After so much bad luck with the ’87 Sentra, Dad had located a low-mile Ciera for a good price, and we bought it. It was to be typical of my GM experiences overall – a good car let down by some really annoying issues.It was a Ciera SL, white with reddish burgundy interior. It was the fanciest car I had had up to this point, with working A/C, full power windows/locks/trunk/seats, cruise control, wire-wheel hubcaps, a powerful 3300 V6 and a 4-speed overdrive. It proved to have loads of power while turning in very good fuel economy for highway driving. The seats were comfortable, and the inside of the car was a nice place to be.
Via Cardomain.com
It had one of the nicest gauge layouts I’ve seen in a car – with white backlighting on the gauges, but all of the warning zones in the appropriate colours. The needles would light up too. Something odd was the fact that as seen above, the kilometers started at 10 and went up by 20 per indication. I haven’t seen any other car do that.
A scan from the GM parts book cover.
Being one of General Motors’ A-bodies, one would think it would be reliable – and mostly, it was. It was all of the bits that bolt on that gave trouble. The car started making a noise one day – a loud whine and low voltage at idle. It turned out to be a failed diode in the alternator. When it was wet out, the car would misfire – upon looking at the coil pack, you could see the spark jumping from under the plug wire to the coil mounting screw. Lots of dielectric grease took care of that. A short time after that, the car started missing under a moderate load – a bad plug wire was the culprit. On New Years Eve at the end of my back shift, the car refused to crank. Checking it over in the parking lot, I found the starter had failed. Replaced that with lots of cursing as the frame member ran directly below the starter bolts.
My half-hearted attempt at an exhaust tip. It didn’t work.
It didn’t end there. I couldn’t keep ball joints or inner tie rods in it, and it would seem to break belts in the front tires every so often. The car never let me down, but I grew tired of the car nickel-and-diming me regularly, and after a year, decided to get a small loan and buy something new. I was glad to see it go, and consequently drifted towards other car brands for a while. I found something that caught my eye, and bought it – but got some gentle teasing by lots of people over it.
Reading your last comment made me think about a topic.
“What was the first car you financed?”
At what point in your young life did you finally realize that, in order to get a more reliable and newer mode of transportation, it was necessary to take out a loan?
For me, it was 1990. I was 25 and the car was a brand new Pontiac Grand Am sedan. I remember the payments were $188/month.
My late dad was pretty much a GM guy – occasional used Fords and one DeSoto (yay!) for his short commute to work – until the early 80s. Either Oldsmobiles or Caddies.
My first new car purchased with financing was a ’74 Fiat X1/9 at 21 years of age.
I’ve spent most of my life in the UK which seems to be the world capital of cheap used cars. I spent about $6000 to get something sporty and shiny when I was 19 or 20, and everything I’ve driven since then has been significantly cheaper.
I’m 37 and I’ve never had a car loan nor felt the need to buy a new or nearly new car. In fact in Britain buying a new car seems to be about the daftest financial decision one could make, given the depreciation.
It’s equally daft on this side of the pond.
Canucknucklehead-
Keep that under your hat- If the word gets out, people will stop buying new, and we’ll run out of cheap, heavily depreciated used cars!
I’ve only come across speedos with odd numbering on French cars….a Renault Mégane RS265 rental in Australia and a Peugeot 308 rental in Spain.
There is a 1990 Cutlass Ciera S coupe with the rallye gauge cluster and FE3 suspension for sale on Reading, PA Craigslist right now for $2800. It has to be the cleanest Ciera of any kind I have seen in well over a decade.
I really like that car in reading!
I looked at one identical to the Reading car, here in Vancouver Canada a few years ago. The coupes are so rare. Unfortunately it was really thrashed.
I always thought of these as grandparent cars – probably because my maternal grandparents had two of them in a row – both four-door, medium blue examples.
I remember buying one of these for my son as his first car. He wasn’t fond of it, and ultimately took over my pickup The Ciera went to Southern Oregon and served as a third vehicle for the parents of friends of ours for over a decade.
