George Orwell was right

YAWN ON WHEELS

I was walking along last Summer when a Victorian fainting spell came over me. Was I a narcoleptic? Had I somehow forgotten to breath? No, it turn out I was passing by this Buick and it sucked the energy right out of me. Please read this post sitting down.

This is a 1984 Buick Century Limited in one of FOUR color choices named Silver Poly. I believe this is the perfect summery of the domestic automobile landscape in 1984. Vehicles were so damn boring that they needed 4 different colors that are hard to distinguish all named the same thing.

Maybe the 4 Silver Polys referred to how many repaints it will require before the decade is out? Shout-out to whoever grabbed that hood ornament.

In the 1980s the Big Three auto makers had to switch their paint to a low VOC (volatile organic compound) recipe. They complied without fully realizing that this required a longer curing time. The result is that almost every car from the mid '80s has serious paint issues.

Let's get back to the hooptie at hand. We know this is an '84 due to those 7 vertical bars spanning the grill. Interestingly the registration sticker in the windshield says it's an '85. Maybe it was a holdover languishing in the factory lot until the model year changed?

My sympathies always lie with the copywriters who have to describe these utterly boring rides in their sales material. For 1985 Buick separated their brochure into 3 segments: The Art of Buick, The Science of Buick, and The Buying of Buick. In The Art of Buick they mention how European this car is no less than 4 times in the first 2 paragraphs. Poor Europe!

One thing I will give it up for are those sweet factory hubcaps!

To be fair these were actually well engineered cars compared to those just a few years previous. They were all fuel injected and front wheel drive with well tuned suspensions. No longer would the mighty Buick be a listing yacht in the corners. Yawn.

If anything this sticker might be the only thing to entice a thief because they might be wondering why they would bother? By the way Custom King Electronics is no more; replaced by a real estate office. Such is Brooklyn in 2017.

The name Century was first given to a 1936 Buick that could go 100mph. The British auto community in the '30s called 100mph "doing the century" and someone at Buick was amused. The official top speed of this ride was 98mph. FAKE AND SAD. Maybe the Limited refers to its limitations?

If you really squint you can imagine some continuity between the Buicks of the '60s and this car. The taillights are almost full width and it's a mostly squared off design.

Again with that sweet paint.

The mighty Grand National was available from Buick in '85, and happened to be the fastest American production car due to its turbocharged V6 engine (even beating out the Corvette!). If you were so inclined you could order a Century T-Type which sported blackout trim and a slightly better engine but it still didn't amount to high performance.

Oh yeah dig that Malaise era velour! This is the quintessential '80s GM interior with slabs of faux wood, plush cloth seats, and flat dashboards filled with buttons.

Well that's that. 

When my beloved Grandmother passed away she stipulated in her will that I could have either her Buick identical to this in every way or $3,000. I took the money without blinking. Part of it was my memory of riding in that car with several smoking adults and the windows barely cracked, but the other part was that this encapsulated all that was boring in modern automobiles for me. It is the perfect grandparent car for the mid '80s but other than that I was surprised to see it even exists in 2017.

The most affordable Porsche

THE MOST AFFORDABLE PORSCHE

I recently went up to Bear Mountain for some late winter nature time. Who knew I'd run across a cocaine edition '80s sports car? Behold!

This is a 1984 Porsche 944 in Black (I was hoping for a more interesting color name but no!). Everybody knows the flagship Porsche 911. The larger 928 had a starring role in Risky Business. The 944 is the forlorn and forgotten Porsche.

The flared fenders are from the factory, giving this ride a voluptuous look.

Way back in the 1970s Volkswagen and Porsche teamed up to develop a car that would be sold by Audi. This complicated alliance began to unravel while the car was being developed. At one point VW declared that they would be the only ones to sell the car. Then they decided to drop it altogether! Porsche bought everybody out, finished the car, and called it the 924. This small hatchback Porsche had an Audi engine which caused enthusiasts to turn their back on it.

This ride was introduced in 1982 as a replacement for the 924, this time with all Porsche parts. To me it has aged very well. We know this is pre-1985 because the power antenna is visible on the front fender. In addition these are the stock '82-'84 wheels. In 1985 new wheels were introduced that looked like rotary phone dials.

This sporty German has been around.

From this angle the evolution of the 924 is on full display. Both models have this large rear window.

