At first, I was going to do another installment of Glorious Garbage about this car, but upon closer inspection I realized that, no, this thing really isn’t garbage at all. The car is the 1973 Hurst Oldsmobile, and, I have to say, considering the deep-Malaise Era-timeframe it comes from, it’s still a pretty potent and fast machine. Oldsmobile’s muscle cars were somewhat unique among muscle cars in that they tended to be a bit more mature and premium than your average Camaro or Mustang, a sort of musco-luxo/gentleperson’s hot rod sort of thing, and the Hurst Olds was a great example of this.
The 1973 edition – all this was first brought to my attention by The Bishop, by the way – also had a really interesting first, the sort of thing that is ubiquitous now, but it’s interesting to see what seems to be its origin. It also has a detail that I find absolutely baffling, so we’ll talk about that, too.
The 1973 Hurst/Olds was now on the new GM A-body, the “colonnade” body style, specifically the Oldsmobile Cutlass, and came in two color schemes for the first time in the Hurst/Olds history, the traditional black with gold stripes and now a “Cameo White” option, still with gold stripes. These cars had big chrome exhausts like a muscle car, but also had opera windows and a half-vinyl roof like ’70 luxury royalty demanded.
The front bucket seat even swiveled, in case you were too good to get in and out of a car like all those other filthy heathens out there:
Performance-wise, the ’73 Hurst Olds had one engine option, a 455 cubic inch/7.5-liter V8 making 270 horsepower – kind of meager for the displacement by today’s standards, but fantastic for 1973. Oh, unless you wanted air conditioning, then you lost 20 horses. That’s what you get for being too good to sweat!
The Hurst/Olds also came with an interesting shifter, the Hurst Dual Gate Shifter, which we once wrote about before because of that shifter’s weirdly misogynistic origins:
…of course, in the Hurst/Olds it was just called the Dual Gate shifter, none of that “his and hers” bullshit anymore. Because you could –sort of – shift through the gears on your own, a tachometer sure would be handy, and this is where the ’73 Hurst/Old’s notable first comes into play: it had what I believe to be the first electronic digital tachometer ever.
Actually, it’s likely the first electronic digital car dashboard instrument ever, and that’s even if we’re generous and call clocks an instrument, a chronometer, I guess, but electronic digital clocks didn’t really start to appear on dashboards until around 1978.
And by digital, I mean real digital, as in computer digital, not gears and cams and analogue doohickies moving drums with numbers on them behind a faceplate. This tachometer is all-digital inside, and even contains an actual integrated circuit, from MOS:
Is this also the first time an actual integrated circuit – that white “chip” you see on the right there – was used to run a component of a car’s dashboard? I think it could also be the first use of a seven-segment digital numeric display – in this case a Sperry SP-352 neon display, not an LED or a VFD display.
Now, the Hurst-supplied Digital Tachometer was bolted onto that dashboard and was optional, but it was available from the factory, so I think this counts for the ’73 Hurst/Olds having the first truly digital, computerized instrument. It even had a bit of memory, where it stores the highest RPM recorded, and you could push one of those buttons to see it, letting you know if your pal you loaned the car to redlined it even after you told him to take it easy, Larry.
This may seem like a little thing, but considering all cars now seem to have huge digital displays that show and control everything, I’d say this first digital display is pretty seminal. From those humble two red blocky digits came the sea of full-color, high resolution dashboard displays. This is where it started.
Okay, that’s the good part. Now let’s get to the baffling part.
So, there’s this part in the ’73 Hurst/Olds brochure, talking about the car’s distinctive hood vents:
See that? Nassau Hood Duct. What the hell is a Nassau Hood Duct? I’ve searched all over the internet, but it only seems to come up in the context of these Hurst/Olds ads:
That’s it. No one else talks about whatever the fuck a “Nassau” duct is. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the lovely capitol of the Bahamas, either. And it’s not even real on the car; it’s just a bunch of raised louvers glued onto the hood; if you look under the hood, as you can see in this screengrab from a YouTube video, you can see there’s no holes in that hood at all:
They’re fakes.
The fake vents themselves look like they’re meant to be engine heat exhaust louvers, providing the air that enters the radiator a nice convenient exit through the hood, or at least, that’s what they would do if they were actually real.
So far, the only theory the Bishop and I have come up with is that maybe, just maybe someone at Oldsmobile called these NACA ducts, because NACA ducts (which stands for National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the pre-cursor to what became NASA) were a well-known sort of duct used on racing cars and aircraft.
The problem is NACA ducts look nothing like the”Nassau” ducts. Look:
They are nothing alike. At all! In fact, NACA ducts are for low-drag air intake; whatever the hell Nassau ducts are supposed to be, the one thing we can tell is that they’re for air exhaust, because they’re facing backwards. Nassau ducts, as seen in their lone example on the hood of the ’73 Hurst/Olds, really couldn’t be further from NACA ducts.
So, I’m baffled. Did someone at Oldsmobile just make it up for marketing purposes, like Rich Corinthian Leather? That was also in 1973. Was that just the year that carmakers decided to make up weird, exotic-sounding names?
Oldsmobile is gone, and I think anyone associated with Nassau ducts are likely gone, too. I’ll reach out to GM, but I’m not holding my breath, like I would be forced to do were my nostrils Nassau Ducts.
Still, having one impressive first and one strange mystery on the same car is something, so let’s hear it for the ’73 Hurst/Olds!
UPDATE:Â So, we have a good theory, seen in the comments (by Fire Ball, who seems to have been the first to note this connection!) and in this tweet:
Ah, see, if @JasonTorchinsky was as old as me, he would know where Nassau vents came from. Older hotrod/GM styling feature you'd see most prominently used on racers at the Nassau Speed Weeks. Think of stuff like Grand Sport Corvettes and Chaparrals. https://t.co/rvkvtRQ6bA
— Tony Borroz (@TonyBorroz) October 12, 2024
Nassau Speed Weeks! Chaparrals I do feel like had louvers like these, now that I think about it? Let’s look:
Holy crap, look at that. This 1965 Chaparral 2A is covered in those types of louvers! That has to be it! Thank you!
I wouldn’t consider 1973 deep malaise era. Some say 1973 was the beginning, I typically go with 1971 when compression ratios began dropping across the board.
Deep malaise would have been somewhere around 1977 when cars like the 442 could be had with a brutally low horsepower 260 V8. (At least you could get a 5 speed behind it!)
If transmission technology had for some reason never advanced since the time of the ’73 Hurst Olds, I’d advertise that transmission as having Stop & Go and GO GO GO! modes these days.
At the risk of sounding picky, the (much appreciated, BTW) article suggests that the Cameo White and gold color scheme was the “new” H/O scheme, when…that is actually the “traditional” scheme, while the black with gold (very sexy, BTW) was the new kid on the color block.
‘67 and ‘68 GTOs had the two-sided Hurst shifter for automatics.
My junior high gym teacher had one would have been nearly new. Only interesting car in the teachers parking lot with the exception of the science teachers black 73 C10 stepside with aluminum slot mag wheels.
My high school calculus teacher drove a bright red, new (at the time) 1996 Toyota Supra. It was a non-turbo and automatic, but pretty awesome for a calc teacher!
My favorite teacher car was the white Thunderbird Turbo Coupe my 3rd grade teacher drove. I thought it was the coolest.
My Aunt had a 1976 Monte Carlo with those swivel seats. When she was pregnant, shoe loved those. It was the first time I had ever seen them.