GM Once Sold A Car So Unloved That Even Buick’s Revolutionary Turbo V6 Couldn’t Save It

Back in the late 1970s, General Motors found itself in a bit of a pickle. The company introduced a dramatic restyling of some of its mid-size cars and the public wasn’t impressed. Sales plummeted at brands like Oldsmobile and Buick. How did GM respond? It tried putting turbos into the car your grandma normally bought, creating the 1979 Buick Century Turbo Coupe. The effort was an impressive and silly failure.

Countless journalists have told you this before, including myself, but the 1970s were a critical turning point in automotive history. The decade opened up with muscle cars making almost unfathomable gross horsepower numbers. Then, America’s automakers started taking gut punch after punch. First, the switch to net horsepower ratings instead of gross power made all those muscle cars of the era appear a lot weaker, and then came the oil crises, concerns for vehicle safety, concerns for the environment, and the tightening of belts all over the country. V8s lost power, cars got substantially smaller, and styling got worse. Quality was also in the toilet and overall confidence was low. These are among the factors that earned the decade of 1973 to 1983 the Malaise Era moniker today.

Some of the more fascinating stories to come out of this era aren’t just how bad the cars got, because we all know about that, but how automakers tried to get people into seats despite the shortcomings of the products. America’s automakers were facing luxury and performance competition from Europe while the cars and motorcycles flooding in from Japan represented great value and increasing quality.

If it wasn’t hard enough to stay relevant while complying with new regulations and fighting strong competition from overseas, Detroit also found ways to set itself back by shooting itself in the foot. In the case of General Motors, it released a handful of new cars so unloved by the public that sales fell into a freefall. Buick tried to reverse course while also attracting new buyers into showrooms. In theory, souping up cars with turbos, graphics, and handling packages should have brought people into showrooms. The 1979 Buick Century Turbo Coupe was basically a Grand National before that was a thing, but it was a total flop.

Half-Baked Fastbacks

Trouble began brewing in 1978. That year, General Motors introduced a redesigned and downsized A-body platform. It was a radical change compared to what was sold before, the Colonnades, from my retrospective:

For General Motors, Colonnade was a fancy way to spell the end of four-door hardtops and convertibles. In their place, the Colonnade cars had large and prominent B-pillars that were there to keep occupants alive in rollover crashes. These cars would also bear the ungainly 5 mph bumpers that are so often associated with the Malaise Era. It was a reportedly controversial departure from what buyers and the auto media were used to. As Curbside Classic notes, the Colonnade cars were developed jointly by multiple GM divisions. Chevrolet’s team, led by John Z. DeLorean, designed the front suspension. Pontiac handled the suspension business in the rear, Oldsmobile engineered the steering, and Buick spec’d the stopping power. The frame came from GM research, and the advancements were numerous.

According to an engineering report for 1973, the new A-body Colonnade cars got a stronger perimeter frame, new body mounts, 6-inch wide wheels, a larger 8.5-inch rear axle, and a refined suspension both front and rear. Coupes rode on 112-inch wheelbases while four-doors and wagons rode on 116-inch wheelbases. Reportedly, the front suspension was based on the F-body suspension designed by engineer Herb Adams.

The new front suspension improved geometry while the rear suspension improved cornering stability. Stiff springs and large front anti-roll bars also helped keep a Colonnade in the driver’s intended path of travel. The engineers even thought of the daily driver with front camber. The left wheel has a slightly more positive camber than the right wheel, which aids in driving feel on a crowned road surface. As a result of these changes and more, GM’s Colonnades were known for good handling for the day, albeit with a rougher ride.

1977 would be the last year of the Colonnade era. Afterward, General Motors would continue to follow Malaise Era trends in cutting both size and weight from its vehicles in an effort to increase fuel economy.

The 1978 revisions to the A-body were drastic. General Motors kept the body-on-frame construction and maintained the front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout, but the rest changed dramatically. A-body cars lost up to a foot in length, lost another up to 8 inches in wheelbase, and the General found a whole 600 pounds of metal to trim out of the platform’s totally redesigned bodies. Yet, the cars were advertised as having the same interior room as the outgoing models.

