Vintage C/D Review: 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado – A Downsized E-Body Begins Oldsmobile’s Downward Spiral

Excerpt of the cover of Car and Driver, August 1985, showing the latest Oldsmobile Toronado with a 1966 Toronado in the background, in a desert setting

For 1986, Oldsmobile redesigned its FWD Toronado personal luxury coupe, hoping to expand its market with a trimmer, more efficient new model bristling with high-tech features. In August 1985, Car and Driver sampled the new car and expressed some cautious skepticism about the Toronado’s new direction, which swiftly became one of Oldsmobile’s biggest commercial disasters of the ’80s. Let’s take a look at what C/D had to say — and at another car of this period that succeeded where Oldsmobile failed.

The original Oldsmobile Toronado (pictured in the background of the C/D cover above) debuted for 1966 as the first U.S.-built front-wheel-drive car since the 1930s. It was never a big commercial success and was eventually overshadowed by its Cadillac Eldorado cousin, but the Toronado won worldwide attention for its novel mechanical package and impressive Cord-inspired styling. The second-generation Toronado, introduced for 1971, was bigger and more conventional-looking, now aping the styling of the previous generation Eldorado. Oldsmobile redesigned the Toronado again for 1979, downsizing it to somewhat more rational dimensions and reining in its considerable thirst while continuing to hang on the Eldorado’s stylistic coattails.

Front 3q view of a Saddle Tan Firemist 1985 Oldsmobile Toronado Caliente with matching vinyl top

1985 Oldsmobile Toronado Caliente / Orlando Classic Cars

 

For 1986, the Toronado and its Eldorado and Buick Riviera siblings were due to be redesigned and downsized again in the interests of improving GM’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) numbers. This raised some serious questions about what the Toronado’s mission was supposed to be. Oldsmobile had never really promoted its front-wheel-drive layout, which by the ’80s was no longer special anyway, and its previous brand of wretched excess was falling out of fashion. What, then, could Olds do next?

Car and Driver, August 1985, p. 40, first page of Oldsmobile Toronado preview test, with the headline "1986 Oldsmobile Toronado: Oldsmobilists will think they've died and gone to Hawaii."

For the sake of my own digestion, I am going to tiptoe quietly past Bedard’s weird insistence on saying “females” instead of “women” to focus on his commentary on Toronado sales, which I think paints a grimmer picture of the 1979–1985 Toro’s sales standing than the data really supports. It’s true that the 1979–1985 Toronado never sold as well as the FWD Eldorado or the contemporary Buick Riviera, but the third-generation Toronado was a solid commercial success. The greater popularity of the FWD Riviera indicated room for improvement, but I don’t think anyone in Lansing was too unhappy about how the outgoing Toronado had done:

GM FWD E-Body/K-Body Production, 1979–1985
Model Year Oldsmobile Toronado Cadillac Eldorado Cadillac Seville Buick Riviera Total
1979 50,056 67,436 N/A 52,181 169,673
1980 43,440 52,685 39,344 48,621 184,090
1981 42,604 60,643 28,631 52,007 183,885
1982 33,928 52,018 19,998 44,071 150,015
1983 39,605 67,416 30,430 50,234 187,685
1984 48,100 77,806 39,997 57,863 223,766
1985 42,185 76,401 39,775 65,305 223,666
Total 299,918 454,405 198,175 370,282 1,322,780

 

Front 3q view of a Medium Driftwood Metallic/Light Driftwood 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

Closeup of the right front turn signal and headlight of a 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado with the lights

Ribbed grille/headlight covers/turn signals were intended to evoke the grille and concealed lights of the 1966 Toronado / Barn Finds

 

In terms of demographics, an average Toronado buyer age of 50 in 1984 was about five years younger than I would have expected. (The ’80s Toronado has always seemed like the kind of car retirees and affluent empty-nesters would buy to drive back and forth to their Florida timeshares.) However, an average buyer age of 50, in 1984, meant that Olds wasn’t attracting many Baby Boomers. Given the demographic swell of that generation — and the fact that a growing number of Boomers now had the money to buy $25,000 cars — that was the sort of detail that should have made Oldsmobile marketing people say, “Uh-oh.”

