In 2004 my father bought his second new personal car in my lifetime. Before he had used those of the Army in 1946, then company cars during his working life, and used cars in his retirement. So in 2004, he treated himself to this Buick LeSabre Celebration Edition.
Some may recall the Cougar I own, which was purchased new by my father when he was between jobs on April 20, 1968. By June of that year he found a new job in San Diego and the new company paid for the Cougar, making it a company car. I then purchased the Cougar on December 18, 1969.
While I was present when the Cougar was bought in ’68, I wasn’t around for the Buick, as he lived near Phoenix then. He was 78 at purchase, and I was 50.
This was his baby and I didn’t get to see it until 2010. In 2012 he moved back to my neck of the woods, about 6 miles south of me, into a different living arrangement. The car had always been garaged in Arizona and continued to be so after the move.
I assume he took the Buick to a car wash as I know he wouldn’t. In fact, I don’t think he ever washed a car in my lifetime, especially once I could. However, with the car now near me he would ask me to do oil changes and he always bought Mobil 1. Why Mobil 1? Just the fact that my father was very much a brand name guy. His entire life was spent in food marketing.
I know he had one accident in 2017, I believe. I never saw the front-end damage that occurred making a left turn and hitting another car either oncoming or when finishing the left. It was repaired fairly well but I could detect the work via paint. Afterward, he considered the idea of stopping driving since his vision was badly compromised in one eye by senile macular degeneration. Others had been pestering him to buy the car especially since it had only 45,000 miles. In the end, he sold it to me for $3000 and used the money for future funeral expenses (even though he was entitled to a National Cemetery being a veteran).
As to my opinion about the car I can say I enjoy it very much. The car is smooth riding and smooth running. It is quiet and quite comfortable for longer trips. It handles fairly well and even better after the new struts. I get what I consider excellent gas mileage for the size of the car. Range is between 27-32 mpg on the highway. I cannot complain about the car or its looks even if it is an automatic. Generally one sees blah-colored LeSabres but rarely one in this color due to it being a Celebration Edition. Personally, I think the color makes the car POP.
Since I have owned the car I have used it as our long-distance car for trips like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or Merced to visit my mother. The car currently has 63,000 miles. I can’t garage the car but I do take special care of it as though my father might drive it once again. It is what I do. Unfortunately, others have not been so understanding and the car has been involved in two incidents where other drivers hit me.
So this is the first crash I suffered due to a brand new Tesla (bottom photo). This car had been behind me for 1 mile as we moved at 5 mph towards the 680/24 merge in Walnut Creek. Somewhere in the merge, he fell behind and a gap was created. As usual, after the merge, all came to a dead stop but not him. I looked in the rearview mirror to see him coming up on me while looking down at his phone or car screen. He then looked up and had that ‘Oh no’ look on his face and tried to slide his car to the right where there wasn’t any room anyway. Both my feet were hard on the brakes. He slammed right into me with us in the middle of 6 lanes. That was fun getting over and I was so hot, my 13-year-old son got all his ID and insurance information. The Tesla was three weeks old, the driver around 59, and from the Central Valley.
Now the fun started. The estimate was $5400. CSAA was talking to me and questioning the value of the car and if it was worth even that much and should they have an appraiser see it. In the end, they didn’t and sent me a check for $4900 and change. Now the estimate had a new tail panel at $850, new light housing at $250, and lower filler panel at $150 or a total of $1250 for parts other than bumper cover. To save money I found a perfect tail panel on eBay for $135 delivered and the filler piece for $15. Pick ‘n Pull netted me the lamp housing for $26 plus tax. That would save me just over $1000 which came in handy as more damage was seen when the car was taken apart. In the end, the shop wrote off $200 for me to get to the $4900.
I was satisfied.
After I got the car back it threw a PO455 code according to my reader. That is for the evaporative emission control system (EVAP) when there is a leak. Leak where? Fuel cap, fuel tank, vent valve, purge valve, or canister. This didn’t pop up before the crash nor driving down but afterwards. I can’t believe it was any of the components in the engine compartment so I went under the car and found a break in the harness. How? This is actually forward of the tank and on the other side of the car from the crash damage. Anyway, there was no slack in the wires so I got male/female electrical connectors and hooked the two wires up and the code disappeared.
Ah, but there is more.
