Recently while I was taking my morning walk in the town near where I live, I spotted and photographed the car shown above. It's an Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, probably from around 1990.
Back when I was buying General Motors cars because I qualified for a supplier discount, a Ciera would have been more affordable than the GM car I actually bought. But I knew that Cieras had been in production for what seemed ages, so I disregarded it because I wanted what I hoped was a car with newer technology.
As the title of this post indicates, Cieras lasted through 15 model years, all using the same platform and body. This was remarkable for GM in those days. The cars apparently filled a strong market niche. Better yet for corporate beancounters, Cieras were quite profitable because tooling costs were amortized during the first few years of that long production run.
The Ciera's Wikipedia entry is
here, and a link with perhaps more information is
here.
Some images of Cieras are below.
Gallery
Factory image of a 1982 Ciera Brougham (four-door sedan). Styling is a carryover from the "three box" squared-off look common during the 1970s. Aerodynamically influenced shapes for dealing with fuel economy did not appear on American cars until the 1984 model year when Ford introduced its Tempo model. Such shapes were common by 1990, yet Cieras sold well despite their now-oldfashion styling.
Here is a factory photo of a 1982 Ciera Coupe. There also was a station wagon.
Now for a four-view walk around of a 1990 Ciera up for sale. For this picture, the car was lowered closer to the ground for some reason. The remaining photos have the car in a normal stance.
Side view. Nothing really wrong with the styling, though it's rather bland. Note the black plastic patch over what on the comparable Pontiac 6000 was a small third side window.
Rear styling was simple with a consistently rectangular theme, unlike the often themeless designs we find on current cars.
Ciera's styling is not distinctive, and therefore not exciting. This, besides soon becoming dated in the new aerodynamic world, seems to have had no noticeable negative effect on sales.
These were made in the original and facelifted version for 14 years. And they were based on the GM X cars which lasted for 7 years starting in 1979. I'm guessing that a whole lot of the internal structure was much the same - the rear door window frames are identical. GM may have been selling millions of cars but apparently they were pinching pennies for higher profits. Didn't really work out all that well for them. Of course in the 80's they were blowing a lot of money on the obviously wrongheaded Saturn thing and making other big mistakes.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, looking back at them now the X cars were pretty modern and good looking for 1979. That's a year after the also good looking for its time and certainly a revolution for American cars Chrysler Omnirizons came out.
OK, now do those.