The A-body underpinned a long list of GM models from the Chevrolet Malibu and the Chevrolet El Camino to the Pontiac LeMans and the Buick Regal. That year, the A-body was used on a variety of body styles as well ranging from notchback coupes up to glorious wagons with sedans in between.

But things got weird over at Oldsmobile and Buick. While brands like Chevy and Pontiac got vehicles with a typical three-box design, Oldsmobile and Buick went a different direction, as they got notchbacks as well as the fastback-style “Aeroback” cars. As Mac’s Motor City Garage writes, these cars sort of looked inspired by GM’s fastback cars of the 1940s. I checked a number of historical guides and none could pinpoint exactly why GM introduced the Aerobacks. Brochures claimed the new designs were a concept for all American cars to follow for increasing rear headroom and trunk space. The best guess by Mac’s Motor City Garage is that perhaps GM was trying to chase the popularity of hatchbacks from Japan and Europe.

Regardless of why GM did it, the Aerobacks landed with a solid thud. Despite looking like hatchbacks or liftbacks, they weren’t. All an Aeroback buyer got, aside from a rear end that resembled a dog defecating, was a substantially smaller trunk opening than if GM just went with a traditional three-body design. Reportedly, the original intention was to build real hatchbacks. Instead, the public got these half-baked creations that only looked the part.

The Aeroback design, which was featured on the Buick Century and Oldsmobile Cutlass Salon variants, was received poorly by the buying public. In 1977, the last Colonnade Buick Century models sold more than 134,000 copies. Just a year later, buyers went home in only 54,000 Aeroback Buick Century cars. For those of you keeping score, that’s a 60 percent drop in sales in just a year. The Cutlass Salon did a little better, losing around 50 percent, but that’s still a shocking loss in sales.

While Buick and Oldsmobile still had notchbacks, wagons, and other A-body styles to fall back on, they still had these Aerobacks that weren’t selling well. Their solution was an attempt to attract the performance-minded buyer, or perhaps some of the younger buyers who might have otherwise gone for an import.

Not Your Grandma’s Buick

It appears that both Buick and Oldsmobile had the same idea, but took two very different paths to get there. Let’s start with Oldsmobile, which took an embarrassing path.  The brand still had equity in its 4-4-2 name, which was applied to its famous Pontiac GTO-competing muscle car in the years prior. The 442 — GM’s marketing was sloppy and stylized the name as “442,” “4-4-2,” or “4.4.2” depending on the exact literature — made a return for the 1978 A-body, but not in the way you would expect.

The 1978 Oldsmobile 442 wasn’t its own model, but a trim level slapped onto a Cutlass Salon coupe with that Aeroback design. Opting for the 442 did not net you a faster car as it would have in years past, but did net you an appearance package that somehow made the Aeroback look cool. You also got other nice add-ons like luxury interior appointments and a handling package. Olds 442 owners with the 305 V8 could expect a 14-second jog to 60 mph thanks to the 140 HP on deck. Heck, the 305 wasn’t even special to the 442. In other words, a 1978 Oldsmobile 442 didn’t live up to its name and could easily be the subject of an episode of Glorious Garbage. It’s glorious, but also fell way short.

Buick would do better, creating cars that were even faster than Oldsmobile’s desecration of its muscle car nameplate. But keep in mind that we’re still talking about the late 1970s here, so doing better is still a low bar. As I stated before, Buick was having a problem moving its own Aeroback units. It was also having trouble selling its turbo cars, too.

Back in 1973, Buick engineer Ken Baker started a Boy Scout Explorer program. In it, Baker wanted to find the best of both worlds. He thought that if you could turbocharge a V6, you’d be able to give a smaller car the power of a V8 and a bigger car the fuel economy of a V6. Baker and the Boy Scouts scrounged parts together, creating a car that was reportedly a blast to drive. As a bonus, the kids got to learn so much about car engineering, too.

