There are some cars you find yourself rooting for just because they look cool. Unfortunately, not all of them live up to the promise of their styling. The H-body Buick Skyhawk was one of the raciest-looking cars GM offered in the late ’70s, but even with the optional 5-speed gearbox, it was a disappointment in almost every respect, and Consumer Guide branded it a loser.
As designs, the H-body Buick Skyhawk coupe and its Oldsmobile Starfire sibling were the epitome of mid-’70s sci-fi cool. Were these pretty cars? Not really: The proportions were a little odd from some angles, the detailing didn’t bear close examination, and I’m not sure what was happening at GM Design Staff in the ’70s that made them so incapable of designing attractive taillights. However, if I’d had a Hot Wheels version of this car, it would have been one of my favorites. Especially in this resplendent Pewter Gray metallic paint, the Skyhawk looked like what you might have gotten if Japan’s Toho Pictures had hired futurist concept artist Syd Mead to design a robotic turtle from space to costar in a sequel to the 1974 movie Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.
For such a car to be marketed by Buick was no less outlandish than the shape. During the 1973–1974 oil embargo, there was a brief period where giving Buick and Oldsmobile their own Vega-based subcompact models had probably seemed like a good idea. However, neither small nor sporty had ever been Buick’s forte. They had no pony car, and despite years of effort, even the most formidable of the intermediate Gran Sport muscle cars had never been able to shake off the Geritol jokes, so offering an even smaller sporty coupe was a reach. And make no mistake, Buick definitely positioned the Skyhawk as a sporty coupe. Consider this passage from the 1976 brochure:
So off you go. The new you. Experiencing the fun of driving again. Downshifting into corners, upshifting as you pass. The floor-mounted gear lever falls readily to hand. The steering wheel is small and comfortably angled. And, as you watch the tachometer needle climb, and feel the power of the Buick V-6, you begin to understand why this car inspires such emotion.
These were not the sorts of mental images one normally associated with ’70s Buicks.
The H-body coupes (including the Chevrolet Monza as well as the Skyhawk and the Starfire) were originally supposed to be the initial production application of the much-anticipated GM Rotary Combustion Engine (GMRCE), another of GM president Ed Cole’s big-ticket pet projects. However, it had become clear by December 1973 that there was no way the GMRCE was going to be ready in time for the 1975 model year, or indeed if it would ever be ready at all. The divisions made plans to go ahead with the H-bodies without it, and in September 1974, a week before Cole’s retirement, GM announced that the rotary project was being indefinitely postponed. In its place, Chevrolet contrived a 4.3-liter version of its small-block V-8 for the H-body Monza, while Buick turned to its recently revived 90-degree 3.8-liter V-6.
Curbside Classic has recounted the story of the Buick V-6 various times over the years, but a brief recap is in order: Back in 1962, Buick created a 90-degree cast-iron V-6 engine based on its ill-starred aluminum V-8. Despite the peculiar sensations caused by its unusual, uneven firing intervals, the V-6 gave decent service in smaller Buicks (and some Oldsmobiles) through 1967. Buick then sold the tooling for the V-6 to Kaiser Jeep. Jeep used the V-6 for a few years, but the tooling went into storage after AMC acquired Jeep in 1971. During the oil embargo, GM bought back the engine tooling, which was hastily restored to the Buick engine plant in Flint. Buick made some hasty updates to update the engine for 1975 emissions standards, and the reborn V-6 was ready to go into production cars by August 1974.
Unlike Chevrolet, Buick didn’t attempt to shoehorn a V-8 into the H-body, so the V-6 was the Skyhawk’s sole engine. (The same was true of the Starfire; Oldsmobile bought V-6 engines from Buick.) The 90-degree, 3.8-liter V-6 had 110 net horsepower in 1975, reduced to 105 hp (albeit with more torque) for 1976.
