A parts car, destined to be picked clean and then discarded as scrap, or a project that just became too overwhelming and/or pissed off the landlord and/or wife to the point where the junkyard seemed like the only way out? Impossible to say. In any case, it appears that a few bits and pieces- including the engine and transmission- remain on this Olds.

Here we see a trio of hip Cutlass buyers choosing their Middle Malaise Era rides of choice. The Cutlass Supreme offered "style, value and good gas mileage," while the Cutlass Calais boasted bucket seats, special suspension, and full instrumentation." Naturally, the Cutlass Supreme Brougham was the pinnacle, with "richness inside you'd expect in bigger, more expensive cars."

With that futuristic touch-screen dash display, it's no wonder that the forces of evil will stop at nothing to get their hands on the Trofeo. Why, they'll even blow up a hay wagon in their desperation!

Rust seems to have taken a few bites out of the Pontiac, but it hasn't surrendered! Here's what Nuyear68 has to say about his finds:

Not necessarily an island that time forgot, but still a home for some neat DOTS candidates. Here's a 1965 Oldsmobile Starfire convertible. Pretty low production, it was the last Starfire ragtop, with the 1966 coupe being the end of its run until unceremoniously brought back as a dinky hatchback in the 80's (I think).
This one sports wheels from a 1972 Olds, and the neatest feature of this car is the side exhaust outlets at the rear of the fenders.
Must be an Olds guy who owns this, notice the nice Olds 98 Regency coupe in the driveway.
Rust hasn't forgotten this oldster I spotted here on Staten Island. It's a 1952 Pontiac - plain jane model with not too much trim, but a real neat chrome treatment up the deck and down the nose.

Ford wagons apparently hold a special spot in the hearts of Jalopnikadians. Only a bitter and angry 5% of you went for the Crack Pipe lever on yesterday's '66 ten-seater, before going back to pasting up vitriol-filled letters to the government, made from magazine clippings. The only thing that could have made that Country Squire even more desirable (other than it being in our driveway) was for more sun-speckled, wind in the hair action. Well, today we're going to set that right.

When GM redesigned their X-platform mid-sizers in 1980, they shifted from longitudinal engines and rear wheel-drive to front-driving sidewinders. GM also demonstrated their utter lack of understanding of how such a car should be designed and built. Representing some of the most loathed and despised vehicles ever to be shoddily-built by the too big to fail auto maker, the Chevy Citation, Pontiac Phoenix, Buick Skylark and Olds Omega greeted the eighties with a sassy attitude of craptacular mundaneness.

Okay, so they lacked basic driving competence. Perhaps their build quality would have shamed even a Haliburton contractor. So what if the steering has all the feel of sex with Verne Troyer. All that negativity will be swept away like a baby in a flood the first time you lower the top and step on the gas.

That's right, this Curtis Camper convertible conversion (rubber baby buggy bumpers!) means you can have both your X-car fix and skin cancer! Heavy reinforcements mean the car shouldn't collapse under its own weight when opening both doors, but it will further stress the wheezy 2.8, which was only in its second year of deployment in 1981, and lacked the power-making and driveability enhancing mojo of fuel injection or EMS which made its 110 ponies feel like that many fat, lazy cats.

Curtis converted about 500 of these before coming to their senses, and who knows how few are left today? That means it will be significantly more rare than that Chrysler LeBaron convertible that has also caught your eye. A lot of new parts are claimed bolted to the Omega, as you would expect would be required of a 28 year old car. And it's starting price is only $2,000. It hasn't received any bids so far, and with only three days left on the ticker, yours might be the only one.

That $2,000 winning bid would buy you a unique ride. WWII veterans would nod in approval as you pass by in the Remembrance Day parade. Upon learning of your purchase, your grandmother will finally admit that you're not an idiot like your father, but that you still don't visit enough. The manager and waitstaff of the Olive Garden will ignore their other patrons to marvel at the topless two door when you pull into the parking lot. Yes, you'll have many miles of enjoyment in the car- at ten below the limit, in the left lane, with your blinker on.

So, is $2,000 a Nice Price to be the object of admiration from your elders? Or would buying this car be a big puff on the Crack Pipe, if you could just figure out how the kids get the dang thing to work?

