1967 Buick Skylark: An Uncommon Four-Door Hardtop With One-Family Ownership

In the 1950s and 1960s, full-size four-door hardtops were almost universally great-looking cars that sold very well, but for some reason, that magic never quite spread to General Motors intermediates. Whether it was because of their comparatively truncated length or a price tag that started crowding models on the full-size side of the showroom, sales were tepid, at least by GM standards. Maybe it’s that relative rarity that makes them so intriguing today, as this 1967 Skylark so eloquently suggests. It was bought new by the seller’s grandmother, and is now being auctioned on Hagerty Marketplace in Bloomingdale, Indiana.

Owning a 1960s Skylark is a lot like having a secret handshake: There are a lot of little secrets that elicit nothing but blank stares, even from car people. One of those “secrets” is the engine, a 340-cubic-inch Buick small-block V8. You can imagine the confusion; the only 340 that most people have heard of is Chrysler’s giant-killing small block. But Buick fans know that it was also a two-year-only enlargement of the little 300, which grew to 350 cubic inches in 1968.

This hardtop has the top dog, the 260-horsepower four-barrel variant with a premium-fuel-drinking 10.25:1 compression ratio. Trust me as the owner of a ’65 Skylark with the 300 four-barrel; the two-speed automatic, tall highway gears, and a fairly high compression ratio conspire to ensure that you can’t get away with anything but the good stuff at the pump. Still, the little Buick will reward you will plenty of torque and reasonable fuel mileage (around 17 on the highway). The Super Turbine 300 automatic also had, for the last time in 1967, a “switch-pitch” torque converter that used an electromechanical switch on the carburetor to do exactly what it said: switch the pitch of the stator blades in the torque converter for a more aggressive stall speed during heavy acceleration (and at idle for less creep).

The seller of this Skylark recently inherited it from his grandmother, who purchased it new. Unfortunately, there is no documentation to verify that claim, but the mileage is claimed to be an original 76,300. Given that the upholstery looks original, that may very well be accurate; all-in-all, it doesn’t look like a 176,300-mile car.

There is some fading on the kick panels and discoloration on the dashboard, but this blue interior is still inviting potential new owners to jump in and drive across a state line or two. It has a new master cylinder, radiator, and tires, so it should stop, stay cool, and roll.

The trunk on the intermediate Skylark is gigantic, which makes one wonder why anyone would need a full-size car.

But many thought they did. Buick sold 9,123 Skylark four-door sedans and 13,673 four-door hardtops like our feature car, at $2,767 and $2,950 respectively. Meanwhile, the LeSabre four-door sedan cost a mere $52 more than a Skylark hardtop, and sales bore that out at 36,220 units. The LeSabre Custom four-door hardtop sold 32,526, the Wildcat 15,510, the Electra 225 12,491, and the Electra 225 Custom a whopping 40,978. People liked four-door Buicks; they just didn’t buy that many of them in a smaller size.

Maybe it was the fender skirts, which certainly looked more appropriate on the four-door hardtop than they did on the two-door (which by the way was much more popular at 40,940 cars sold). Whatever the case may be, the Skylark four-door hardtop deserves a reappraisal for what it is, a deftly styled example of a car that should have been more popular than what it was.

Related Reading

Road Trip Outtakes: 1967 Buick Skylark – Canada Dry (by Ed Stembridge)

Curbside Find: 1967 Buick Skylark – 2-Door Hardtop Looking Good, By The Curbside (by StuartH)

Curbside Find: 1967 Buick Skylark On A Front Lawn – A-Body Lawn Ornament (by Rich Baron)

All Those Glamorous Hardtops, Appendix: How Common Were Four-Door Hardtops? (by Aaron Severson)