Dad had one of these. It was his second to last car before the doctors pulled his license. My mom was surprised one morning when she realized the car had been stolen out of the driveway in front of the house. It was found several days later minus the 4 cylinder engine. Why the thieves wanted a 4 cylinder is a complete mystery to this day???
That’s a good one. Of all the things to take off/out of a Ciera, the engine? Well, I guess someone else’s car must have needed one.
It would have been an interesting insurance claim, too. How do you write up a car where only the engine has been taken and everything else is intact?
After telling them the engine is missing, they would say, sorry, your policy does not cover tune up’s.
You got me to remembering……my friend had an 89 Calais and went to visit her father in da-Bronx, NYC. She stayed overnight, while obeying her father’s instructions to park it “under a streetlight”. Next morning, guess what…..I suppose the streetlight helped the thieves break into and steal her car. It was found a few weeks later with damage to the door and steering column, of course. The odd thing was that it was missing the ECU(computer). The mechanic she had it towed to said that since it had a “Quad 4” engine, they apparently wanted the ECU that went with that particular engine.
Ain’t life interesting?
I just logged in to say that A-bodys were as common as a head cold where I grew up and I have NEVER seen one with a gauge package. That alone is pretty awesome. Even on the G-body coupes (where it would have been more appropriate) the gauge package is pretty rare.
I agree that those gauges are some of the best I’ve seen in a modern-era car. For a change, someone at interior design got it right. It’s actually rather amazing how difficult it is to do that which seems simple and rudimentary.
I mean, c’mon, it’s just a couple of round, good-sized, pointer-and-scale main (speedometer and tachometer) gauges in the middle, flanked by the four, most needed ancillary gauges on either side, all with orange needles and white lettering on black backgrounds in a plain, rectangular dash opening directly in front of the driver. How hard can that be?.
Interestingly I’ve noticed that current Buick’s with the 3.6 ltr V6 get full instrumentation (accessible through the screens that you can change) but the default is speed, tach, engine temp, and oil pressure (or maybe its temp.) But for the 2.0T ecotech its just speed, tach, engine temp, and fuel level.
They must have designed a specific cluster for the 3.6 that isn’t compatible with the 4 cyl computer.
I doubt they have a specific cluster for the 3.6 if it is configurable screens on both, they just change a couple of bits in the programming to enable or disable something.
GM was the father of creating universal components that are reconfigurable and what created the foundation for today’s ability to “tune” vehicles. The computer that ran the truck TBI system was the same whether the engine was the V6, either of the small blocks or the big block. The difference was the Mem Cal “chip” that was full of look up tables for things like fuel, timing, idle speed.
Today of course it is flash memory instead of an EPROM and things have expanded greatly.
Thanks to crazy Russian Hackers who created FORScan those of us with Fords can now access and change so many parameters of their vehicles. Regarding the instrument cluster specifically I know there are people who have figured out how to turn on things that are not included in lower trims, for example turning on the AWD gauges, tire pressure gauges. For the infotainment screen you can change the splash page that shows when you enter the vehicle. Ford, Lincoln, Mustang, F150, Raptor are all available by changing a single bit and the check sum.
Or just allowed other features on the gauge in the V6
On my 1995 Deville it did not have a temp gauge, digital tach or battery voltage gauge. However the 1995 Seville and Eldo did. It is the same cluster. I just needed to go into diagnostics and change a few settings.
I followed this youtube vid and did it. It required no tools or anything disasembled
It is kind of surprising that after all these years that you could still put the car in diagnostics mode by pressing and holding the off and warmer buttons together, which dates back to the 80’s Cadillac Digital Fuel Injection. Even back then you could toggle through a number of what we call to day PIDs and read live data.
Every Cutlass Ciera I’ve been around have either had the giant cataract speedometer package or the older square speedometer. This gauge package just raised the Ciera several notches from a deep pit of lameness it was previously. They remind me of the rally gauges in old Challangers and Barracudas.
If it had have been more reliable It would have been a great car. I think it had door mounted seat belts…not awesome.