Roughly two-thirds of Skyhawk production had the TH350 Turbo Hydra-Matic, but a 4-speed manual was standard, and during the 1976 model year, the new Borg-Warner T50 5-speed became optional. By 1976, the only other stick shifts Buick still offered were a couple of 3-speed manuals in the cheapskate ends of the Skylark and Century lines, so the availability of the 5-speed was noteworthy. However, it cost a hefty $244 extra and had an aggravating shift pattern with a “dog-leg” 1st gear, an annoyance in traffic. (The lightweight 5-speed also proved to be fragile, although the wide-ratio version used with four- and six-cylinder cars was less stressed than the version offered with small V-8s.)
This particular Skyhawk also has the $104 handling package, which included a rear anti-roll bar.
The way Buick merchandised the H-body was as odd as the engine note. This Skyhawk is a Skyhawk S, which you might assume would be the sportier version. In fact, the “S” essentially stood for “stripped”: It was cheaper than the standard Skyhawk and sacrificed various otherwise standard features, including radial tires, the handling package, and convenience items like a remote outside mirror.
I’m not sure I understand the original purchaser’s logic in ordering the S model and then paying extra for many of the features that would have been standard on the regular Skyhawk. Maybe it was cheaper this way, but since this car’s original sticker price was $5,429.24, it was hardly cheap, and this car still doesn’t have a tachometer, an ammeter, or a temperature gauge, which would have been standard on the “base” Skyhawk.
In theory and on paper, this Skyhawk seemed like an attractive proposition: sporty looks, compact dimensions, lightweight (ish) V-6 engine, optional 5-speed, handling suspension, even a reasonably cool name for a sporty coupe. However, something — maybe several somethings — had been lost in translation. First of all, the Skyhawk was not quite as compact as it looked; at 179.3 inches overall, it was actually almost 5 inches longer than the U.S.-market Capri II, an obvious rival. With a curb weight of more than 3,000 lb, the Skyhawk was also over 400 lb heavier than the Capri II V-6, which cost the Buick dearly in straight-line performance. Road & Track‘s automatic 1975 Skyhawk needed 14.2 seconds to reach 60 mph, a substantial 3.6 seconds behind the 4-speed Capri despite an extra liter of engine displacement. Car and Driver found that the Skyhawk was about as quick as a Chevrolet Monza with the 4.3-liter V-8 (no great shakes either), but the V-6 wasn’t meaningfully more economical. Overall averages of 17 to 19 mpg were typical, although up to 24 mpg on the highway was possible with stick shift. That wasn’t awful for the mid-’70s, but it was disappointing, another consequence of the Skyhawk’s weight.
All that extra mass didn’t buy you enough insulation to mask the V-6 engine’s vibration, which was enough to make the Skyhawk’s body and interior trim buzz and rattle at idle. With the restrictive GM pellet-type catalytic converter, the odd-fire V-6 was not a free-revving engine (the tachometer, if there were one, would be redlined at 5,000 rpm), and pressing on produced a lot of what Car and Driver termed “huffing and puffing.” (For 1978, the Skyhawk got the even-fire V-6, which was somewhat more civilized, but no more powerful.)
Buick attempted to minimize the commotion, and make the best of the fuel economy situation, by specifying a tall 2.56 axle ratio, which didn’t help the lethargic acceleration. Amazingly, even the 5-speed used this same axle ratio, leaving the engine turning only 1,600 rpm at 55 mph in 5th. That was low enough to make the V-6 lug a bit except at steady speeds on completely level ground, so the overdrive top gear was of limited value if you obeyed the speed limit.
Despite its weight, the Skyhawk was quite nimble, although it was unusually tail-happy for a mainstream GM car. Road & Track actually suggested that the handling suspension needed more understeer (how often do you hear THAT from a car magazine?). The Skyhawk was also prone to overcooking its brakes, which were only fractionally bigger than the ones in the much-lighter Capri. By 1976, Buick had allegedly addressed this with harder brake pads, but the heavy H-body cars really would have benefited from ventilated front discs, which I don’t think they ever got.
You paid for the Skyhawk’s swoopy styling in various ways. Buick frankly described the Skyhawk as a 2+2, and the steeply sloping roofline and short wheelbase made the back seat inhospitable even for kids. Minimum rear legroom was less than 30 inches (grim even by pony car standards), and rear quarter windows were fixed, so rear ventilation was poor. Unless you folded down the back seat, the cargo area was short and shallow. The doors were heavy, and owners complained that the inward curvature of the body sides made the rocker panels highly susceptible to stone chips. Buyers in this class had modest expectations for practical accommodations, but even by those generous standards, the Skyhawk fell short.