Car and Driver, August 1985, page 41, second page of 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado Preview Test

Bedard says Oldsmobile assumed they could expand the Toronado’s market to “bring in more younger than older buyers.” However, you’ll notice that while the Toronado in the C/D article has blackwalls and alloy wheels, the well-preserved 1986 example (in a color the seller said is called “Medium Driftwood Metallic”) still features narrow whitewalls and the awful wire wheel covers (a $199 option) that served to instantly disqualify a car from serious consideration by most Boomers and many of their Gen X children. That combination seemed to be far more common on real-world Toronados than the blackwall/alloy combination, except perhaps on the later Toronado Troféo model, marking this as a car aimed at people closer to my grandparents’ age.

Rear 3q view of a Medium Driftwood Metallic/Light Driftwood 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

 

The Medium Driftwood Metallic car (and who on earth decided “Driftwood” was a good paint color name for such an expensive car?) reveals that the 1986 Toronado did have some interesting detailing — note the wedge shape of the tail — married to an ill-proportioned basic shape whose various elements didn’t mesh in any graceful way.

Car and Driver, August 1985, page 42, third page of 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado Preview Test

The 1986 Toronado has often been criticized for shrinking too much, but while it was a foot and a half shorter than its predecessor, an overall length of 187.9 inches and overall width of 70.7 inches was not particularly small by ’80s standards, especially since a car in this class was now likely to be compared to European or Japanese rivals with smaller footprints than traditional Detroit iron. Also, for 1985–1986, a drag coefficient of 0.36 was really nothing special (the German Ford 15M P6 managed that back in 1966!). There were other cars of this time with similar dimensions and equal or better aerodynamics that looked much better than the downsized E-bodies.

The real problem was that as a design, the ’86 Toro was simply inept. While writing this post, I kept staring at the photos of the Medium Driftwood Metallic car (which is about as nice an example of this model as you could hope to find), trying to summon some charitable impulse, but the car just doesn’t look right from any angle. The aesthetic blight continued inside, where any sporty impression provided by the horseshoe shift lever was immediately counteracted by the blocky dashboard and a really awful steering wheel:

Cream leather front seats and dashboard of a 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

Digital instrumental panel of a 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado showing the rev counter

In tachometer mode (the numbers under the speedometer are for engine rpm) / Barn Finds

Digital instrumental panel of a 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado showing the fuel consumption display

In fuel consumption mode / Barn Finds

 

The digital instrument panel could display a rev counter (top), but this was only one of several display modes, selected via the buttons to the right of the IP, seen below left:

Climate control and radio buttons in a 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

 

In my estimation, there are not a lot of things worse for automotive ergonomics than touchscreens, but this array of tiny, identically sized Chiclet buttons for radio and HVAC surely comes close. Did no one in Lansing wear gloves in the wintertime? It has been a mercifully long time since I had to deal with a Midwestern winter, but I remember sometimes needing to wear gloves while driving, at least when first getting into the car and before the engine was warmed up. Even with automatic climate control, you might have to fiddle with the buttons, and you might even have wanted to turn on the radio, for which the above layout seems ergonomically troublesome. (At least the “voice information system” with which the C/D editors were so annoyed wasn’t mandatory; the tiny buttons unfortunately were.)

