled quite well (and made you forget the less-than-stellar 301 V8), pleasing Car and Driver’s editors. However, as with most extra-cost handling upgrades, real world buyers were probably less enticed, as non-enthusiasts probably couldn’t understand or enjoy the handling difference versus the stock set-up. Predictably, dealers wouldn’t have been too keen to have units on their lot with a $116 option ($429 adjusted) that few buyers could fully appreciate. But an oh-so-glamorous padded vinyl landau top for about the same money? Easy sale!
In some ways Car and Driver’s test car seemed wildly overpriced, with its $10,408 sticker equating to $38,477 in today’s dollars, making for a pretty pricey Prix. Certainly a more judicious trip down the options list could have avoided a lot of this cost, as could switching to a Grand LeMans coupe instead of the fancier GP. But that would have negated the whole point of this car: the Grand Prix LJ was a cosseting style statement, well-tuned for the vast middle-market car buying mindset of the time.
To me, today’s equivalent would be something like a Ford Edge, which is basically a heavily modified Fusion with the now-enormously-popular SUV attributes. Do most people need an SUV for daily driving when a sedan could serve just as well, if not better? Not at all. But people want the SUV look, and many Ford buyers are happy to pay the ~$6,000 price premium for an Edge as compared to the Fusion. Plus, it is easy to load up an Edge to more than $40,000, so really not that different from where Car and Driver’s Grand Prix test car was priced. The U.S. car market has frequently placed an emphasis on style, and willingly paid more money for an “image” vehicle–personal luxury back then, off road “ability” today–so the more things change, the more they stay the same. The real question is, in 38 years, will we be snapping shots of a loaded Ford Edge Titanium still being driven with pride?
The 1979 Riviera’s base price was just over $10,000 and then options run the price up. A Bonneville was about $7000.
Current Lincoln’s are in the equivalent price range but Lincoln in 1979 were well over $10,000 before options.Brakes were optional???
BLAH. BLAH. BLAH…
This C/D article reads as though it were inspired by a call from the advertising sales department: “GM brought the car this morning. Write it up GOOD enough and they’ll sign for blah-blah-blah thousands in ads. Write it up even better and they’ll sign up for blah-blah-blah-BLAH…”
Perhaps, but most of the automotive press of this time were impressed with the road manners of GM’s downsized cars, at least with the optional suspensions. C/D seemed genuinely pleased with the whole downsizing trend — their editorial stance in this era was that all cars should be like the better (pricier) German cars, so anything that seemed like a step in that direction generally got their strong endorsement. (The bricks and tire irons came out for anything that didn’t, like the Cadillac DeVille GN mentions below.)
The part that seems unusually subdued, for C/D, is the commentary on the styling and image. In this era, they didn’t have much liking for personal luxury coupes (even the original BMW E24 6er, believe it or not), but maybe they felt the editorial spleen had been sufficiently vented at the downsized Monte Carlo.
This wasn’t even the most expensive model of Grand Prix in 1979, there was a (slightly?) more expensive model, the SJ. What’s disappointing is that engine choices, unless you were buying a Firebird or full-sized Pontiac, were limited to the standard V6 or the 301 V8.
It’s unfortunate, but looking at pricing of new cars in road tests then and now show that you still need to spend several thousands of dollars in options to get a great car instead of a merely good one.
Yep, the SJ was $259 ($860 adjusted) more than the LJ. It had buckets, center console and RTS standard. It was the least popular Grand Prix, with 24,060 produced for ’79.
The thing, though, is that back then there were actually substantial options, like different engine choices or suspension upgrades. Those are *very* few and far between these days, unless you’re talking about a truck. For the vast majority of cars, options are limited to things like sunroofs, leather, and infotainment packages. Nice things to have, and ones that make the car a nicer place to spend your time, but not ones that make a difference in the way it drives. Generally if a car offers more than one engine choice, the better engine can’t be had as an a la carte option, usually appearing in conjunction with a higher or sportier trim level.
Foregoing just four appearance/comfort options (wire-wheels, sunroof, two-tone paint, and CB radio) drops the price by nearly $2,000. The 1979 Grand Prix LJ would then be a whole lot closer to the competition in cost, yet still have the same performance advantage (and probably be better, considering the weight savings of the sunroof and heavy wire-wheels).