Baker thought he would be canned for his secret project, but Buick brass loved it so much that Baker was promoted and a turbo V6 program was greenlit. First came the 1976 Buick Century Indy 500 Pace Car, which sported a 3.8-liter V6 with a turbo making 20 pounds of boost. Sadly, the Pace Car replicas sold to the public didn’t get any forced induction.

The turbo V6 would return in 1978 in the Regal and the LeSabre. Unfortunately, as Curbside Classic notes, neither the Aeroback nor the turbo V6 was resonating with buyers as sales for both models fell flat. At the same time, Buick had a reputation for being the car of doctors, professionals, and parents. They weren’t really hot among young buyers. Buick’s solution? What if it combined an Aeroback with a turbo and made it all sporty? Would a legitimately sporty car bring people into showrooms? Enter the 1979 Buick Century Turbo Coupe.

On paper, this chimera had a lot going for it. The 175 HP turbo 3.8-liter V6 practically ran circles around V8s of 1978 like the 305 Oldsmobile put into the 442. But Buick’s engineers didn’t stop there. They went nuts trying to turn the Century into a proper sporty car. Only the Turbo Coupe came with the FE1 handling package, which added stiffer springs, sharper steering, thick upper control arm bushings, anti-roll bars, wide tires, and a throaty exhaust system. In effect, Buick’s engineers made a sort of Grand National years before that iconic car became a thing.

Unfortunately, cracks began showing in the Century Turbo Coupe early. As a period review from Car and Driver noted, the Century Turbo Coupe didn’t have a manual transmission and the interior was left largely untouched. Yes, there was a turbo indicator so bright that it lit up the whole instrument cluster, but it was still an uninspiring Century instrument cluster. The rest of the interior also had pretty much nothing to set itself apart from the Century your parents drove. As the Car and Driver review reveals, the engineers just didn’t have the funding to go all-out like they wanted to.

The car would go on to have two identities. The engine was a work of art. The 1979 Buick Century Coupe hit 60 mph in 9.1 seconds, got 18 mpg, and was the quickest car down a quarter mile when tested against a Saab 900 Turbo, a Mercury Zephyr, and a Chevy Malibu. It even out-braked those other cars and managed to have a largely quiet interior despite the drama brought on by the engine.

A Fast Aeroback Is Still An Aeroback

On the other hand, none of the Car and Driver editors seemed to truly like the car, dinging it for heavy understeer, polarizing styling, inadequate equipment, and just the general unlikability of the car the engine was saddled in. It seemed like the engine got praise, but it was put into the wrong body. It also didn’t help that at $8,473, this car was priced into the better-equipped and more popular Regal territory. Most buyers just bought a Regal instead.

How bad was it? Buick sold just 1,653 Century Sport and Turbo Coupes in 1979. Yep, that number includes turbo models and naturally aspirated models. In comparison, Buick moved 21,389 Regal Turbo Sport Coupes that same year. It’s even worse than you think, too. Remember, the Regal Turbo was already a poor seller! Buick sold 273,365 units of all Regal variants that year. In other words, boosting the Aeroback design didn’t result in people falling in love.

Should you want to experience this late-’70s hotness, I have good news for you. It looks like these cars were so forgotten that you can get running examples for under $10,000, if you can even find one. I’m all for cheaper, more accessible classics, even if they weren’t popular.

Thankfully, Buick never gave up on the turbo V6. The engine remained in the Regal and LeSabre and was introduced into the Riviera in 1979. As for the Century, Buick kept the V6 turbo going in both the coupe and a sedan through 1980. Buick went as far as to say it had the biggest choice of turbocharged cars of any automaker in the world. Of course, all of this would lead to the iconic Grand National. So I’d think all of this paid off.

But at the time, the 1979 Buick Century Turbo Coupe must have been a confusing ride of mixed identities. On one hand, it was like a hot rod with lots of power. But on the other hand, it was, at its core, still a deeply unlocked Aeroback. Either way, people weren’t buying it.

(Images: GM, unless otherwise noted. Top Photo: Peter Viera/Bring a Trailer Seller.)