Car and Driver, August 1985, page 43, fourth page of 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado Preview Test, with a sidebar entitled "The Poletown Plant" by Jean Lindamood

Unless you were one of the few remaining masochists who still wanted to self-flagellate by ordering the miserable Olds diesel, the 1985 Toronado had been powered by the carbureted 307 cu. in. (5,033 cc) Oldsmobile V-8. This was replaced for 1986 by the ubiquitous 231 cu. in. (3,791 cc) Buick V-6 (pictured below). Although the Car and Driver article describes this as having 150 hp, 10 more than the previous V-8, Oldsmobile hedged at the last minute: The LG2 V-6 in the production ’86 Toronado was rated at 140 hp and 200 lb-ft of torque, giving it the same power as the carbureted V-8 with 55 lb-ft less torque. Despite the new car’s 545 lb weight loss, this was something of a wash from a performance standpoint. (The Toronado would get the 150 hp LG3 engine for 1987.)

Overhead view of the LG2 V-6 engine in a 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado

Buick LG2 90-degree V-6 / Barn Finds

 

Oldsmobile claimed the 1986 was a second quicker to 60 mph than the 1985, but the factory’s 11.1-second 0-to-60 claim was nothing special for the time, nor was the 10.4 seconds Car and Driver clocked. For traditional Olds buyers, more concerned with ease than urge, it was probably fine, but Oldsmobile had said they wanted to appeal to newer and younger customers, for whom average performance from a ubiquitous GM V-6 powertrain wasn’t necessarily a great selling point. (I have also heard that the THM440-T4 in these cars was initially very troublesome — at least one commenter on the auction listing expressed concerns that the low-mileage car probably hasn’t had its transmission rebuilt … yet.)

I don’t have anything to add to Jean Lindamood’s sidebar on the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant (also known as DHAM, more recently rebuilt as Factory ZERO to build EVs), but people from that area may have stronger feelings about it, so I’ll set it in plain text for easier reading:

The Poletown Plant
High tech comes to Hamtramck.
• There is no “You Are Here” arrow on the map in plant manager Earl Harper’s office. The old map, circa 1929, shows an industrial section of Detroit and Hamtramck (“Ham-tram-ick”) known variously as Polonia or Little Warsaw or Poletown, named after the Polish immigrants who settled here at the turn of the century to work in area factories.

In 1929, as now, Detroit’s industry was automobiles, and the map tells us that Little Warsaw was home to Hupp, Maxwell, Packard, Cadillac, and the old Dodge Main plant. All are gone now. If Earl Harper’s map were updated, the arrow would show us standing in GM’s new 77-acre Hamtramck assembly plant, which will soon be turning out the 1986 Toronado, along with the Buick Riviera and Cadillac’s Seville and Eldorado.

For a brief moment, until the General builds its next space-age manufacturing complex, it’s safe to say that Poletown (a nickname destined to stick to this plant like pirogi to your ribs) is GM’s most automated facility, boasting more than 2000 programmable devices. The sci-fi starts at the main gate, where bar-code readers record the contents of about 430 incoming trucks daily, each laden with parts for the day’s production run.

Inside the mammoth Poletown plant, computers rule the roost. Sixty unmanned forklifts, called Automated Guided Vehicles, trundle raw materials and parts wherever they are needed. Of Poletown’s 260 robots, two-thirds are at work in the body shop, mostly welding.

Ten of the robot welders are assigned to the Comau Robogate, a massive framing station that holds the structural components of each body in perfect position while they’re fused together. Each car passes next through the Perceptron, a checking station equipped with 121 “seeing” robots that check body openings and build tolerances. The Perceptron’s rejects go to the “verification room,” where their dimensions are electronically compared with the engineering data base in an effort to pinpoint supplier, design, and production problems before they become serious.

After passing through a pressurized “superclean” room, the cars are divided among eight paint booths, where 80 robots are capable of spraying 60 cars an hour. (Humans paint the second colors of all two-tone paint schemes.) Another dozen or so robots are programmed to perform the worst grunt work in general assembly: installing windshields and rear windows, mounting tires, installing rear-axle bushings and various moldings, dispensing vital fluids, and the like. Several more seeing robots check each car’s front-end alignment and install headlights, grilles, and front-end trim.