IOW, where the money’s really made is the outrageously over-inflated price of needless options (premium radios have always been one of the biggest money-makers). It’s a game nearly as old as the auto industry itself.
There’s a short article in the most recent issue of the British magazine CAR that deals with what different manufacturers charge for options.
Optional paint colors for a VW Beetle: £145 ($200) versus the possibility of spending as much as £23, 730 (nearly $35,000) for CUSTOM paint on a Bentley Continental GT.
Leather upholstery on an Audi A1 is £170 ($250) versus £11, 490 ($15,000-$16,000) in a BMW Alpina B7 ( a “hot-rod” BMW).
Cruise control: £204 ($300) in a VW Caravelle (sort of a VW Eurovan) versus £7944 ($12,000) in a Rolls-Royce Dawn.
Alloy wheels: £300 ($450) for a MINI versus £8568 ($12,500) in a Rolls-Royce Phantom.
Oddly, the only thing on that list that doesn’t shock me unduly is the paint. I’m guessing “custom” in this context means the customer brings in a swatch to match the car to her corgi’s new diamond-studded color rather than picking a less-common option from the catalog. While the quoted price is perhaps gouge-y for an OEM with ready access to bodies in white (even considering that you’re also basically paying for their production inconvenience as much as anything else), if you bought the car in one color and took it to an aftermarket customizer for a high-end repaint (especially one with quality befitting a Bentley) it might well cost you that much anyway, and having the factory do it is certainly more convenient. Modern high-end automotive paint jobs ain’t cheap.
For comparison, there’s an excellent Car and Driver article from circa 1992 called “The $64,000 Paint Job,” about a place in the L.A. area called Junior’s House of Color. (If you’re interested, I can figure out the exact issue, which I have in a box somewhere.)
Not that it isn’t ridiculously extravagant, mind you, but on the scale of things, it’s less absurd than $12K for cruise control (or for a wind-up dashboard clock, as on the original Lamborghini Diablo years ago).
Exactly Rudiger. I was thinking the same thing. A buyer could have opted for some Rallye II’s and pin stripes and saved a ton of money. $2000.00 was a lot for appearance options in my book. Then again, it raised the status quotient of this GP to near Riviera levels.
Not many GP’s were equipped like this one. In fact, the wire wheels were as rare as could be, not many had sunroofs, two-tone paint was not very popular and the CB radio was also a rarely ordered option.
Two-tone paint was very popular here in southern Ontario in the late ’70s-early ’80s. I remember seeing a lot of cars optioned that way. With the right colour combos and pin stripes, dual shade paint could really transform even the most humdrum sedan into something that looked special. I miss it.
Very popular in S.E. Michigan too.
Maybe it made rust repairs easier, no need to spray the whole car to get a good paint match.
I had seen those cars 10 years old with no rust. Most people didn’t repair rust in that era anyway, they just ditched the car and bought a new one.
An even better value in 1979 would have been the Model SJ which had many items standard that cost extra on this LJ – including the 301 V8, gauge cluster and Rally RTS. Would have foregone frivolous stuff like the leaky sunroof that also reduced head room, the CB radio, two-tone paint and real wire wheels, and gone for most of the other stuff listed including the power options, cruise and Safe-T-Track differential. Interiorwise, would have stuck with the SJ’s standard buckets and console in cloth and outside would have ordered the Rally IIs and then the cheaper manual air condtioning instead of the expensive Comfortron unit as this car was equipped.
That’s the one for me!
I’m surprised with how good the 0-60mph times were on the 1979 Grand Prix they’ve tested considering it was a Malaise era car, not many cars of that year was capable of going 0-60mph in under 10 seconds.
I’m sure it was carefully “prepped” by GM, like all press cars back then. 😉
I kindly doubt it was a ringer. Ten seconds to 0-60 and a 107mph top speed seem reasonable objectives for 150 hp in a 3500 car.
IIRC, Joe Yoman, who regularly contributes commentary here, has mentioned on several occasions that 301-powered GP’s were deceptively quick for the era. I trust his judgment, as he owned a few of them.
The part that raises an eyebrow about the performance figures isn’t the engine, but the listed axle ratio. If it had the 3.08 or even the 2.73 (which the brochure indicates weren’t available on the Grand Prix with the 301/4v and automatic), these figures wouldn’t be unreasonable.