Here we have a freeway entrance where there are two left lanes, as you can plainly see, for entering 680. When I use this entrance once in a while, I always take the outside lane because the inside lane needs to make a sharper turn. Well, one Friday morning, June 30th to be exact, I make the turn and out of the corner of my eye I can see the fellow next to me swinging wide right into me. I try to go as far right towards the curb with no luck.
We pull over just past the black stain on the wall. I get out with my camera on hand and the other driver, in his early 70’s says I made an illegal left turn. What? So I immediately walk to the corner to take a picture of the two left lanes. Takes 40 seconds. I turned back and in that time the driver had taken off. Oh, was I ever so angry with myself. Luckily the damage was barely visible.
From six feet away it is hard to tell. There is a bit of a scrape along the cover behind the wheel well, but needed to be right on it. There is also paint damage on the leading edge of the bumper cover and it was just painted a year ago. But, WAIT, does anyone believe in karma?
At the end of August, I got a letter in the mail from CSAA about a claim. Now I think it is about my wife’s Mazda 3 as she got hit twice in one month. (One hit and run in a parking lot and one where the driver stopped. The second hit was repaired by the other driver’s insurance and the first was on hold while I found a PDR guy). I thought the letter was about that but no. When I called they asked me if I was in an accident on June 30th and for a moment I didn’t realize what they were talking about. I had wiped it from my mind. Then it hit me, I got angry, and said “Yes some SOB hit me and then ran.” It was their insured filing a claim against me. He took a picture of my license plate.
Now the agent was interested in my story and who my coverage was under. Told them I would talk back to them after checking with my adjuster which I did in the following weeks. Oh, on talking to CSAA they asked me if I knew what car was involved. I didn’t and they told me it was a 2015 Nissan Xterra. What? No, it wasn’t an SUV! It had been a car like a white 2000 Bonneville. I sent the photos above to my adjuster. Two of my cars are CSAA, five are Hagerty, and two hardly used are Progressive which covers the Buick. One is non-op.
On September 18th Progressive texted me to tell me the claim was settled in my favor. Really? Well, then why not get it repaired? They gave me the claim number and I called CSAA. Told them my preferred shop down the street from my office. Same shop. Saw them three days later for an estimate on the 21st. Got a check in the mail for $1436 on October 6th and the car went in on October 13th.
On October 18th, I got the car all repaired. With that, the car went back into long-distance service down to Magic Mountain in November and a scheduled trip to Las Vegas this March.
Sad the hit. Love father son car stories
One of these was my Mom’s last car. A white 2005, barebones, but she loved it. Drove it until 2015, when she didn’t feel comfortable driving any longer. She sold it to one of the physical therapists at her retirement community whose wife had a baby on the way. (They wanted something bigger and safer….and are still driving it. It’s being kept up well.)
Yes, the red makes it pop .
Nice to see someone taking good care of their father’s car .
-Nate
Nice car, and a good story to go with it. I agree – the red really makes a difference on the LeSabre. A friend of mine inherited an older LeSabre when his dad passed in 2005, and he was quite happy with it until the engine threw a rod around 2010.
You’re certainly looking after that car!. Well done, good work and I hope you can keep it that way!
“hit and run” incidents are a pain – I’ve had 2 on my current car and the insurer’s repair agent was not good.
Love the dark red color! My 2001 is the typical silver and most boring. On the other hand, boring silver color makes it easy to get matching body parts at the pick-n-pull yards.
I had a candy apple red LeSabre like this one. I loved driving it.
Great story! I can’t recall ever seeing a red LeSabre with beige interior, and am sorry there aren’t more. Also, that 3800 V6 was always known for durability and great gas mileage (except, maybe, dman63’s).
The candy apple red with two tone tan interior and chrome wheels was the top of the line for a few years. It was relatively popular where I live, which is Buick territory. Also available in pearl white or metallic beige.
Arrest-me red is a very unusual color for Buicks – definitely stands out. That is why I got my LaCrosse in 2011 in red.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/coal-2011-buick-lacrosse/
I’d switch the Lesabre over to Hagerty to avoid these insurance hassles. Progressive is just going to keep treating it like an old, used car.
