Nostalgia is a helluva drug. Radwood is taking over as the car show for cool kids, or kids that wanted to be cool in the 80s and 90s and now are middle-aged. But forget the Japanese imports and collectible Porsches, if you want to rock Radwood you need a 1997 Cutlass Supreme.
A reader sent me a tip to this listing from an exotic car dealer in Massachusetts whose standard inventory is any number of Ferraris, Maseratis and other high-end hardware. But nestled into the listings in an odd game of “one of these is not like the other” was this 1997 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with only 413 (you read that correctly) miles on the clock. According to the ad this car is part of GM’s “Heritage Collection” and was the last hardtop Cutlass Supreme of this era to be built.
The dealer is asking a whopping $18,900 for it. While that seems pretty ridiculous for an old Cutlass even with super low miles I can’t help but feel connected to this car. If you are my age, which is dangerously close to 40, you probably owned or had a friend with this car or a related one in high school.
My first ride was a 1991 Chevy Lumina that shared the platform with this Cutlass. It also had the same 3.1 liter V6. These GM W-body cars were basically the ubiquitous “shitbox” of the time, but that Chevy treated me well. I bought my Lumina when I was 17 from my uncle for about $2,000; it had 28,000 miles on the clock. I drove that car beyond college and gifted it to someone else with 185,000 miles. I never once did a major repair.
Unlike my Lumina that had front bench seats making it a comfortable six-seater for a coupe, this Cutlass has fantastic buckets, just check out that padding!
While I’m not going to drop almost twenty large on this Olds I will give mad props to the person who shuns the Seras and the 928s and rolls up to Radwood in a “classic” Cutlass Supreme.
(H/T to Andre!)
(Correction: The article refers to the Cutlass and the Lumina as an N-body car. These are W-body cars. The post has been corrected and we regret the error.)