With the 2.29 ratio listed, it should have gotten much better highway mpg, which they tested as freakishly lower than city. Maybe it was 3.29.
Not if that 2.29 rear axle caused the engine to lug below its torque peak. The driver’s foot would always be buried in the carburetor, and there’d be frequent downshifting to 2nd—none of which is good for highway fuel mileage.
@Daniel Stern
One of my first cars was a 1979 Malibu Landau (woohoo! Only the rear half of the roof rusted.) originally equipped* exactly as this GP, save for a 305 instead of the Pontiac 301. It also was heavily optioned, and weighed about 3450lb (had a truck scale close to home). The only place where the car really struggled was trying to get away quickly from a dead stop; mashing the throttle to the floor produced a soggy getaway, with the Quadrajet’s secondaries finally starting to open at ~25-30mph if you kept your right foot on the carpet. From that speed on up, it handled itself pretty well. Passing on two lane roads required booting it, and it did occasionally execute a part-throttle downshift to second on steeper hills. The only time I measured fuel economy was on a trip to Spokane and Seattle from Montana, and got 21 one way and 19 heading back. Otherwise, it… wasn’t too horrible? with 16 year old me at the wheel.
* The car only had the Turbo 200 for part of my ownership; we rebuilt a Turbo 350 for the car after the 200 shit the bed. The 350 had taller first and second gears, which exacerbated the leisurely take offs.
With the 301 producing max torque at 1600rpm (I think my 305 was at 2000rpm), it shouldn’t get hung up lugging. What with a three speed transmission though, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few sour spots where rpm/load/throttle opening would conspire to keep manifold vacuum low enough for the power circuit in the carb to stay open for long periods of time, netting poorer than expected fuel economy. Definitely wouldn’t happen on an EPA test loop, though.
Not so good as a 60’s Pontiac’s was at 3.9 sec in a lot heavier car. It was either a ’63 Bonneville or ’65-66 Catalina as I have read it both ways. The ’63 Bonneville rings more of a bell because at the the time I had subscriptions to 4 car magazines at the time paid with money earned on my paper route. I was a just turned teenager already dreaming of the car I wanted when I turned 16. As usual there was quite a gap between fantasy and reality.
There was not a stock Pontiac at any point in the ’60s that could do 0–60 in less than 5 seconds. The ’64 GTO of the infamous Car and Driver test had a heavily massaged 421 (and even then, the numbers were, er, fanciful) and the ’65 Catalina 2+2 in the Ferrari vs. Pontiac test you’re thinking of undoubtedly had a similarly heavy degree of help. The hotter Grand Prixes and Catalinas were plenty quick, of course (I could believe high 6s for a stock 2+2 equipped as C/D‘s ostensibly was), but not THAT quick in anything like off-the-shelf form. I don’t doubt you could get such figures out of a 421 in serious dragstrip tune, or swapping in modern LS1, but that’s not really the point.
Pontiac road tests from that era generally need to be taken with a big grain of salt because the performance models seldom made it to testers without receiving at least the Royal Bobcat treatment, so finding tests of genuinely stock examples was rare. Those two C/D tests are especially notorious, however, because they were from the David E. Davis Jr. “any publicity is good publicity” era of tongue-in-cheek snobbery and the occasional outrageous stunt.
Sorry, trying to go on a memory almost 55 years ago is probably not the thing to do anymore. 🙂 This must be the one. Still not bad for a big heavy car.
62 Grand Prix 421 (405 hp) 3-speed auto, 3.42 posi 14.3 @ 103 mph
Addtl times: 0-30 mph : 2.7 sec, 0-60 mph : 6.0 sec, 0-100 mph : 13.4 sec
Options: P/S, P/B, P/W, 8L Wt : 4330 (test) Magazine : CL (3/62)
Ahh, I thought you were talking about “The Pontiac 2+2 Against the Ferrari 2+2,” from Car and Driver, March 1965, where they ran a Catalina 2+2 against a Ferrari 330GT. Not as notorious as the GTO test, but sort of in the same vein.