The entire plant is linked by a GM-developed communications system. Only six AT&T telephone lines connect Poletown with the outside world.

The price of progress was typically dear. The Poletown project ultimately displaced more than 3400 people and bulldozed 1362 homes, 143 businesses, sixteen churches, a hospital, and two schools. (Of the 465 acres marked for urban renewal along the Detroit-Hamtramck border, 360 now belong to GM.)

A storm of public protest raged from 1980 to 1982, postponing production for two years, pushing the cost of the plant from $500 million to $600 million, and attracting the attention of Gray Panthers leader Maggie Kuhn and Ralph Nader. The consumer crusader set up shop in a neighborhood church to fan the flames of discontent.

“GM has totally intimidated the city government,” Nader told the press.

“Ralph Nader is psychotic in his hatred of GM,” retorted Detroit mayor Coleman Young. “Whenever you mention GM, he foams at the mouth.”

Eventually the protests subsided, and Poletown came together. On the day of our visit, about 100 prototypes are spread throughout the system as 1986-model production draws near. Conveyors rumble overhead, empty—to “run them in,” as Harper puts it. The single shift of 1700 employees will gradually swell to two shifts of 2500 workers each, as Poletown reaches its modest 60-car-per-day goal.

The only remnant of the past on the grounds of the assembly plant is a small Jewish cemetery, Beth Olem.

The cemetery and Earl Harper’s map, that is.

“I’ve stood and looked at this map for an hour,” the plant manager muses. “You can almost see the families living in these little houses, walking to work at Dodge Main and Detroit Steel.”

Mayor Young was less sentimental about the demise of the colorful but rundown Little Warsaw neighborhood when the city of Detroit began buying up property for the plant. “The residents of Poletown are voting with their feet,” he told the press. “They left.”

Returning to the Toronado: As the text on an earlier page of the C/D article noted, the downsizing and shorter wheelbase did cost the 1986 Toronado a significant chunk of rear legroom — 3.2 inches, according to the specifications — and some trunk space as well. The decrease in claimed cargo volume wasn’t much (0.9 cu. ft.), but the 1986 trunk seems awfully shallow, limiting its utility.

Rear view of a Medium Driftwood Metallic/Light Driftwood 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

Trunk compartment of a 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

 

Even with a conventional transverse front engine/FWD layout and the allegedly space-saving transverse fiberglass leaf spring linking the rear struts, the Toronado was not setting any records for packaging efficiency. Interior space wasn’t necessarily a big priority for coupe buyers, but for the 50something customer looking for a nice car to drive back and forth to the Florida timeshare, the mediocre trunk space might have been a deal-breaker.

Car and Driver, August 1985, page 44, fifth page of 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado Preview Test, with Technical Highlights sidebar on new headlight designs by Don Sherman, entitled "GM's brighter outlook"

The only thing I can say about the Don Sherman headlamp sidebar (above left) is that it seems like archetypal GM to respond to the greater flexibility allowed by the revised NHTSA headlight regulations by developing a proprietary lamp that looked a lot like rectangular sealed beams and was undoubtedly more expensive to replace. Since the Toronado had concealed headlamps anyway, the “F-lamps” had no particular stylistic impact.

Front view of a Medium Driftwood Metallic/Light Driftwood 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado with headlights exposed and lights on

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

 

Given that this is from Car and Driver, not the obsequious Motor Trend, I find the main text’s overweening charity towards the styling rather disconcerting. Bedard’s assertion that the Toronado “looks even more aerodynamic than it is” left me scratching my head, especially given that the claimed Cd (0.36) was decidedly mediocre for this time. As for his comment that the rest “has been sculptured in remarkably good taste,” I’ll freely admit that taste is subjective, but one of my usual benchmarks for it is consistency and coherency, which this Toro lacks in abundance, even when the individual elements don’t look bad. Which sometimes they do:

