Oldsmobile joins Plymouth: RIP

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That engine is one reason I got my current "beater", a '96 88 which is a
delightful car, plenty of power and gas mileage of 24 to 27mpg (throwing
out the aberrant highs and lows).

My history with Olds starts with my new '67 CS 442 convertible, which I
beat all to hell on all-night rallies and it just kept on ticking. Then
I got a '66 CS 442 hardtop, used, which someone else beat all to hell
but it was still a solid car.

I have a '68 Olds 88 with 455 and 3 speed on the column. You know
someone had to put down a big wad to get the dealer to order that. In
the 13yrs I've had it I've replaced a starter and battery, is all. Will
never sell it, can't get enough money out of it to buy anything else.
Norm (no more studes, Nate, but a passel of old hemis now)

 

Oh yeah, the lying. In that environment they expect you to 'spin' things.
I would get in trouble by telling people the truth as my managers and
their managers had 'spun' something (aka lied). Trouble is, they didn't
even clue people like me in on what their lies were. Didn't matter anyway
but I would have still told the truth to anyone that wanted to hear it.

And a recruiter working for that company left a message on my machine
yesterday...... go back there... maybe for 2-3x what I am making now.
I've rested enough to put up with it again for awhile, but I have to
be compensated properly for it.

 

Anyone remember Sylvania's short-lived Xenarc HID retrokit for sealed
beams?

Oh yeah, the lying.

DS

 

Apparently the Caddy 472/500 engines are pretty darn good too.
There's a small but respectable contingent of the Studebaker club that
seems to think that the Caddy motors make a nifty swap into a
Studebaker C-K (coupe/hardtop) body. I can't really argue with them,
but that might almost be too much motor for those little cars. (note
that I said almost.) Also I've heard that they make good replacements
for a BBC in a work truck.

Of course, eventually Caddy got SBCs as well, although they did have
their own engine for a while - the 4100 - the less said about same the
better.

nate

 

Very true. The 3.1 and 3.4 engines are known to have numerous
fixable problems with them that GM refuses to address. The 3800
is fine, but the engine wasn't really made to work with the
new coolant(seals and gaskets).

Q: what year did they change from using old-fashioned antifreeze?

 

Cloaked wrote:

I was thinking of the older ones with the smaller 218 V8.

 

I would not hire a MBA to work in my company. In fact, it would
be something I would look for to exclude them when hiring.

Any degree that has to have ethics classes as part of its
cirriculum is by default broken. That's right - they have
to now *teach* ethics classes in addition as the rest of the
cirriculum does everything to indoctrinate you into genuflecting
at the feet of the almighty dollar.

In the 80's and 90's, most colleges did not require ethics
classes. These are the people in power now - godless, souless
idea-men who know how to suck up better than they know how
to actually solve problems.

I'd take a professional in the field and train them to be
an assistant or manager instead of hiring one fresh off
the college assembly line anyday.

 

Well, that's no longer true. With the proliferation of U.S.
plants in Mexico, there are a fair number of more modern
vehicles filtering into the country via Central America.

I'm surprized that Japan or Korea or India doesn't ship cars
there directly.

 

I'd say put up with it and milk them for all you can get out of them.


2-3x isn't a bad salary increase

 

Yup!

I my case, ethics are mandated BY LAW through my professional
association. Breach of ethics can have you not only fired, but have
your right to title revoked.

I guess there is no "professional" association for MBAssholes.

I wish I could have tought that MBAsshole that canned me that the
"value added in manufacturing" was that people had JOBS that kept the
economy ALIVE and communities prosperpous!

It kinds reminds me of Scrouge - the before and after. Before the
visits from the ghosts, all the man cared about was $$$$. After, he
wanted to help his employee raise his family.

I have heard employers bitch about employee loyalty. There is no
loyalty without respect, and respect has to be earned. Perhaps if
employers were not so busy stabbing their employees in the back they
might earn a little respect. And a good start would be by keeping the
jobs right at home.

 

It's more than that. These people they are getting rid of
to cut costs are the same ones they will need to grow out
of their current mess.

It takes time to train and get people up to speed. The
smart company keeps its experts and long-term employees
because they are what makes the place run efficiently.

I've seen it all too many times myself. Management wants
to cut costs. Of course, they don't want to cut their
salaries or beneifts. So the guy who had been working for
them in the warehouse for ten years gets replaced with
a new less expensive hire.

Then they wonder why they are loosing inventory six
months later. Lol.

Honesty and dedication are things that I'v actually had to
bring up in interviews in the past. I'd often get stares
from the moron across the desk as if that wasn't important
to the hiring decision.

Q: what makes more sense? A person with a family that's
in their 30's who is reliable and honest for $40K or a
college grad with no ties or morals for $30K?

Which one will sell you out first?
Which one will steal from you first?
Which one will care about the company and community more?
Which one cares about how their job reflects on them more?

And you wonder why so many businesses fail.

I had a friend who had an auto parts business. Turns
out that his entire warehouse staff was stealing him
blind and doctoring the records. I response was - well,
what did you expect for $9 an hour?

He should have found a middle-aged person with a family
and community ties and a reputation to uphold and paid
him twice as much(because you don't need 4 slackers if
you can hire 2 pros to do the same amount of work).

 

Or losing it, even.

I see, so there's no space at your ideal company for a talented engineer
(or whatever) who chose not to get married -- or whose state or country
forbids it -- and/or who has no kids.

Nice.

DS

 

For a large percentage of the Cuban population, it is still reality.