Probably the most damning assessment came from Consumer Guide. Their editors liked the looks and rated the Skyhawk the best-handling small coupe on the market, but they couldn’t forgive the noisy engine, mediocre gas mileage, cramped interior, and worse-than-average repair record. “In our estimation one of GM’s losers, and far from a good value among small cars,” they warned tersely.
A part of me resists that conclusion, because I really like coupes like this — I used to have a Honda Prelude, and I have a lot of experience with the first- and second-generation Toyota Celica — and I can’t help thinking the Skyhawk could have been a neat car if it had been any good. However, Buick itself summed up the problem in a later (1979) Skyhawk brochure, which remarked, “Cars today have to be more than bon vivants. They have to make sense.” The Skyhawk really didn’t, nor did the very similar Starfire.
There is a tendency among historically minded auto enthusiast pundits to talk a lot about GM’s “mojo” and the eventual loss thereof. If you listen to people like Bob Lutz or the late Dave Holls (the former GM stylist who co-wrote Michael Lamm’s essential A Century of Automotive Style), the problem with GM was that the bean counters and yes men kept winning out over maverick, mercurial “car guys” like Bill Mitchell and Zora Arkus-Duntov.
However, looking at the Skyhawk and its H-body siblings, I can’t help concluding that they were actually mojo-ed to death. They were stylish, they handled, and if they’d stuck around a little longer Buick might have installed the turbo V-6 (as was rumored in 1977), but they just weren’t very desirable. The Skyhawk and Starfire were better-looking than a contemporary Celica, to my eyes, and they probably handled better, but the Celica was much more pleasant to live with. Unsurprisingly, it sold better too. In fact, Toyota sold almost as many U.S.-market Celicas in 1976 alone (100,438) as Buick sold H-body Skyhawks through this car’s entire 1975–1980 production run (113,611).
This Skyhawk is a rare car. 1976 wasn’t a good year for the Buick H-body; after a decent debut, Skyhawk sales fell by almost half for its sophomore season, to 15,768. Of those, only 3,148 cars — about 20 percent of production — had the 5-speed. The odometer on this car showed only 17,453 miles when it showed up on Bring a Trailer in June 2025, fetching a modest $8,000.
Related Reading
Vintage R&T Road Test: 1975 Buick Skyhawk – “It Isn’t A Finished Car” (by Paul N)
Car Show Outtake: 1979 Buick Skyhawk Road Hawk – Saddest Car Ever Made? (by Tom Halter)
CC For Sale: 1979 Buick Skyhawk – Dropping A V6 In This Vega Derivative Was A Lark by Perry Shoar)
From Vega To Monza: A Look Back At GM’s 1970s H-Body Subcompacts (by Rich Baron)
An ex-girlfriend had one of these, either Buick or Oldsmobile, in red. I drove it once or twice. She called it a “sports car” — I didn’t correct her. Totally forgettable. At least it didn’t have a console.
How could GM take a Ferrari Daytona and turn it into this awkward looking thing? The H bodies had a decent profile and the rear end doesn’t bother me. Aaron I agree the front end has a Japanese sci-fi feel to it and it spoils the whole thing. The Olds was the worst with it’s David Niven mustache. Ugh. I think the wheels were undersized as well.
The H body was so over hyped in the media and I remember it being teased as a future home for the Wankel (as was the AMC Pacer).
The Buick here could have really been something with a turbo, bigger wheels and a better front end execution.
The biggest styling issue was that they were too narrow, being based on the Vega. And I could never warm up to the front end.
No mention the fact that it’s Vega based.
Styling more directly inspired by the 365 GTC/4, not the 365 GTB/4 Daytona.
GM’s rotary was, at least in the early stages, being considered for the 1974 Vega.
True that. But in typical GM style, there was a lot more wishful thinking going on than realistic planning. Shades of the Cosworth Vega.
