Olds, we miss you

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Cars come and cars go, it has always been the same. With only a tiny majority of newborn marques surviving, the street scenes around the globe are becoming more of the same every day. Even relatively big European players with excellent provenance such as Saab, Rover and Lancia cannot survive. Or Packard, Plymouth, AMC and Studebaker in the US. And last but not least: Oldsmobile

It’s 17 years ago this week that General Motors decided to phase out the 103-year-old Oldsmobile-marque - the then-eldest automotive brand in the United States. Oh yes. When Olds Motor Works merged with Buick to become General Motors in 1908 no one would have told them that it was GM that would eventually kill it off. As a matter of fact Olds was known as ‘The Technology Division’ of GM in those early days, pioneering with the V8 engine in 1915, chrome plating in 1926 and the Hydra-Matic automatic transmission in 1937. Some will say these three inventions are the core of the American automotive industry.

The perspective of exciting things to come still oozes from the photograph above. That’s the Oldsmobile Super 88 Holiday Sedan of 1957, when the future looked bright and exciting. Oldsmobile had taken its Golden Rocket 88 to show throughout the country and the eagerness to take it to the future radiates to this photograph. Is that a hat or a space helmet? It could be both. It was the way forward all the way.

What went wrong? The experts say that Oldsmobile became too slow to react to trends. It was, for example, one of the last American car manufacturers to come up with a sports utility vehicle... Four years after that December 2000 announcement, the last Olds ran off the assembly line. We miss it. Do you?

(Words editor, picture GM PR)

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