Backlight of a Medium Driftwood Metallic/Light Driftwood 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

 

Bedard noted that the 1986 Toronado “still has GM’s trademark chopped-off roof, but the bubble-backlight theme borrowed from the GM-20 adds a new trick.” If by “trick” he meant “making the $20,000 Toronado look disconcertingly like a $10,000 Olds Calais,” I would have to agree, but I think this roofline/backlight treatment was where the 1986 Toronado’s styling went from merely “stumbling” to “falling down and hurting itself.” As with a lot of downsized GM cars of this era, the roofline just plays hell with what are already awkward proportions, and I strongly suspect that the upright angle of the backlight contributed materially to the Toro’s lackluster drag coefficient.

Car and Driver, August 1985, page 45, final page of 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado Preview Test with data panel

Since the C/D test car’s engine apparently differed from ultimate production spec, their recorded performance (0 to 60 mph in 10.4 seconds, the quarter mile in 17.5 seconds at 78 mph, a 110 mph top speed) may have been a bit better than stock (although Popular Mechanics subsequently managed a 17.1-second quarter mile with their 1986 Toronado). With the ride and handling package and sporty Goodyear Eagle GT tires, lateral acceleration was a quite decent 0.79 g, albeit with more of a sacrifice in ride quality than traditional Olds buyers would probably have appreciated. Despite four-wheel disc brakes, however, stopping from 70 mph took a mediocre 214 feet, a poor showing in this era, especially with relatively aggressive tires.

Front view of a Medium Driftwood Metallic/Light Driftwood 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

 

Actual prices weren’t yet available when C/D went to press, but the Toronado’s base price for 1986 ended up being $19,418, up a hefty $2,620 from 1985, and a loaded example was closer to $25,000. For the owner of a previous-generation Toronado (and there were almost 300,000 of those when the ’86 arrived), this was a sizable price jump for what likely seemed like less car; the sacrifices in rear seat and trunk space were pretty apparent.

I know that fourth-generation Toronados have their defenders (what weird car doesn’t?), but the grim production figures make it very hard to see this car as anything other than a commercial disaster:

Oldsmobile Toronado Production, 1986–1992

  • 1986: 15,924
  • 1987: 15,040
  • 1988: 16,496
  • 1989: 9,877
  • 1990: 15,022
  • 1991: 8,053
  • 1992: 6,436
  • Total: 86,848

 

Decklid Toronado badge on a Medium Driftwood Metallic/Light Driftwood 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

 

I want to cut some of through the usual excuses for the fourth-generation Toronado’s failure, which usually imply that the Toro couldn’t have ever succeeded unless Oldsmobile had somehow stuck to its traditional guns (i.e., oversize dimensions, V-8 power, and squared-off styling resembling a previous-generation Eldorado). The idea that the Toronado was just too small is repeated over and over in almost any discussion of the late ’80s E-body coupes; even Patrick Bedard — who, like most C/D editors of the time, was more enamored of trimmer German sedans — mocked the Toronado’s “Toys ‘R’ Us dimensions.”

However, as I noted earlier, there were other upscale six-cylinder coupes of this time that were about this same size, at least as aerodynamic, and much better-looking. For example, the Japanese-market Toyota Soarer, which was redesigned in early 1986, a few months after the Toronado, was a little smaller than the Toro — 3.8 inches shorter overall and 2.8 inches narrower on a 2.9-inch-shorter wheelbase — but had vastly better proportions. Like the Toronado, the Z20 Soarer also offered a whole array of high-tech electronic toys (like digital instruments and Toyota’s “Electro Multivision” CRT touchscreen control center), although such gadgets seemed to have a much greater appeal to 30something yuppies in Japan than they ever did to Americans under 50 in this era. (JDM buyers of the ’80s loved digital instruments, but in the U.S., they almost always seemed to scream “AARP discount,” much like the aforementioned tacky wire wheel covers.)