And FWIW, it would have been kind of dumb to actually put it in the Vega for MY ’74 when the much swoopier Monza was die out a year later. The Monza would have allowed the rotary to be priced at a more realistic (higher) level.
I can’t help but think GM saved themselves untold grief by pulling the plug on the rotary at the last minute. It might have made the 2300 engine look like a model of durability.
The rotary engine killed NSU. At one point in the 50s it was the no. 1 volume producer of motorcycles. Could have hastened GM bankruptcy.
The rotary engine came close to killing Mazda after the 1973 oil crisis.
I strongly suspect the RCE would have gone down in history as one of the worst GM engines since the Copper-Cooled Chevrolet of the ’20s, and if it had really appeared for 1974 — right in time for the oil embargo — it would have been about the most catastrophic timing imaginable.
The (female) friend of one of my grad school classmates had the Olds Starfire version of this car in the very early ’80’s. It was equipped with the Firenza package, which apparently consisted of spoilers and lots of extra decals/graphics, but little or nothing to improve performance. Several things stood out about this car:
— It would never start on the first try, and often not on the second or third try either. It often stalled when shifted into Drive. She took it back to the dealer multiple times, to no avail.
— The interior had many annoying squeaks and rattles. Again, the dealer was unable/unwilling to fix the problem.
— The back seat was as bad as any car I’ve ever ridden in; between lack of headroom, lack of legroom, and rear side windows that didn’t open.
Much to her dismay, my humble 5-speed ’79 Accord LX seemed like a finely crafted sports car compared her Starfire Firenza.
The engines in these cars were garbage but they would blow timing chains and people would dump them for about five hundred dollars and we would buy them and shove a good small block chevy in them and go racing they were hard to beat
These engines were not garbage. Can you spell Grand National?
There’s a world of difference between one of these low-output uneven-fire V6 and the GN. Maybe they weren’t garbage but they were mediocre.
And I wonder how many people traded these piles in for a shiny new 1980 X-car, another pile?
Probably more than one might think. GM still had real brand loyalty in 1977. They blew that up in the decade that followed and they never recovered.
Had one in the mid eighties and loved it. It started with an auto but changed it over to a manual. It had the Skyhawk decal package on black and I added a rear spoiler. Kept losing wheel covers though. Red interior with a console. Wouldn’t mind another one.
Lipstick on a pig. GM was trying to milk the Vega platform for all it wasn’t worth.
No doubt they were also trying to get those CAFE numbers down, too. (With as little investment as possible.)
There were no CAFE standards until the 1978 model year. The underlying law had only just been passed (in December 1975) when this particular car was built, and the H-body was designed well before that.
Great article. I like that you mentioned how, aesthetically anyway, some of the details of these cars didn’t bear up under a closer look. I do think these were pretty cars, bit as you mentioned, some of the details were just slightly wonky.
The most irksome things for me were:
– Extraordinarily long rear overhand on such a short wheelbase;
– Too narrow. I prefer the wider Mustang II in this regard;
– The composite body panels seemed subject to warping ranging from mild to pronounced as these cars aged. It detracted from the look of these being solid cars.
As for the extra weight, it’s kind of like by way of this being a Buick, the extra sound deadening over the Monza was a necessary evil. A mid-fourteen-second 0-60 time is disgraceful for a car with sporting pretensions, not even talking about the shaky nature of the uneven-fire six.
There was also far too little differentiation between the H-body variants, at least in the beginning.
I still like things about the Skyhawk, and I think the 1980 Road Hawk was particularly fetching in that era-appropriate way.
I hope this particular car gets bid to a decent amount by a buyer who appreciates its good qualities.
”As for the extra weight” Essentially, they were reinforced Véga models with more gussets.
Nope. The Skyhawk was actually a little bit lighter than a V-8 Monza, due mostly to the 3.8-liter V-6 weighing less than the Chevrolet 4.3-liter V-8.
I completely agree about the rear overhang, though: It looks wrong, and once you notice, it’s hard to miss.
I’m not quite on the same page as you guys with the rear overhang, the wheel placement isn’t far off from the GTC/4 it was inspired by, this is nowhere near Mustang II levels of awkward wheelbase/overhang proportions(though I will concede the narrow width causes some weird angles.
