Oldsmobile

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~ the eulogy ~

Ransom E. Olds founded the Olds Motor Vehicle Company in Lansing on 21 August 1897, and in 1901 his factory built 635 cars, which made it the first high-volume producer of gasoline automobiles anywhere. The car was the Curved Dash, a small runabout that looked like a buggy with the horse removed, and it was assembled by pushing the chassis between stationary work stations on wheeled frames. Henry Ford's moving line at Highland Park came twelve years later and got the credit. Olds himself left in 1904 after losing an argument with his investors and founded a second company under his own initials, REO, which is why two American car brands trace back to the same man.

William Durant bought the division into General Motors on 12 November 1908, and for most of the next eighty years Oldsmobile sat in the upper middle of GM's ladder, above Pontiac and below Buick, which is where it did its best work. The Hydra-Matic arrived on the 1940 models as the first fully automatic transmission sold to the public. The Rocket V8 arrived in 1949 and started the American horsepower era more or less by itself. The Cutlass became the best-selling car in North America by 1976 and the division cleared a million cars a year, ending with an all-time high of 1,066,122 in 1985.

The Turkish road never had much room for any of this. Import tariffs kept foreign cars effectively out of the country until the customs union with the European Union took effect on 1 January 1996, so what my generation grew up around was the Murat 124 and the fiberglass Anadol. American iron existed here only as the 1950s sedans that ran as shared taxis in Istanbul long past any reasonable service life, and by the time the tariffs came off, Oldsmobile was fourteen years from being shut and had nothing to send.

~ the dossier ~

~ what came out of lansing ~

The list of firsts is long enough to be surprising for a brand most people now remember as a car their grandfather drove. Front wheel drive returned to an American full-size car with the 1966 Toronado, and an airbag was offered as a regular production option on the 1974 models, two decades before anyone was required to fit one. The Hydra-Matic was licensed out to Cadillac and Pontiac and then, during the war, put into tanks.

The 88 also got a song. Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats recorded "Rocket 88" in Memphis in 1951, named after the car with the Rocket V8 in it, and a great many people who write about music call that record the first rock and roll single. It was cut at Sam Phillips's studio in Memphis two years before Phillips recorded Elvis Presley there.

~ the badge problem ~

The trouble started with the engines. In 1977 GM began building Delta 88s with Chevrolet 350 engines because the Oldsmobile engine plant could not keep up. It told nobody, and it lost the resulting lawsuits. The 1978 diesel V8, converted from a gasoline design that was never strong enough for the compression, broke often enough to end the American appetite for diesel passenger cars for a generation. Then came the corporate platform sharing of the 1980s, where the same body appeared under four different divisional badges with different grilles, and a buyer who wanted a Cutlass found himself comparing it to a Buick that was the same car. The 1988 advertising answer was "This is not your father's Oldsmobile", a slogan that reminded everybody under forty exactly whose Oldsmobile it was.

~ the last five hundred ~

General Motors announced the phase-out on 12 December 2000, the same day it cut ten percent of its salaried staff in North America and Europe and took a charge of up to $2.5 billion. Sales had fallen from over a million a year in the 1970s and 1980s to a projected three hundred thousand. Winding a car division down takes years of warranty obligations and dealer settlements, so production continued while the lawyers worked, and the dealers who sued GM over the closure were still being paid off afterward.

The final five hundred Aleros were painted dark cherry red and given Final 500 badges. The very last one came off the line at Lansing Car Assembly on 29 April 2004, signed in marker by the people who built it, and driven a short distance to the R. E. Olds Transportation Museum in the same town where the first one was made in 1897. Thirty five million cars, and the ending was a signature on a fender.

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