While I do have Hagerty for my six vintage cars, driven less than 2500 miles, I don’t use them for the others. Clearly the daily drivers are with CSAA. Been with them since 16. The 626 and the Buick are the odd ducks. Not daily but not less than 2500 miles. So they got Progressive for cost. CSAA was unreasonable when they get added as my wife was listed as a driver. The Tesla driver had CSAA so Progressive not on the hook.
Reading your story it seems to me that this LeSabre handles better than your Buick did. Two, I have a beautiful expansive view. Three I am 70 but at least the Buick has mag wheels.
Being in Las Vegas means I have to use my cell phone. What a big PIA. Takes forever to type. Missing my keyboard.
My dad bought one in ugly brown in 2000 when he was 73. It was a nice car for people under 6′. The front seats hit me all wrong and were uncomfortable. He’d wanted a Park Avenue with cloth seats (he’d had 3 Electras since ’68), but the step-monster insisted on memory seats (she never drove it), which only came with leather on the PA, so his LeSabre had heated memory cloth seats. She also had to have the closest park to their high rise condo’s elevator, which was at a terrible angle next to two concrete posts, so every corner got scraped.
After she dropped dead getting out of the Magic Trailblazer in 2013, he moved in with me, and it was parked next door behind his parents’ newer house (then his, but too much stuff to live in it, since he would not dispose of anything). It developed a tiny oil leak onto the exhaust manifold and two of GM’s infamous Pop ‘n Drop windows (failed regulator part) at the same time. In the fall of 2018, a hurricane came through and knocked a 120 y.o. pecan tree right onto it. Like an idiot, I’d cancelled the comprehensive insurance on it to save some money, so he got $75 for it. Fortunately, his homeowners ins. paid for tree removal plus several thousand for minor shingle damage on a roof that needed replacing anyway.
This story reminds me a lot of my mother’s last car, a 2006 Lacrosse. The same condition, same low miles (lower even, if I remember correctly) and the same color combo. I had really wanted to like it, and wonder to this day if a bigger LeSabre would have suited me where the Lacrosse did not. But the Lacrosse is still serving as daily transport for my middle son – from college, to first job, to marriage, “the Buick” is still serving in front line duty. The biggest problem has been a series of failing door handles (which are plastic and become brittle with age) and an a/c system that is in need of some expensive parts to put really right.
Smooth, comfortable, quiet, relaxing, and economical ? That was what Buick was all about. 30 mpg. with a full size sedan is remarkable, you must have been driving much smaller, four cylinder cars before this. Comparable cars would usually be in the mid twenties at best.
Older, non collector cars and insurance, that’s a difficult topic. Luckily they didn’t just total out your car, if it had been your fault and your insurance, that might have happened. I have full insurance on only two of my vehicles, my Flex and my truck. Though the truck has depreciated to a pretty low value and would probably be totaled out in a moderate collision. Being the optimist that I am, I hope that any collisions would be the other driver’s fault, though getting a fair settlement on an old car could be a problem. What I want to avoid is my insurance company declaring my car as a total loss, if I decided to have it fixed on my own. A salvage title ruins the value of a collectible car. I’ve been lucky so far, knock on wood!
Don’t those Teslas have automatic collision avoidance braking? I’ve seen some videos of other cars equipped with that feature, and it seems to work surprisingly well.
Tesla seems to best at over promising and under delivering. The anti-Toyota.
That incident following your freeway entrance incident is a new type of scam I haven’t heard of before. I guess a passer-by saw what happened, and later claimed that you hit him?
Several years ago I witnessed a similar low-speed paint-transfer type of accident, and gave my name to the woman who was hit. A few months later her insurance company called me to get my version of events. Apparently the woman who hit her (who’d passed several cars on the shoulder to get the front of the line), claimed the victim slammed on her brakes, causing the other woman to swerve. I told the insurance adjuster that traffic was completely stopped, and the driver who caused the accident passed cars illegally. There’s lots of dishonest people out there.
Since these types of scams seem to be getting more common, I bought dash cams for our cars this year. Just inexpensive units, but I figure video evidence can come in handy in cases like this.
I’m glad you’ve been able to hang on to Dad’s LeSabre – these were great cars.