More than anything I think these really needed a sloped nose and pop-up headlights, the front end is the worst part, the only car comparable would be Ford’s frog eye treatment on the early Escort EXP. For what the Skyhawk(Monza et al) is I give everything from the cowl back a pass
I think the rear overhang might be less visually bothersome to me if not for the tiny wheels. The 13-inch rubber was not generous for cars of this weight, and they look a little lost in the wheel wells, which makes the tail look that much more whale-like.
FWIW, I don’t have any problem with the exposed headlights, and while the slatted grille makes it look a bit pouty (and of course hard to distinguish at a glance from the Monza), it’s better than the Starfire — BlueovalDave had a point above about the David Niven mustache.
”unusually tail-happy for a mainstream GM car” Oh yes, I often learned that on my mother’s ’78 auto 3,8L Sunbird. I would lose the rear end too easily in corners if the automatic’s kickdown came at the worst possible moment in a curve with my foot was pressed down. I then literally changed direction 180 degrees. At least with the manual, a certain amount of control could be exercised. After all that excitement, before getting back on the right track I took a moment to breathe and at least enjoyed the 1978 3,8L with less vibration .
No one ever ordered one of these cars, especially with the MT.
Dealers, in order to get extra units of high-profit cars like Regal, Electra, Cutlass, 98 … had to take these which were manufactured to comply with federal fleet fuel economy standards (CAFE).
To sell them dealers advertised them in newspapers at prices lower than similar Monzas, but did not lose money because of the extra profit earned by the extra high-profit units they sold.
CAFE wasn’t passed until December 1975, and it wasn’t in effect until 1978, the fourth year the H-body cars were on sale.
That very much appers to be the same steering wheel the Corvette used in the early ’70s Overall I suppose the car is somewhat constrained by not wanting or being allowed to step anywhere near the Camaro in size or performance.
I’ve been reading the GM deadly sins pamphlet in depth recently and think I finally understand that these are vehicles-engines-etc that did nothing to stop the ultimate bankruptcy.
That said, I never understood the need for this model. Chevy maybe, but not Oldsmobile or Buick. I think GM was trying to be everything to everyone and after a successful career in customer service and sales, that doesn’t work. Places like Lowe’s where I was a sales manager for 10 years have special order catalogs because not everything appeals to all people.
If I were of a car buying age when these were new, I would never have visited a Buick or Oldsmobile dealer to look.
I sadly drank the GM drink for far too long, but no more. Aging has its perks!
I always figured that GM thought that maybe a typical Buick or Oldsmobile customer might see one of these on the lot when replacing their Riviera/Toronado, Electra/Ninety-Eight and buy it for one of their teen-aged children?
Absolutely a possibility. I just never could wrap my mind around so many variations of one model.
Sometime in ’76 I went with my father to our local Buick dealer. He wanted to look at a Century or Regal to replace his ’72 Ambassador, which was a very good car. Being an AMC retiree, he ended up buying a Matador Coupe, which my mother absolutely HATED.
While he was in the showroom talking to a salesman, I was outside walking the lot. I thought the Monza and its ilk were pretty decent looking cars- until i got up close to a Skyhawk. I have never seen a vehicle so haphazardly assembled. It had ill-fitting Rubbermaid bumpers and filler panels, interior parts that looked like they were thrown at it from across the room, and you could put an entire finger in the door gaps. I was driving a very nicely assembled Mazda RX-4 Coupe at the time, and all I could do is shake my head.
The first-generation Buick Skyhawk was something of a replacement for the Opel Manta in Buick dealerships. They were sold alongside each other for the 1975 model year. I can’t help but feel that the Opel Manta was a much more well-rounded, easy-to-live-with, and more fun-to-drive car.
It was too bad that currency fluctuations had made German-built Opels (and European cars in general) fairly expensive in the U.S. and led to GM curbing sales of German-made Opels in the U.S. for many years to follow.
Had a female cousin who bought a 1976 Buick Skyhawk S. It was canary yellow and had the 231 V6 with a 5 speed. Not a bad looking car but what a POS! She bought it in the early 1980s after it had been rode hard and put away wet. She couldn’t hold a job so was perpetually broke. She bought it because it had high miles and was cheap.