And I'm *not* surprised you didn't know that they do. Korean cars are
rather common in Cuba.

 

Joseph Oberlander () wrote:
: 442. Ah.... (smile)

: Okay, a 1960's Buick Skylark convertable is great as well.

My first "old" hobby car was a '64 Skylark convert with the 330 V-8,
aluminum heads and all. Nice car, fun cruiser. Then I got a 2nd hobby car,
a 68 Cutlass S with the 350. Not quite a 4-4-2, but fun nonetheless. The
Olds was (is) a much better car than the Buick. It's criminal how GM let
this brand and all the heritage die. R. I. P. Oldsmobile. We never
realized how good you were until you were gone.

 

No, Buicks are actually pretty darn well made. Try to convince me that
Buick Grand Nationals from the 80s were "not driven very hard!" And more
Buicks in recent years (by percentage) tend to get the Buick-designed
3800 v6 than the Shiv-o-lay-designed 3400 v6. GM still has deeper and
more fundamental engineering differences between its divisions than any
other manufacturer, although they are surely disappearing toward the
lowest-common-denominator junk motors (eg. Chevy 3400) or high-end
engines like the Northstar (which really replaced Cadillac's in-house
engine division, which itself was very good until the late 70s). I
would take slight issue with Dan's original assertion that Oldsmobile
was so far ahead of ALL other GM divisions in engineering- Olds most
certainly kicked the pants off Shove-a-lot and Pantycrack, but Buick
also had excellent engines and cars. The Buick 455 was more powerful
than the Olds 455, WAY more reliable than the Shivvy 454, had a
rod-ratio almost as good as a Mopar big-block, and weighed about the
same as a Shivvy 350 smallblock.

 

Nate Nagel wrote:

They're also reasonably popular with hot-rodders and off-roaders,
believe it or not. The 472 was the last truly great pure Cadillac
engine, the 500 was a step in the wrong direction, and then they fell
off a mile-high cliff and were crushed by the HT4100 and V-8-6-4

But Cadillac engineering re-emerged 10 years later as the Northstar,
which this old Mopar fan concedes is a true world-class engine.

Not many. Most Fleetwoods and Broughams got the Olds 307, which was not
a bad engine but was suffering badly from GM sinking tons of money into
the SBC to make it meet emissions, live longer, and get more power out
of it. They could have done the same for less using either the Olds or
Buick v8 as a starting point, IMO. The Olds 307/350 met the same fate as
the Chrysler slant six in its final years- smothered under a ton of
"add-on" emissions gear rather than addressing combustion chamber
design, cam design, and valve/port design, all of which the Chevy 350
received, and the same applied to the Olds engine could have made it far
better than the Chevy 350.

 

Nate Nagel wrote:

Can you see anyone waxing nostalgic about ANY car made in the past
20-odd years since the Buick GN/GNX? I mean any car that the average joe
could realistically own and their kids could aquire memories of riding
to school in- like a '67 Plymouth GTX, or a '67 Cutlass, or a '69
Torino? Maybe there'll be people admiring Vipers and C6 (feh! its a
C5.0.1) Corvettes in 30 years, and the odd PT Cruiser, or Cooper Mini
will show up as about as much of an oddity as AMC Gremlins at car shows
today, but *nothing* else will even be remembered.

 

And now Chrysler is offering its own dual-displacement
engine in the 300C. It'll be interesting to see how
that works out.



Geoff

 

Dem boys from the CSA (Confederate States of America) did pretty good in
the pre-NASCAR bootleggin' days (when the term "stock car" was more than
just a meaningless name) at being self-sufficient. In fact - that's how
NASCAR got its start. They had to be pretty good to consistently outrun
the federal revenooers and the local law enforcement (that is, if the
local law enforcement wasn't in on the take).

Bill Putney
(to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with "x")

 

Daniel,

Let me put names to the 2 "MBA Assholes" most responsible for the
demise of Oldsmobile:

Ron Zarrella (Head of North American Operations for GM)

Karen Francis (if memory serves correctly, she was the Olds Brand
manager under Zerella)

Ms. Francis was one of the famous "soap peddlers" Zarrella recruited
to "transform" GM, I don't think this witch knew a tail light from a
valve lifter - probably THE opposite end of the spectrum from Bob
Lutz, Zora Duntov or John DeLorean, who are genuine car guys and
understand you don't market cars like laundry soap.

Funny thing was, as a person she is actually rather likeable - I met
her in Lansing at the 100th Anniversary and she was very pleasant to
me (and a cute lady too). But when it came to cars, she was clueless.

If there is a proper afterlife, Mr. Olds will be there to escort Mr.
Zarrella and Ms. Francis to their proper reward, which should be a
special place in the hottest part of Hell operating a spot welder or
maybe pouring molten cast iron for block castings. .

Regards,
Bill Bowen
Sacramento, CA

P.S. I'm orginally from the Detroit area, lived in Lansing as a kid
and had numerous relatives that worked for GM, a couple at Lansing
Assembly. I also worked at HydraMatic for awhile while in college
building transmissions for Oldsmobiles. And, last but not least, my
very first car AND my present car are both Oldsmobiles.

P.P.S. Folks, don't miss the series of articles in the Lansing State
Journal http://www.lsj.com about the end of Oldsmobile (that AP
piece in USA Today orginated from the LSJ) plus they have links to
stories and pics and such from the Detroit News.

EXCELLET COMMENTARY )which I snipped to conserve bandwidth)