You decide!

eh-Bay or go here if the ad goes to bed at 8:00. Hat tip to Tomsk!

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Known variously as the Iron Duke, Pontiac 2.5, and Tech IV, this pushrod four was an available powerplant in just about every car and small truck built by Pontiac, Chevrolet, Buick, and Oldsmobile during the Late Malaise Era and beyond. From the Camaro to the Fiero, S-10 to Skyhawk; even some late AMCs got Iron Duke power. The Duke tended to be on the noisy side and was often derided for its behind-the-times cast-iron construction and pushrod valvetrain, but it was compact and reliable- in many cases, the most reliable component in the car- and got the job done.
[Wikipedia]

It's pretty rough, and plenty of parts have been picked from it by now, but the all-important roof glass remains. There's an example of today's Engine Of The Day honoree under the hood, too- looks like a 2-barrel 350. Nice Bondo-y patina on the tailgate!

Say what you will about Detroit's primitive suspensions and iffy build quality during the postwar period, but there's no denying that The General cranked out inexpensive, reliable, and powerful pushrod V8s by the tens of millions. We've honored the Buick 215 aka Rover V8, the Buick Nailhead, the Cadillac OHV, the Pontiac V8, and the Small-Block Chevrolet so far in this series, and today it's the turn of the Olds V8s built during the 1964-1990 period (yes, we'll eventually get to the big-block Chevy and the others, so be patient). Starting with the 330-cubic-inch Jetfire Rocket, this engine family (technically split into "small-block" and "big-block" categories based on deck height, but otherwise the same) included the axle-snapping 455 that powered the '70 442, countless 350s and 400s that were stuffed inside Cutlasses, and the 403, which was stuffed into just about every GM vehicle that would hold still on the assembly line. The "6.6 Litre" engines in the Malaise Trans Ams were Olds 403s… and we'd say that perhaps that engine is best forgotten, but we're saving that distinction for the ill-fated diesel version of the 350. I had a purple '69 Cutlass with the (gas) 350 for a regrettably brief, donuts-on-your-lawn period in my teens, and I think I turned more cheap tires into black marks on the pavement with this engine than with any other. Hooray for torque!

[Wikipedia, 442.com; Image source: Fotki]

The alley next to Lee Auto Supply is technically a street (it has a name), so it's fair DOTS game when a Lee employee buys a parts car while on the job and leaves it in the alley for the day.

I'm positive that this is a Cutlass, and I'm 90% sure it's a '71. It appears to have been hit pretty hard on the right front, prior to being gutted, but it might yet be the basis for a project Olds. We've been so short on Cutlasses in this series (so far just this '69 convertible and this '67 Vista Cruiser) that even one as rough as this makes the DOTS cut!

Mostly you see the good ol' small-block-Chevy-powered Corvair, but why do that when the engine/transaxle assembly of the front-wheel-drive Olds Toronado (or, heh heh, its Cadillac Eldorado cousin) is better suited for placement in a rear-engined car? Corvair racer UDMan has found a very nicely done Corvair/Toronado swap and written up a review over on Automotive Traveler.

[Automotive Traveler]

In January of 1981, my parents packed up their possessions—which included a 5-month-old kid yet to become a car boy—and set out west from the Hungarian city of Szeged to fly all the way to Washington, D.C. We were people from the satellite of an evil empire yet welcomed kindly, in spite of the total sum of 25 American dollars burning a hole in my parents’ pockets, the maximum amount allowed for export by the Communist state when you left the country.

I have no memories. We settled in the Maryland suburb of Rockville, I was sent to a municipal pool to float with American neonates and my dad went to work at the National Cancer Institute to probe the secret life of bacteria.

Then we got a car.

It was a first generation Oldsmobile Omega, as identified by Murilee over iChat, a compact car which has transformed into a proper land yacht in the recollection of my parents. I have no memories of the car. It was a sickly shade of yellow and judging by the only photographic evidence which remains, I rather liked it. So did my dad, who hates cars with a vengeance.