The Catalina had a Tri-Power 421 and close-ratio four-speed with 3.42 axle. They claimed it did 0-60 in 3.9 seconds, 0-30 in 1.7 (!), and the quarter in 13.8 @ 106 mph. The latter sounds plausible for a well-prepped Super Duty 421 (not a standard three-carb engine), but the 0-30 had me wondering what they were using for timing equipment — a small boy next to the strip reciting, “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi” through a bullhorn?
I am surprised that the highway mileage was worse than the city. It had an extremely tall axle ratio. With a three speed auto, the engine turns about the same rpm as my 2014 Verano with a 6 speed auto. The low weight of the car shows up in being notably faster than a 360 Magnum XE or a 400 Tbird.
Also surprised it has wire wheels not just hubcaps. And that C/D ordered it that way.
I wouldn’t assume that their describing it as “our” car meant they ordered it like that. Automakers usually have a specific press fleet for road testers, which naturally tends to have a lot of cosmetic and luxury options for the benefit of photographers as well as equipment automakers know the magazine people love, like handling packages and the most powerful engine options. There are exceptions, depending on timing, but during any given road test cycle, a lot of the testers are driving the same car or couple of cars from the press fleet. Being familiar with the tastes of C/D editors of this time, I’m quite sure they would have rather had the Rally or aluminum wheels and would have dropped the sunroof and some of the other stuff to keep the weight down.
As for the mileage, those weren’t EPA figures, but the magazine’s own, and I’m guessing the comments about the car’s behavior in 80+ mph cruising have something to do with the low highway figure!
And the same thing happened in the the superbike wars of the late ’70s. Bike makers too had their “ringers”, and the same motorcycles got passed from magazine to magazine. Nobody who went to their local dealer and bought the Superbike of the Month got anywhere near the quarter mile times of the magazines! And quite often the bike that went to the dragstrip or chained to the Webco dyno was not the one tested on the street.
So what exactly was the problem with the Pontiac 301 V8? I drove a ’77 Bonneville Brougham with that engine (new that year) that was presumably heavier than this Grand Prix, and it was torquey, smooth, quiet, and trouble-free – basically what most of us want out of a V8. But this engine had a short life.
I had the very similar 1978 Grand Am, with RTS and the 301-4 bbl. The highlights of that car were its excellent handling compared to the boats of previous years, and the engine, which was quick for the times and fairly thrifty too. Also, the beautiful dash was identical to the GP, with full gages (yes, that how Pontiac spelled it).
Build quality was poor however, and at 100K miles the car basically disintegrated, with the A/C, exhaust system and other components failing and the engine needing a rebuild. Although this would be unacceptable in a car today, that was about par for the course back then.
It was very common to see GP’s optioned out like that in the Metro Detroit area, not “special ordered”.
I’ll admit I’m an old school car nut.
Having been born in 1962, my parents tell me that by 1965, every car I saw I said “Mustang”.
I have also been told that I parroted (innocently) what my Dad used to call firebirds. Sh*tbirds came out of my mouth upon hearing my dad talk to his friend about his firebird.
It is thus that I became a car nut – by nuture and by nature. Dad loved him some cars and owned a 1968 Torino GT fastback. I recall that I knew “dad was home” by the rumble the car made as he pulled into the driveway.
But I digress… somewhat.
I wax nostalgic on this site because I once had the excitement of Christmas every September when the new cars were coming out. I was reading Motor Trend as an 11 year old and always worshiped the spy shots of the new cars and the new car issue. Later I became a Road and Track subscriber.
It is thus that I remember the end of my fascination with new cars.
It began with the horrific introduction of this generation of GM’s “intermediate” cars. And while the Cutlass and the Grand Prix and Monte Carlo still fascinated me, I nearly suffered a coronary at age 16 when the dreadful Malibu and Buick four doors and aerovomit four doors were unveiled.
Taken in this context, I still love the Grand Prix with its yards of fake wood on the dash and the last attempt to recapture the past in styling – something that has left GM starting after this point and finished with the revolting Impala, Roadmaster, and the vomit inducing barges from Cadihack.
I would love to have a Grand Prix of that vintage. To my eyes it is beautiful. And it makes me sad that after this, GM was falling apart and did so intentionally.