Priscilla had gone to Ohio State. I forget what she majored in but it was one of those “useless” degrees that didn’t make much sense in the real world in the late 1960s. She couldn’t get much of a job so she ended up joining the Army. The discipline and order of military life suited her but her physical frailty caught up fairly quick. After about 10 years she separated at a base in Alabama. She then began a life of short term employment and long term mooching.
She had a bunch of friends in Alabama, many former military. She would “stay” with one family until they threw her out then move on to another. After she had run the gamut of the Alabama folks she would return to Ohio and stay with her parents until, they too, would toss her out. Back to Alabama, rinse and repeat. She would also often put the touch on my mother and our other aunts for money.
So upon one arrival from Alabama she had the Skyhawk. She had previously fallen asleep at the wheel, ran off the left side of the road, and side-swiped a tree. The result was the driver’s door was permanently jammed shut, and no outside mirror either. Ingress and egress were accomplished by either climbing through the driver’s window or crawling across the shifter and console and out the passenger door.
After several months with her parents and the usual confrontation over her unemployed state, she left for Alabama. The Buick made it to somewhere in Kentucky and died. Desperate for help, she called her parents. Uncle Jim, so determined not to bring her back to Ohio, rented a chain-on tow bar from U-Haul (remember those?) and towed the Skyhawk to Alabama with his 1977 Mercury Marquis.
A while later she was going to return to Ohio but this time with the pets she had unwisely acquired – three cats and a spider monkey. Not having enough money, nor sense, to obtain carriers for the cats, they were put into the Skyhawk loose. The monkey cage would not fit into the car along with all her other stuff, so it was strapped to the roof and the monkey was released into the interior of the car. Again somewhere in Kentucky, she stopped at a rest area along I-65. While she was attempting to exit the car via the passenger door, the totally predictable happened. The monkey escaped. While she was chasing it around the rest area grounds it did what monkeys are inclined to do – it ran up a tree. She spent the next 8 hours trying to coax it down. Finally hunger prevailed and it was lured down with food. Back in the car and on the road again!
The next day she showed up at my parents’ house. Unbeknownst to my father, she had conned Aunt Martha into keeping her animals “for just a little while”. My mother always had multiple cats and my father had grown to tolerate them so he agreed the felines could stay. But to quote my WWII veteran father, “There is no way that god-damn monkey is coming in my house”. So my cousin and the monkey left in the Skyhawk to grovel before her parents.
WWII vet Uncle Jim’s reaction was much like my father’s. My cousin proceeded to beg and plead with her mother until she finally convinced her husband to relent and let the monkey (and her) stay. But it was insisted that Priscilla get a job. Which she did. The job was with a company that did inventory counting for big box and other retailers all over eastern Ohio. It didn’t pay much so she could never afford a motel, and the company wouldn’t pay for one, so she did a lot of traveling in the Skyhawk, either to her parents or to her sister’s in Akron. Then the Buick started breaking down – frequently. Since I had a roll-back truck at the time, guess who got called to retrieve the car and, often, my cousin? Of course, she had no money to pay for repairs so I got to work on it. Our family had a well equipped garage and full time mechanic to support our company fleet. I had basic mechanical skills so I did a lot of the work myself. Most of the breakdowns were relatively minor but once it stripped the cheap plastic timing gear on the camshaft. Our company mechanic had to do most of that job. The longer this went on the more irritated my father became. He finally told me no more. I retrieved the Skyhawk from along the road one last time but I told my cousin I was not going to fix it. First she was tearful, then angry. The car sat at our shop for a couple of weeks. One day a good ole boy from Alabama showed up with his pickup pulling a car hauler trailer. My cousin had talked one of her former fellow soldiers into driving all the way from Alabama to get her car. I helped him load it on the trailer. He picked her up from her parents’ house and back to Alabama they went.
My cousin was pissed at me so I didn’t hear from her for a couple of years. Never saw the Skyhawk again. She left the cats at my mom’s and the monkey at her parents’. It died a few months later. I think Uncle Jim poisoned it.