The leviathan Oldsmobile took us scrappy Hungarians all the way up and down the East Coast, it took us to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina where I saw the ocean for the first time in my life. I have no memories of this event, only my mom’s story—usually told with a grin—that the muscular Atlantic waves knocked my dad clear off his knees with me sitting on his neck, sending us both into the surf. We survived.

There are no Oldsmobiles in Hungary, save for a few derelict 88’s slowly melting into the tarmac. In fact, most people with no knowledge of American cars tend to think that oldsmobile is simply an English term for a veteran automobile. I know it’s not.

We came back to Hungary in the summer of ‘82, the Oldsmobile was sold off to a friend, and my first memories would not stick for another year: a single image, lying delirious from a stomach bug in a tent by a swollen, raging river. I have no idea what my furiously developing toddler brain made of the Omega. I don’t even know if it had a V8. Although I guess it did. What else would explain the love affair with the lazy rumble of crossplane V8’s, alien to the European continent.

My family would acquire other Oldsmobiles on later stays in the US. My dad still has an Oldsmobile badge on his keyfob. I recall Oldsmobile’s death from a few years back. And now General Motors has gone bankrupt.

You all have clear memories of American cars. I do not. I can only point your way to P. J. O’Rourke’s elegy in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

Goodbye then, Oldsmobile Omega, goodbye.

Photo Credit: László Orosz

Yesterday's 1975 Stutz Blackhawk escaped getting a black eye with 57% of you nodding in unison over both its fifteen grand price, and Elvis-endorsed pedigree. Now let's again jump into Mr Peabody's Wayback machine and move ahead a year for our next American Idle contestant.

Nineteen seventy six. America's bicentennial year. It was in this year that Saul Bellow won the Nobel prize for literature, Rocky served an uppercut to the box office, and a little known peanut farmer from Plains Georgia no longer needed to lust in his heart for the presidency. David Pearson achieved one of the most spectacular Daytona 500 victories ever that year, with a paint-trading spin involving Richard Petty's car coming out of the final turn, before coaxing his smoking wreck of a Mercury across the finish line at 30 miles per hour. Now that was racing!

Also that year, despite fuel shortages and cojone-robbing emissions controls, American manufacturers dominated the auto market in the U.S., holding down the top spot against insurgent, and more economical, rivals from Japan. The Oldsmobile Cutlass grabbed the gold ring for the first time ever during this turbulent year, enabling Olds to move into third place in sales, eclipsing both Plymouth and Pontiac.

Here's an example of that top-selling '76, in buckskin, offered by an individual who really, really, really likes his Cutlasses. As it hails from the bicentennial year, the 350cid engine under the hood is an Olds Rocket V8, not a corporate parts-bin motor, as it wasn't until '77 that production limitations forced the covert insertion of Chevy engines under the hoods of the Cutlass', causing accusations of deceit from car buyers upon discovery. Olds' advertising tagline of there era was Can We Build One For You?, but apparently, no, they couldn't from '77 onward.

There's not much to be said about the car itself- it's rocking the colonnade coupe "A" body, and that 350 motor is backed up by another 350- the TH350 3-speed slusher. The buckskin paint is shinier than a tax-payer's wallet, and the engine mods probably help drivability and put a few more ponies in with the 235 installed at the factory.

It's unlikely that you will be able to find another exemplar of the era in this nice of shape at any price. Despite the non-functioning horn, extracted A/C (what, it never gets hot in Detroit?) and worn-out weatherstripping, where could you find still-functional plaid swivel seats? Or a space-saver spare that's bigger than the tires on your current car? And when was the last time your car's bumper weighed more than you do?

But sixty nine hundred dollars to step into a time capsule from the disco era? Is that an age that should be revisited, or worse, sustained? At any price? What do you think, does $6,900 put this Cutlass on the top of your sales charts? Or does that price swivel you right out of the driver's seat?

You decide!

Detroit Craigslist or go here if the ad goes the way of Oldsmobile. Thanks to Psydiphekt for the tip.

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The General whacking Olds was especially painful, given that it was the oldest American marque still making cars. In fact, if your car company wasn't named Daimler or Peugeot, it was younger than Oldsmobile. Was the fact that the world "Old" was right in the name of the 107-year-old brand part of GM's decision to put it on the chopping block by the '04 model year? Marketers probably cringed every time they saw those three letters and then contemplated the ever-increasing average age of Oldsmobile buyers.