Whether this was a scam at the beginning I don’t know. When the fellow, in his 70’s opened his mouth, I heard a strong Russian accent or Balkans. Had I not walked down to photograph the turn, but stayed, it would have been interesting to see what happens. However, once CSAA showed me a picture of my license plate, taken by him, did I feel I was being scammed. How he/they thought they could substitute an Xterra for a car is beyond me. Could it had been scam from the beginning? Sounds like it given how the car changed into an Xterra.
That’s a lot nicer than Moby Dick, our white 2003 LeSabre Custom. Our son bought the Buick in 2017 as a college car with high miles, after literally outliving the first two owners. They were father and son and he bought it from the first owner’s granddaughter. I became the owner after he got another car and handed it down to his sister who has yet to pass her road test.
We have the basic Custom trim in pearl white with miscellaneous dents and a missing belly pan after a winter adventure. Central Oregon still has a large population of early oughts LeSabres mostly white or silver but a few in red like this or metallic blue. Like many end of run GM cars the bugs are worked out and the 3800 Series II is stone reliable so these only succumb to third or fourth owners.
One great thing about these cars is that they are probably in the bottom 10 when it comes to theft. Where the car ends up, after I am gone, will probably be handled by my son. Now, as for the Cougar, that will be a super tough decision for him. He knows my opinion about selling a car only to have a new owner resto-mod it. I would destroy the car then allow that but that is me.
Aren’t those just the greatest cars? Really too bad Buick no longer makes a nice sedan like that. The Celebration Edition was truly a special trim that gave you a lot of nice things and some that were only on that trim. Keep it well maintained and it will go well over 300K.
Awesome story! And how nicely you keep that car. A stunning example especially with those rims!
My dad was 40 when I came along, so we weren’t real close. But I leaned a few car things from him that I still use! Always do regular oil changes at or about 5k miles, tilt wheel was always a must (except for this unlock/move/relock set up!) cruise control can help you save gas and always take great care of your car by cleaning it regularly.
Dad was a Buick man most of my life.
And me? I’ve owned 2 old box style Park Avenues, a 93 Ultra and a 95 standard. Mix in their 4 94-96 LeSabers and well, they were all really good cars.
My hope someday is to be able to afford and find either a 77-79 Cadillac Fleetwood or better still a 77-79 Buick Electra like my dad owned.
These were not available with the V8 right? I remember seeing these in a no longer there local Buick showroom in late 2003 and liking the color combo. I had a ’95 Custom at the time. Still these probably needed more of a styling update from the 1992 design it replaced (I think originally this design was supposed to come out in 1998).
Here’s a thought could Buick sell something like the Toyota Crown in any volume? I am not sure a regular sedan would sell but something like that might. Could be part of GMs hybrid pivot.
Looks great. Mine is also a 2004. It was a one owner car until I bought it in 2019 with 145K and it is somewhere over 233K now. One of my favorite features that didn’t get mentioned is the heads up display for the speedometer. When I realized that the HUD was standard with the Celebration Package, and that all of the red ones had the package that made my search a lot easier.
Good story about a good car. I appreciate your perseverance in keeping it going good and looking good.
Something about bright red cars seems to make them hard to see for others. My brother had one of the Mazda based Ford Escorts for many years. In bright red, it seemed to get hit almost biannually. One thing for sure, it always had fresh paint!
Buick being perpetually called an old person’s brand, and the periodic pressure from the press about a dying buyer base is baseless in a sense. The older buyer of 1970 certainly wasn’t the same buyer in 2004. The buyers of all brands eventually pass away, Buick had a steady stream of buyers aging INTO their product.
Personally, I’m a bigger fan of the Park Avenue of this era, but I definitely lost all interest in big Buicks when the LeSabre and Park Avenue were merged into possibly the blandest Buick ever built; the Lucerne.
The death of the sedan is unfortunate. There seem to be two culprits. Most cars took on a useless mail-slot trunk and a less than generous cabin space. The loss of utility has certainly helped lose my interest in sedans.
I believe CAFE also reared its head, with its complicated footprint formula making it too difficult for vehicles like this to meet future standards. In the process, we lost gentle large V-6 engines getting real world 30 mpg on the highway, and now have high strung CUVs struggling to achieve the same.
Progress.
I did average 30 mpg at 70 mph for both legs of my trip. If there had been no mountains to climb I might have done a hair better. Ironically the 2004 Focus with the 2.3l engine and 5 speed never gets over 30 on the highway. My 626 is the champ at 34.