What the hell month is it? August? September? March? The wall calendar in the hallway at my office is still showing February and I’m hoping everyone leaves it there when they begin returning to the office in larger numbers. Then, in January, we can burn the damn thing. The calendar, I mean. Burn it right off the wall. Hopefully without also burning down the building.
It’s with this fury and indignation that I introduce you to what might be a rage-filled slog through the brand I’ve mostly avoided since I kicked off this series with the Chevy Cavalier. Get ready to trudge through the lamest American cars that ever America’d. Welcome to Lamest Classics’ GM Gauntlet. A series within a series. A tribute to the icon of rusting midwestern malaise.
I’ll get pummeled. You’ll get pummeled. We’ll all cry a little, laugh a little, cry some more.
“Mother nature’s in charge, so we’re just doing what we can with the window that we’re given,” said a spokesman for CalFire, the state’s fire authority. The agency said that, in all, nearly 350,000 acres have burned in Northern and Central California. https://t.co/6thPBsLfI5 pic.twitter.com/ilsGnqjapH
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 20, 2020
In the end, we’ll either come out stronger, better people, or we will be dead and/or on fire. Though the GM Gauntlet won’t continue for the whole rest of the year, the above edict goes for this series as well as for all of 2020.
Don’t blame me. This is just a case of art imitating life. Well, assuming anyone would consider this series “art” and not “infantile insults and esoteric car facts.”
Gladiator 1: The N-Body Cars
The hard part of covering GM cars is that there’s so much badge engineering. Under the surface, so many cars share the same wheezing powertrains, outdated transmissions, cheap switchgear, rattly doors, and lackluster build quality we came to know and love from The General in the ’90s.
So, is this installment about the last pre-refresh year of the Pontiac Grand Am? It was still in its barely-out-of-the-’80s glory, with Pontiac’s famous plastic body cladding to make it a bit less slab-sided. Slap on some BBS-imitation mesh wheels and the Radwood internet fanboys will drool on their own pants over this badge-engineered pile of underwhelming garbage.
What about the Oldsmobile Achiever Achieva with its Mercury-imitating electric shaver grille? A style so ugly that its advertisers preferred to show bar charts longer than the actual car? Even the thing that gave these cars the potential to be cool, the 190-horsepower Quad4 engine, was gone after 1994. Its SCCA World Challenge-winning days were over.
Surely the Buick Skylark, with its weird beak, doesn’t actually qualify as lame — for no reason other than the fact that holy crap, Buick made a car that looked weird. But who actually wants it? You know you’re on the right track when you find a car for sale that has photos of it already strapped to a dolly.
Lamest Motors
The only thing that made these cars even remotely interesting was the high-output Quad4 engine, especially in the Achieva SCX W41. Yeah, it’s absurd alphabet soup worthy of an imported luxury car, but it was legitimately impressive: 190 horsepower from 2.3 liters, 10:1 compression, a redline north of 7,000 rpm.
That engine, though, was used for only 3 years. The 180-horsepower version that was available on the non-W41 Achieva and Grand Am was detuned each year in the early ‘90s until it was eventually dropped for ‘95.
Nevermind that Quad4 is a silly name that means “four four.” For 1995, the only version of this once-interesting engine made just 150 horsepower and you could optionally upgrade the automatic transmission to a 4-speed.
Oh. And you could also get it with a crappy V6.
You Can’t Lose the Lamelympics in a Teal Grand Am
If you’ve seen a teal Pontiac, with cigarette burns on the seats, headliner drooping until it touches the driver’s frosted-tips haircut, smelling of some combination of coolant, cigarettes, bad weed, and cheap beer, then you know the Grand Am.
It’s the car for underachievers and pretenders. For tossing empties out the window while blasting Van Hagar as you bounce on blown shocks over partially snowed-over potholed country roads on your way to meet your dealer the next town over.
So forget the Achieva and Skylark. Be one of those people who say high school comprised the best years of their lives. Go get yourself a teal or maroon Grand Am sedan with an exhaust leak and rotted-out fenders. Slap some cheap, grey aftermarket hubcaps on your factory steelies. Blat that melancholic BWAAAA from your also-rotting muffler all the way to the DMV over in Dixon and tell them that hell yes, this thing is indeed a classic.
It not only does it qualify for Antique Vehicle plates, but it also deserves them.
The Pontiac Grand Am scores a perfect 10 on the Lamestain Index, partly for trying to pretend it’s interesting. The Achieva and Skylark get a 7 and a 4, respectively.
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