I have seen that gauge package a lot of times in Cieras. That was the standard gauge for the Cutlass Ciera International Series. The plain jane ones had that as an optional gauge cluster but most got the speedo/fuel gauge only version (1980’s) or the speedo/temp/fuel gauge one(1990ish-1996)
From looking at the pictures I would guess the speedometer is marked the way it is (mph and kph are numbered in increments of 20 because to use numbered increments of 10 would have necessitated a much larger speedometer which would have made the cluster less symmetrical.
The kilometers start at 10, which equates to 6 mph, and the 20 kilometers “jumps” equal about 12 mph….close enough to 10 to be useable.
A co-worker had a Ciera, though his had the 4 cylinder engine, but like your’s it quickly deteriorated to the point where it nickel and dimed him. Unfortunately he traded it for a 1st generation Lumina that was even worse.
Most cars here go 20, 40, 60, etc…but this one went 10, 30, 50. Rear mono leaf spring seemed to be an Achilles heel with the W body.
A 1986 Cutlass Ciera was my first car; inherited from my great aunt. It had the same color interior. It was traded for a 1996 Honda Civic that I loved dearly, and still miss to this day. But, being the brat that I was, I had to have something better. One thing that the Olds didn’t have that every other car did? A monthly note that I had to pay. Still wish I’d kept the Olds.
I always find it both sad and funny when people blame a car for their choices. It is mentioned that you couldn’t keep tie rod ends in it and that it constantly broke belts in the tires. I’m willing to bet that those failures were due to either the fact that they were low quality parts and tires and/or that the car was subject to at least a little abuse, even if that abuse was situational due to the poorly maintained roads in the particular area.
This does seem to be more common in GM cars and it isn’t because the basic GM design is bad, it is because the vehicles were produced in such large numbers. There is a whole host of auto parts mfgs who concentrate on the “AA” movement class of parts, that is the top 10 or 25 in a given segment and that company doesn’t care what those parts are or if they have any knowledge or expertise in making them. The know that if they can undercut the competition in price with the number of units in service are high enough they can make a tidy profit.
I have a friend who many years ago had a Trans Am he had rebuilt the engine and in doing so didn’t want to put it back together with a used water pump. He went to the local chain store and picked up their “lifetime” warranty unit which was the same part as the standard unit with a little bump in price to cover that expected warranty rate. Well that cheapo pump failed like clock work every year. Sure he was able to take it and the receipt back and get a replacement but changing the water pump should not be an annual maintenance item. So when it decided to start spewing in my driveway I convinced him to come to the parts store I used and buy a quality unit. He never had to replace the water pump again and he owned that car for probably another 10 years though near the end it had been relegated to occasional use only.
On that note, I think climate has a lot to do with the overall wear, tear, and reliability of a vehicle. In the Northwest, we just don’t have to deal with salt or extreme weather/road conditions. As a result, a mid ’90’s Bronco like mine made it through the decades without a spec of rust => and all the collateral damage that goes along with that. My brother-in-law drives a ’06 Ranger with well over 100K miles on the odo that literally looks the same as the day I handed him the keys… brand new, in ’05. If he lived in Ohio (they did for years) it’d be a different story. The truck would likely be in a wrecking yard already.
Location certainly does affect the durability of the vehicle. There really isn’t a way that one car can really be prone to breaking the belts in a tire, if the tire is of proper capacity for the vehicle. A broken belt in a tire is usually caused by a significant impact, which might be common in an area where the weather favors creating tire eating potholes. The tie rod ends aren’t really friendly with potholes either. Combine rough conditions with low quality parts and a short service life isn’t surprising.
Paraphrasing Scoutdude –
I’m willing to bet that those failures were due to … the fact that they were low quality [replacement] parts and tires….
This is a very interesting argument, and I can see the logic behind it. Is the low quality Chinesium replacement part also a problem for Hondas and Toyotas?
I know that on one of my BMWs when I replaced a broken windshield, the aftermarket Chinese replacement was thinner than OEM windshield. The installer used an OEM gasket (or an OEM replacement gasket?) and it left an empty space because of the thinner glass.
Well the cut rate parts hit the GMs much earlier because so many of their parts were at the top of the number of vehicles in operation because they had so few parts in the bin.