I don't have much of a personal Olds ownership history; the only Oldsmobile that I ever drove much was a purple '69 Cutlass that I bought for 100 bucks from a friend when I was 19, after she loaned it to someone who got drunk and slid it into a tree. The entire passenger side was completely trashed, but it had a rip-roaringly powerful 350 4-barrel engine (and it was purple) and I couldn't resist making the deal. However, I can make the claim that the very first car I ever rode in was an Oldsmobile: a '56 with the 324 V8.

Now it's your turn. What was your first-ever Oldsmobile? Did you love it (Dynamic 88) or hate it (Starfire)?
Photo source: Old Car Brochures

I went to college in SoCal during the mid-to-late 80s and often took the 430-mile drive back to the East Bay, nearly always on Interstate 5 (rather than the slower, prettier Highway 101 or the stuck-behind-'66-Dodge-pickup-full-of-refrigerators Highway 99). In those days, most people died of diptheria by age 30 and cameras depended on toxic silver salts to capture images; I was doing a lot of photography at the time and generally dragged the ol' Canon AE-1- and occasionally a thrift-store Kodak X-11 shooting 126 cartridges- along on my trips. I posted a few of these back in '07, in addition to the MGB-GT I-5 adventure slide show. Many of these shots were taken from the passenger side of my then-girlfriend's '78 Olds wagon, while others were taken from the driver's seat (yes, operating a full-manual SLR while driving isn't such a great idea) of the MG or my '65 Impala 4-door.

Now, you fast-forward the calendar about 20 years and you'd have the Manson family dicing this pair up with machetes and escaping into the Mojave, but the 1940s were more wholesome. Why, there's no way that the "Greatest Generation" would have perved out on profoundly disturbing pedal-pumping videos, not when they could live on the edge with short films like this one. This hardly deserves an NSFW label, but the filmmakers' intention was clearly somewhat naughty… so we're going to err on the prudish side here. I'm guessing that the car is a 1940 Oldsmobile, but I may be wrong; experts at deciphering vehicle identity from blurry movie film, please correct me if needed. Thanks to Jeannette C (creator of the Road Rage Roundup graphic) for the tip!

Somehow this beast manages to pull off Jed Clampett meets Back To The Future, which is not a combination you see everyday. The truck tires and corrugated sheetmetal combined with the flying buttresses and random bits of junk combine in a way almost reaching Lagonda-levels of beauty. [CarDomain]

If these get you in a Classic Ad Watch sort of mood, you might enjoy checking out our favorite Super Bowl Car Ads, then keep going with our Top 20 Vintage Datsun ads, Top 20 Vintage Toyota ads, and Top 20 Vintage Chrysler ads. If that's still not enough, you can go to the Top Car Commercials Of The 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. And now, our favorite (non-Chevrolet) vintage General Motors ads from North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa:

1962 Oldsmobile Jetfire Turbo	1942 Oldsmobile B-44	1991 Oldsmobile Silhouette	1988 Pontiac Grand Am
1956 Oldsmobile 88	1973 Pontiac Grand Am	1968 Pontiac GTO	1970 Pontiac T37
1982 Pontiac 6000	1981 Vauxhall Cavalier	1969 Pontiacs	1985 Pontiac Fiero GT
1990 Geo Tracker	1979 Holdens	1973 Opels	1972 Holden Kingswood
1985 Pontiac Fiero	1971 Oldsmobile Delta 88	1985 Vauxhall Nova	1992 Opels (South Africa)
1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera	1970 Pontiac Firebird	1968 Opel GT	1982 Holden Station Wagons
2001 Pontiac Aztek	1986 Holden Astra	1960 Opel Kapitän	1974 Cadillacs

That means we're due for another one. Symbolizing the manner in which The General sent the Oldsmobile brand itself to The Crusher, this '65 Jetstar 88 (similar to this DOTS '64, with the notable difference that the '64 is still alive and towing boats) has been cast off by its former owner and now awaits the cold metal jaws. Check out those beautiful gauges; I felt compelled to purchase this car's clock, even though I knew it wouldn't work.