The 944 uses a rear transaxle that helped even out the front and rear weight ratio almost perfectly. As a result handling is very good.

This was an unexpected state park find to say the least! 

The way Porsche values have been skyrocketing lately this is really the time to pick one of these up if you're so inclined. At the moment these are seriously cheap wheels. A 1983 example is currently on Ebay with a Buy it Now price of $3,000 that needs nothing but a paint job and speedo cable (supposedly). Even the most well documented mint condition examples seem to be under 10 grand. It wasn't long ago that a 911 could be had for that kind of money so act now!

If this is your car I'm sorry but you must be anhedonic.

X-BODY STANDS FOR EXTRA BORING

Back to basics people. I started this blog to celebrate and/or openly mock cars that looked like they shouldn't be on the road anymore. This fussy little brick fits the bill to a T!

What we have here is a painfully dull and utterly forgotten footnote in automotive history. On paper it is a 1984 Buick Skylark Custom in Light Sand Grey. Even the color name makes my eyelids heavy.

*yawn*

This is what George Orwell meant when he wrote 1984.

The dystopian paint job is giving up everywhere at once. Paint jobs and clear coats were prone to failure from the early '80s through the mid-'90s for whatever reason. Find me a single Beretta or Lumina with a nice factory paint job and I'll buy you lunch.

Buick was always #2 in the General Motors hierarchy below Cadillac but above Olds, Pontiac, and Chevy at the bottom. In 1984 this meant that the X-Body Chevy Citation would inevitably be fitted with more stately styling cues and a Buick emblem. This is classic badge engineering.

That one smoky dead eye is unnerving.

A more formal grill that its siblings, and a more squared-off, upright design set the Buick apart from the Citation, but under the skin it was identical. Does anybody remember the Cadillac Cimarron? It almost killed Cadillac off by employing the most egregious badge engineering in history. One look at the Cimarron and you knew it was a Chevy Citation with leather and gold emblems.

*Spell check wanted to change Cimarron to Macaroni. Most Cimarron owners would gladly trade their car in for a whole bunch of delicious macaroni.

This lump is powered by the Iron Duke inline 4 cylinder engine, built by Pontiac. This venerable, if not actually loved, engine could rocket all 2,600lbs of Skylark up to 96mph! Ready to merge onto the highway? Plan ahead as 0-60mph took a very leisurely 15 seconds. Count to 15 seconds so you can feel how long that actually is.

The interior consisted of a collapsed sun shade and some throw pillows. The door panels actually look like brown tweed. Buying this car new was a declaration of boredom.

There is a car I like even less than this one and it happens to be its successor (though only for the 2 door models). In 1986 the Somerset Regal hit the market which looked like you cut the width of the rear doors out and attached the back window to the back of the front door. It was all hood no trunk and looked ridiculous.

That gas door screams lack of interest to detail. Huge, square, and taking up most of the quarter panel, it is the definition of just going through a checklist of what needs to be on a car in order to function. I can't think of a design where it is more of an afterthought.

This is the tail end of the Malaise era. Even though the X-Body cars were introduced in 1980 the bumpers have the look of designers caught by surprise when the federal safety regulations hit in 1974. These days we take it for granted that bumpers are integrated with the body, but this sports chrome guardrails that look 2 sizes too big.

This is the lowest trim level available for 1984; the Custom. No vinyl roof and no side trim at all.

The emblem whispering to anyone that will listen that this is the base model is tiny! This car seems to be staring at the ground a lot in embarrassment. I mean look at that acne!

Are there any high points? The X-Bodies were all front wheel drive which was a leap in the right direction for small car handling. Also, the distance between the wheels is pretty substantial so I'm guessing it's pretty sure-footed. You'd be going so slow though that it wouldn't really matter.

There was a sporty version of this ride called the T-Type. Not to be confused with the turbocharged T-Type Regal, it nevertheless came with a high output V6 engine. The T-Type was only available in 2 door coupe form. With the H.O. V6 and a manual trans you could hit 116mph and (more importantly) go from 0-60 in 8.6 seconds; almost half of this stock slab.

Well we'll leave this thing looking at us from its best angle. This is the classmate whose yearbook never got signed. It arrived, continued along for awhile, and dropped out of existence without leaving its mark at all. Nobody collects these and nobody is looking for one. The fact that it exists in 2016 Brooklyn was enough for me to take a moment but genuinely expect for these X-Body Skylarks to be extinct any second now.