I enjoyed reading this. With all respect to the parties involved, if this was playing out on TV, there’s no way I would touch the remote all the way through until the monkey died.
Poor monkey. I would have just poisoned HER! LOL
Enablement is a bad thing indeed .
I enjoyed reading the wild stories but have learned to easily say “NO” to anyone begging for a place to stay, even overnight .
Failure to plan is planning to fail .
-Nate
Hmmm,a car that does 1600rpm at 55mph with a speedo that goes up to 80mph.So 2400rpm with needle wound off the speedo..
My father-in-law had the Starfire. On a family trip to Pennsylvania, my wife got so sick in the cramped, low, little back seat that to this day she cannot ride in any type of small sports car. Much to my chagrin.
These might be the best example of the old Top Gear trope “ambitious but rubbish”. The styling is sexy in parts except where it isn’t where its it’s ugly, the transmission has 5 gears in the 70s from GM of all companies but its pattern sucks and it’s made of glass, the engines are lightweight V6s but of the mutilated V8 variety before they figured out how to make them work.
Nevertheless I do have a soft spot for them, but a problem I have and probably most other people into old cars is “they’re all Monzas”. That 4 divisions used these with even more minimal trim variation than the N.O.V.A. cars just makes them seem like corporate slop and without much under the skin redeeming qualities why seek them out? They can be pretty cars at their good angles, but the Ferrari is prettier so I’ll get a poster of one of those.
I think the interesting part is these were arguably better “Camaro IIs” than the Mustang II was, Chevrolet just had the wherewithal to not call it that, but in some respects there is under the skin engineering that directly transferred into the third generation F body line the the torque arm/panhard bar/coil spring rear suspension and its true unibody construction. With a little more effort in a different time these might have been the best sporty cars GM ever made, but instead it was effectively positioned as a Vega successor with even less practicality spread across four divisions instead of two and all the other period’s mechanical foibles inside.
“…and I’m not sure what was happening at GM Design Staff in the ’70s that made them so incapable of designing attractive taillights”
The same can be said of current Japanese automakers and massive black plastic grills.
Was about to enter high school in 1976. I much preferred with notchback Monza and Sunbird versions of these cars.
They look like the same tail lights used on the ’74 Camaro. Sharing parts from the bin?
A school roommate had the Monza version of this car, but with the Iron Duke 4 and a stick (can’t recall if it was 4 or 5 gears). It was HEAVY. And also really uncomfortable inside. The molded plastic interior looked really cheap. I think the car was only maybe 3 years old at the time, and it did not compare favorably with another roommate’s 75 Mustang II. The Mustang was in far worse condition, and also had a rough 4 with a stick, but at least the interior was a more pleasant place to be, with a smoother ride. My 71 Scamp felt like a Cadillac in comparison with both of them.
I never understood why Buick and Oldsmobile offered these models in hatchbacks, in my opinion they should have only been offered in the coupe version and given the brougham treatment that Buick and Oldsmobile buyers expected. The hatchback and “sport” models only sold by Chevy and Pontiac alongside the coupe models who had a younger buyer demographic and needed to appeal to all market segments.
Good lookers, Not really, comfortable or put together so well. The “80”, model year seemed to have a # of the kinks worked out.
With a “6”, under the hood, they even drove sort a well.
The H-body front end styling was somewhat inspired by the XP-897 rotary-powered mid-engine Corvette concept.
I rather like those taillights…..
I had one of these when it was about 12 years old, it wasn’t a comfortable car to drive and had heavy steering to go along with it’s odd looks .
IIRC this was one of those poorly engineered cars I had to jack the V6 engine up to address one of the spark plugs .
I remember the engine being noisy and not much power, the 4 speed tranny was slow shifting etc. – no wonder these cars were the butt of “Geritol” jokes .
It certainly wasn’t sprightly nor brisk in anything but fuel consumption .
Bias-Ply tires, in _1976_ shaking my head .
In general I like ‘hair shirt’ vehicles but anything that you need to give more than 1/2 throttle every single drive, isn’t going to make it with anyone .
I didn’t keep it long .