Front 3q press shot of a Pearl White 1986 Toyota Soarer 3.0GT-Limited (MZ20) coupe

1986 Toyota Soarer 3.0GT-Limited / Toyota Motor Corporation via Response Automotive media

 

Of course, the Z20 Soarer wasn’t officially sold outside of Japan, so you could argue that it wasn’t a fair comparison, but in early 1987, Honda introduced a coupe version of its upmarket Legend sedan, which was sold in the U.S., and quite successfully. The Legend coupe was even closer to the Toronado in size and configuration — a tenth of an inch longer on a 1.5-inch-shorter wheelbase and about 2 inches narrower — and like the Oldsmobile, it had a transverse V-6 engine and front-wheel drive.

High-angle front 3q view of a Antiqua Blue 1987 Acura Legend coupe with Asturius Gray Metallic body cladding

1987 Acura Legend L Coupe / Bring a Trailer

 

In coupe form, the Legend was much more aerodynamic than the Toronado, with a sporty stance and crisp detailing, and it was a competent driver’s car. Even with the clunky Honda four-speed automatic, the Legend coupe was also faster than the Toronado, and U.S. Legends were available with a slick five-speed manual gearbox (which increased their credibility with the buff books).

Side view of an Antiqua Blue 1987 Acura Legend coupe with Asturius Gray Metallic body cladding

The 1987 Acura Legend coupe was 188 inches long on a 106.5-inch wheelbase, 54 inches tall, and 68.7 inches wide, with an 0.30 Cd / Bring a Trailer

 

Considered strictly in numerical terms, the Legend coupe probably didn’t sell much better than the Toronado: It was somewhat more expensive, starting at $22,688, and Acura had far fewer dealers than Olds did — only about 300 in 1987. (American Honda doesn’t break out first-generation Legend sales by model, but the first-year sales target for the Legend coupe was 18,000 units.) However, the two-door Legend was a well-received, reasonably attractive halo model that boosted the image of Honda’s fledgling Acura brand. The hapless Toronado was a commercial and aesthetic misfire that just made Oldsmobile seem that much more out of touch, and it failed to appeal to either past Olds buyers or the younger customers the division hoped to attract.

Side view of a Medium Driftwood Metallic/Light Driftwood 1986 Oldsmobile Toronado with bare trees in the background

1986 Oldsmobile Toronado / Barn Finds

 

People who like these cars will doubtlessly insist that the fourth-generation Toronado was a nice car: comfortable, quiet, reasonably composed. That much was true, but even in a contemporary Oldsmobile showroom, it lacked any unique selling point. The newly downsized Delta 88 coupe was better-looking and more practical; the aging RWD Cutlass Supreme still offered V-8 swagger (if not much performance); and the N-body Calais was much cheaper.

Even within the chaos of the Roger Smith reorganization, GM still managed some decent efforts that earned a modicum of critical respect and/or successfully appealed to younger buyers, but this Toronado was not one of these. It encapsulated many of GM’s worst tendencies, without the attractive styling, compelling performance, or novel technical details that had characterized the corporation’s biggest successes (and many of its more interesting failures). Looking back now, it’s tempting to regard the 1986 Toronado as the true beginning of Oldsmobile’s unhappy downward spiral — a halo car without much of a halo.

Related Reading

Curbside Classic: 1979-85 Oldsmobile Toronado – The Forgotten E-Body (by Robert Kim)
Curbside Classic: 1988 Oldsmobile Toronado Troféo – The Downward Spiral (by Brendan Saur)
Car Show Classic: 1989 Oldsmobile Toronado Troféo – Ooh Boy, Am I Gonna Be In For It… (by Tom Klockau)
Vintage Car And Driver Review: 1986 Buick Riviera T-Type – What Is This Car Supposed To Be? (by Rich Baron)
Curbside Find: 1987 Buick Riviera In Hungary – The Best Preserved ’86-’88 Riviera Still Around? (by Rich Baron)