Talk about a boring piece of milquetoast. I thought that the Grand Prix suffered the most in the 78 downsizing, as it pretty much looked boring and forgettable compared to it’s stable mates. I’m a tiny bit biased in my opinion, because I think the 1976-77 Grand Prix’s that came before hand were two of the best looking cars in GM’s lineup and also two of the better looking Pontiacs of the 70s, and this downsizing does the car no favors. Compared to the Monte Carlo in the early years and the Cutlass Supreme in the later years, these looked very generic and stodgy in a way that wasn’t conducive to a positive opinion. Granted, they did start looking better right around 85, but I think this was the weakest of the A and G body cars in the General’s stable.
I guess “real wire wheels” were still impressive at the end of the 70’s. GM offered them on many divisions. I remember my Grandpa had a set on his Seville. They were replaced with regular steel wheels with wheel covers after he found out how much those required ‘inner tube’ radials cost. Must be strange to people now, spending extra to make your wheels look smaller (but deeper).
Don’t forget that you could buy an SJ (+$260) and get leather buckets (probably another $400). So now you’d be up to over $11,000 for a 1979 Grand Prix.
Heck, now you’re approaching Cadillac DeVille territory. A ’79 Sedan de Ville started at $11,500.
I’d argue that the Cadillac was priced too low at this point. The entry level Mercedes 240D was ~$15,000, for a 4-cylinder diesel with minimal creature comforts. Cadillac should have started there too, for a more luxurious car. Caddy also should have included fuel injection and 4-wheel disc brakes as standard on the DeVille series in ’79 as well–both were global luxury car standards at the time.
What gets me with this vehicle, as with most American cars of this era, is exactly WHAT was optional. Seat recliner, defroster, int. wipers? GM certainly wasn’t alone in this, of course, but it’s still mighty irritating, even all these years later.
I checked the window sticker for my Dad’s 78 Lincoln Mark V Cartier edition and you are quite right. Rear window defroster, interval wipers, and power door locks – even cruise control – were options on the car. Hard to believe now. My 69 VW Beetle came with rear window defroster as standard equipment.
Looking for an equivalent today, I remember being surprised when the latest C-Class Mercedes was introduced with a back-up camera as optional.
It was time for my mother to trade her fully loaded ’78 Grand Prix LJ (that I picked out for her). After roaming car lots for days I had finally given up on that woman. She wanted a Chevy Celebrity. I suggested maybe the Buick or Olds equivalent as I knew what she was accustomed to. She didn’t want “no damn gray interior”. Found a nice Buick Century two tone blue, blue interior. She didn’t want no GD two-tone. She proudly drove home in her Chevy Celebrity that she “did all by myself”. It was two-tone gray/black with a gray interior! It had power locks and crank windows. It had cruise control and no intermittent wipers. Some other weird option combos that didn’t make sense too. She bitched the first time she drove up to the post office and had to ROLL the window down to mail some letters. Then “those windshield wipers that just run constantly”. The first time I polished it I noticed something very odd about that black paint – it didn’t shine. Well, we discovered this entire brand new car was repainted. Probably in a hail storm or something. My guess is somebody special ordered that odd-optioned car and ditched it after it was damaged. She did this all by herself though. I did like the days of a la carte options however.
Love that story! Sounds typical – let me do this on my own – and regret it later!!
She had new carpet installed in the entire house and wanted it all ripped up the next day because she didn’t like it but never followed through. However she did custom order these beautiful tables and decided she didn’t like those and was going to sell them but figured she was crying wolf again but woke up on a Saturday morning to find a couple in the living room saying they didn’t want the whole set, just two. I know she was going through menopause during that period but not during that car story above.
I never married and my only 3 sisters are divorced, just like her.
You are describing my mother to a T. Same with the carpet! Only she went with linoleum in the whole house, everyone told her she would hate it. A week later, she proclaimed that she was calling to get estimates for having carpet put back in. She never did, but still complains about it every time I visit.
Her “did it by myself” car was a 2008 Grand Marquis LS Fleet that the whole family came to hate. When she admitted that she liked her former 1997 Sable more, I sold that car to an exporter who shipped it to the middle east. Good riddance.
I picked out her next car, which she loves and still drives (2012 Ford Taurus SEL in Ginger Ale metallic).