For example take the D154 brake pad, GM used it on the front of all of the down sized RWD A, G, E and S-10 vehicles as well as the rears of the E, spanning 20 years of use. Meanwhile on an 80’s Civic there were 2 or 3 different front brake pads. The lighter CRX had few sq in of friction material than the larger vehicles and on some years of those larger vehicles they sourced the caliper and thus pads from 2 different suppliers.
Several years ago when someone was ragging on their old GM that would “burn through” an alternator every year. I suggested the problem was that it was the cheapo 7127-12 alternator that was used as the loss leader for alternators for several decades. I went on to explain that in the early 90’s I could buy one locally “rebuilt” wholesale for $8. They did that by mixing and matching functioning used components. Of course he then thought back and admitted that he was buying them for $19.99 at the discount parts chain and it all became clear.
It wasn’t only cheap Chinese parts. My 94 E-150 Club Wagon chewed through upper and lower ball joints before the end of my 36k mile warranty. The Ford warranty replacements lasted just as long. At about 75k I popped for a good quality aftermarket set (Moog) and never had another issue with the front end right up to when I donated the van with over 160k on it.
I hadn’t had a car before or since that had the appetite for front end parts or tires like this one did. The second set and thereafter were Moog parts, and the tires were the best I could afford. The driving and roads were the same. Despite it being an almighty A-body it was troublesome for me. My best friend at the time had a ‘90 with a 3300 and a 3 speed and he had good service out of his. Was mine a Friday car and his a Wednesday car? I don’t know. I really don’t like the insinuation that I was to blame for the car’s issues though.
Looking forward to read about your next purchase my guess is you bought something European.
I think cars are like most complex collections of mechanical parts. Usually good but when you get a bad one its always trouble.
Case in point. I had 2 cieras, an 85 and 86.
The 85 gave me no end of grief from the second I bought it.
I swore that car was cursed. The 86 was actually bought as a parts car for the 85 which had blown its motor.
We ended up putting the 86 on the road and it was the best cars I ever owned. Four years and a 100,000km on a car that had 195,000 and the only unscheduled work was replacing the wiper motor. It finally died of terminal rusties but I still think it was one of the best cars I ever owned.
The mighty A body. In this part of country, they were an incredibly popular car among a certain age group and then, their descendants. Fairly basic and simple, with occasional care, they would run for a long time.
In other posts about this car, I’ve mentioned I used to work with folks who would only buy these cars. In used form, they were cheap enough, durable enough and plentiful enough that you could be a serial owner.
Nice find.
My father had two of these, (yes, they were my father’s Oldsmobiles in-spite of what Olds claimed) an ’83 and an ’89. Both were pretty reliable but had really poor driving characteristics. The ’83, in particular, was like driving a pig with a steering wheel attached to its head. The ’89 was better but both suffered from GM’s incredibly poor material quality and finish durability. Nevertheless my father was a GM guy through and through and people of his ilk were what kept GM going longer than it should have based on the quality of their then going products and the level of competition that abounded.
Anyway, he replaced the ’89 Olds with a ’96 Buick Regal which definitely drove better still but was horrid the the material quality and workmanship department, worse than either Oldsmobile. By 2009 The Regal was 13 years old with about 40,000 miles on the clock but looked and drove like it was 33 years old with at least 140,000 miles.
We inherited a ’92 Ciera (which I would never have chosen otherwise) and it served us extremely well until the dreaded New England rust consumed the (2nd) fuel tank and the rear suspension components (Panhard rod and spring perches, primarily.) We found a ’90 Buick Century, coincidentally the same color, purchased it and proceeded to run the wheels off of it until rust got us again! I can’t fault either of these cars in any way. They were economical to run, relatively easy to repair with commonly available parts, reliable, highly functional vehicles. Whether we want to admit it or not, those are the traits most of us really need in our vehicles. I’d l;ike to find a rust-fee low mileage A-body right now. I’d have another in a heartbeat!
We briefly owned a ’95 Ciera around 2000. It was cheap and ran well, but one day the pin that locks the transmission in “park” remained partially engaged and it wasn’t worth the expense to fix, so I sold it to the trans shop. Seems it had been “neutral popped” a few too many times or something. But the 3.1 was a nice engine and it got decent m.p.g.