Hell, it was only about 15 years before this that heaters and windshield washers became generally standard on American cars, and you paid extra for power steering and brakes (and automatic) on nearly everything but a Cadillac.
You’d think in the days before barcodes and computer-aided-everything, that they would have simplified options and colors as much as possible–like they have now, when you can have any interior color as long as it’s black.
From 62 to 68, Grand Prix’s were something very special. In 69 they were reborn but still very special. They lost a bit of their specialness by 1977. After 1977, in dog years it should have been taken out behind the barn and put down. That dog just wouldn’t hunt anymore.
My dad’s ’85 Riviera had a sticker price of 20,000 (45k adjusted) and as the options list goes it wasn’t all that far down the path. Power seats, digital gauges, vinyl landau roof, reading lamps I remember being on the list, but it still had a cloth interior, no moonroof.
(I also remember 20k being a ridiculous amount to spend on a car, but it was my dad’s dream car, and we all remember what happened in 86…)
When Dad ordered Mom’s Riviera in 1979, i clearly remember him saying “I never thought the day would come when I would be spending over $10,000 for a car!” Her Riv was loaded, too…power moonroof, leather, wire wheel covers, rear seat reading lamps, 4-wheel disc brakes, landau top, firm ride & handling suspension….IIRC the sticker (which I had until about 10 years ago and it disappeared) was $12800.
The argument can be made that one could buy a loaded Grand Prix like the featured car for $10k or a stripped Riviera for the same price. The stripped Riviera still had more prestige and was a nicer car overall. Even a Riv with no options was still a nicely equipped car.
Just on the styling alone I’d take the Riv every time, although I think this era GP is actually pretty nice looking.
My dad’s ’85 had the wire wheel covers too. One of the last cars those looked great on.
I think these GP’s are nice if ordered properly. They could look dowdy if they were stripped and really sharp if equipped the right way. My neighbor growing up had a 1980 SJ that they special ordered with the Viscount leather seats, snowflake wheels and a power sunroof. It was white with a white top and maroon leather interior. Gorgeous car. One day their son hit another car head on and flipped it over nearly killing himself. I felt bad for him and the car too.
“La Petite Prix” – I love it! I also loved this article, GN – and thanks for the props. My jaw dropped at the adjusted price of the test car. That’s BMW money. I also liked that this car (the test car, anyway) was viewed as more than competent, and I also liked learning about how it took months for the downsized ’78s to catch on – but then they did.
I think I’ve reversed my preference for this model of A- / G-Body Grand Prix, now preferring the 1978 – ’80 models. I’d love one of these.
A good point was made in earlier posts. We are talking about the 70’s, a time when just a few years prior most mainstream cars didn’t even have A/C and power options. Unless you bought a full-size luxury car, A/C was just that – a luxury. At least here in R.I.
The American auto manufacturers were now going to get shaken up with the Japanese imports coming in, with many features standard that were optional on American cars.
The American auto manufacturers also knew that a well-optioned car was of course more desirable, but consumers had to pay the price for that desirability.
Lol, oh yes, it’s the imports who show the stupid Americans. Like Honda that didn’t offer factory A/C for years, and made it a dealer-installed option of various quality and reliability. Or Nissan/Datsun that got caught illegally importing cars through Puerto Rico with no seat belts.
I call these couple of years the “slab side” years. Didn’t like any of them.
We really have gone BACKWARDS automotively,
at least in regards to steering/handling.
Here’s a magazine, back in the late SEVENTIES,
praising the steering on a contemporary A-body.
Flash forward to the current Teens, and witness
the 2011-2013 Hyundai Sonata steering horror
show in the Hyundai forums. Overboosted electric
steering, cars wandering from lane without driver
input, no road feedback, etc. Most of this was fixed,
to be sure, but it is ironic.
Not to mention all the other numb/vague steering
complaints on cars since 2000, with both conventional
and electric steering systems. WTH?
The mpg and braking numbers, in comparison to the 1978 Dodge Magnum really show you how far Chrysler had fallen, especially considering how pricey the Dodge was.
The latest Collectible Auto mag has a long richly illustrated article on the Beaumonts. They interviewed a Canadian assembly line worker who liked the Beaumont enough to buy one for himself. He said that a car bought by a GM employee always ended up with “extra pieces” added by his friends.
Junior’s House of Color started as a custom paint shop for customs, hot rods, dragsters etc. Now they mostly do high end restorations of stuff like Ferraris. The cost is so high because there is only one quality level, the best. Every car has to be stripped to bare metal, all bodywork perfectly prepped and aligned. All chrome work and stainless trim is replated or straightened and polished until it is better than new. All weather striping and window seals are replaced. Then multiple coats of sealer, base color coats, guide coats, endless sanding before the final color and clear. Then everything is color sanded, then polished and waxed. From the article I read, probably in Car and Driver, Junior was protective of his reputation and would not turn out anything less his best. I respect his craftsmanship.
I had my old F250 painted at Miracle for 650.00! On the positive side, I got the truck back in three days. Those super jobs take well over a year. I was happy.
“Grands Prix” sounds pretty silly and pretentious at the same time, but various sites say it’s the correct plural–in French, where the adjective matches the noun, and “prix” doesn’t change when plural.
There are some particularly silly people who blame Car and Driver for GM’s downfall to this day. Articles like this one are a good illustration that GM was praised for anything they did that wasn’t undeniably terrible right up until fluffing the X-cars destroyed the reputations of the magazines. It’s true that Car and Driver allowed its editors to express dissenting opinions that called into question the effusive praise of the main reviews sometimes, but they never risked advertising and access by saying that a new model line was a disappointment. After the X-car, they spent a couple of years telling some semblance of the truth about GM’s low quality, low performance attempts to meet CAFE targets, but they certainly didn’t erode GM’s brands’ values during the ’70s.
To be fair, they don’t know at introduction which cars will turn out unreliable or short-lived, and I doubt they are ever given cars with typical first year build quality. But at 18, I noticed how crude and cheap parts of the Citation/Phoenix interiors were, so I didn’t even think about them when I was in the market for my first new car several years later, when their size, hatch, and V6 would have been better than what I ended up buying, and their reliability was improved.
It always amazed me the stupid money the automakers charged, with a straight face, for even a crappy AM radio. But $492 for that AM/FM/CB??? That’s $2008.06 adjusted. Insane… Thank God for the aftermarket car stereo revolution of the ’80s. I know a couple of people who ordered new cars sans radio just because they knew they were going to pitch it anyway. And the CB craze was flaming out by this time.
I am quite sure that 3560 must be a fully loaded model with a V8 engine since for a car this size its almost as heavy as the larger GM RWD B-Bodies. That’s even heavier than the V8 350 Nova 4 Door Sedan weighing in at least at 3400 pounds fully loaded yet only 5″ separates both cars. At 3560, thats about as heavy as the 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am with the same V8 engine as the GP.
Working for Hertz as a transporter in ’77 and ’78 I just missed driving the downsized models of Grand Prix, and even the Dodge Magnum (though the downsized name was then Mirada). Even though the smaller Gran Prix came out in ’78 when I was still working at Hertz, they then had more Fords than anything else in their fleet at least in my location, so I got to drive a ’77 Gran Prix but don’t think we had a ’78 (not even a Monte Carlo, Cutlass, nor Regal). Probably our location, at the South Burlington airport, had something to do with it, though I drove plenty of Thunderbirds, and even a few 2 door Dodge Diplomats, even back then 2 door cars weren’t the most common rental so maybe they reduced them further in ’78.
Though, I did drive a Dodge Magnum, which I really liked…it was green, with velour interior. Didn’t realize at the time I was looking near the end of the line, as these had been pretty common earlier in the decade. That’s what I’d choose instead, though don’t know how much Monday morning quarterbacking comes into the thought.
A few years later (1981) I was looking to replace the car I had when working at Hertz,
didn’t look at Grand Prix but instead the Phoenix, which was still pretty popular, but didn’t buy any Pontiac that year; foolishly I started looking at cars before figuring my budget still indicated a used car would be what I could swing even though I’d started my first professional job after getting my undergraduate degree, I didn’t quite have enough time in the job to swing a loan for a new car. Maybe that’s when I should have bought a Magnum, but gas supply was still a bit uncertain, interest rates were very high, and I still lived up in the snow belt, so the Magnum wasn’t the best choice in my situation.
Anyhow..that’s as close as I came to having an X car….maybe I should have bought an old Nova instead?