GM Once Took A Blocky Boring Oldsmobile And Turned It Into An Underrated Muscle Car

Most of GM’s front-wheel-drive cars from the early 1990s are not fondly remembered. There are few people lining up to collect old Chevrolet Cavaliers, and I might be one of the only people who remembers the Corsica fondly. The Oldsmobile Calais was another one of these cars, but before it bowed out, GM did something special. The Oldsmobile Calais Quad 442 W-41 took an old name and slapped it on a seriously quick souped-up blocky car that remains deeply underrated today. How fast are we talking? It was even faster than the original muscle car it got its name from.

The late 1970s and the early 1980s were not kind to America’s automakers. As CNN wrote in 1992, imports were flooding the market and the Big Three struggled to compete. Sure, each automaker fired something off in hopes of capturing interest, but Detroit was losing more and more buyers to Japan and Europe. Young professionals, a demographic that had money back then, flocked to the likes of BMW and Honda rather than Chrysler or Cadillac.

In 1981, Detroit had enough of this and got Japan to agree to voluntarily cap car exports to America to 1981. As CNN wrote, this didn’t have the intended effect. America’s automakers thought the restraint agreement would limit demand for Japan’s cars when in reality all it did was limit supply. Perhaps even worse, CNN writes, America’s automakers decided to invest money in other places instead of using the restraint agreement to shore up their core products.

That’s not to say that the automakers didn’t at least try to compete. In 1982, GM launched an ambitious effort called the GM-10 program. One of GM’s plans to fight imports was spending $7 billion to replace the Chevrolet Celebrity, Pontiac 6000, Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, and Buick Century using a single adaptable platform.

At the same time, GM wasn’t putting all of its eggs into the GM-10 basket. Also announced in 1982 was the Oldsmobile Division Lansing production facilities were moving away from producing Oldsmobile Delta 88, 98, and Cutlass Supreme. In their place would be a state-of-the-art production program for a snazzy new car GM was calling the GM-20, the underlying platform for a set of smaller cars. Oldsmobile wasn’t just going to build its own cars, but for the first time in its history, its facilities were about to build cars for other GM divisions, too.

Pretty much all of the GM-20 cars, also known as the N-body, would be utterly forgettable. But there’s an exception, and it’s a quick one.

GM Fights Imports With Technology

The GM-20 program had one core mission: To take market share back from the imports. GM launched an ambitious effort to achieve this by leaning harder on advanced technology than before.

While the GM-20 cars themselves were largely unremarkable, the way they were produced was novel for GM at the time. As the Washington Post wrote in 1984, General Motors spent $250 million alone on converting and updating its plants to stop producing the GM X platform cars and start producing the N-bodies.

Where was this money going? A lot of it was sunk into automation, where the Oldsmobile and Fisher-Lansing plants would attain 219 welding and painting robots. At the time that was a big deal because no other GM operation had that many robots assembling cars. GM didn’t stop there, the robots were complemented with 185 automated guided vehicles, which automatically moved parts around the facilities without any human driver input. The guided vehicles meant that most human-operated forklifts were no longer needed.

GM put even more robots in charge of racking door panels, attaching VINs, and fitting engine serpentine belts, tasks that were once reserved for humans. Eight more welding robots were used to place 64 welds in each N-body’s unibody.

All of this was implemented in an effort to achieve a level of quality not seen before. Having robots do the welding meant fewer chances for the mistakes humans would make. And to make sure the work was done properly, giant scanners were installed at the plant that looked the cars over as they went down the line, checking to see if the actual cars came close enough to matching the tens of thousands of measurements and dimensions stored in the scanner’s memory. Computers even handled some of the final quality checks that, once again, humans handled in the past.

GM also designed the GM-20 program so that the vehicles would largely be assembled in one place. The Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadiliac (BOC) stamping plant made all of the major metal parts before sending them to the plant next door for body paint, trim, and assembly. Once that’s done, the cars are shipped less than two miles down the road to be finished. GM believed that if the cars were started and finished in largely the same place the quality would be higher. The GM-20’s production process was novel for GM at the time and followed similar ideas to Just-ln-Time strategy that’s common today.

Unfortunately, the GM-20 program also displayed the darker side of technology. The Washington Post noted that GM laid off 4,400 workers and that the heavy automation meant those people might not have had jobs to return back to. It appeared that to GM, the ends justified the means, from the Washington Post:

The union members “are aware that automation may cost some jobs. But, for the long run, they understand that that’s the way we have to go in order to be competitive,” said James C. Rucker Jr., Oldsmobile’s director of product, strategic and business planning and the division’s GM20 program manager.

Automation was seen as a necessary evil not just to dramatically improve the cars coming out of Michigan, but to also reduce costs. The automakers continued to try to limit the imports from Japan, but they knew that without competitive cars the Japanese cars that did make it to America were going to beat Detroit up and do so with cheaper prices.

The publication goes on to note another reason why America’s automakers were embracing automation. Reportedly, America’s major automakers paid somewhere around $80 billion in overtime between 1980 and 1984. Robots don’t collect a paycheck or overtime. The numbers also suggested that robots even built cars faster than humans did.

GM’s Best Small Car Of The Early 1990s?

All of this work went into creating the N-body cars, a platform meant to replace the X-bodies that came before, which had been front-wheel-drive for about six years by that point. The N-body cars employed tactics GM used on its smaller cars. These vehicles rode on unibodies and were propelled with smaller, more fuel-efficient engines. The suspension was also nice, but not particularly impressive with MacPherson struts up front and a twist-beam axle with trailing arms bringing up the rear.

As Curbside Classic notes, the market positioning of the N-bodies was also pretty weird. Initially, the GM-20s shipped as the Pontiac Grand Am, Oldsmobile Calais, and Buick Somerset coupes. These vehicles were placed higher up than GM’s J-cars but below the A-cars. The N-bodies were compacts for a future of expensive fuel and GM believed these cars would draw buyers away from European and Japanese imports.

In brochures, Pontiac touted its Grand Am by talking up the ribbed plastic cladding, the vehicle’s aerodynamic design, and flush windows. Oldsmobile’s marketing went for a rad jukebox sort of vibe and touted the Calais as the choice for the buyer concerned with quality and style. The brochure for the 1985 model really rams the word “quality” down your throat, perhaps echoing GM’s hundreds of millions in investment to make the GM-20 cars good enough that you’ll forget about the broken-when-new hoopties of the late 1970s.

Oldsmobile touted such luxuries as multi-coat paint, velour, bucket seats with lumbar support, and a passenger seat that slides forward for easy entry into the back seat. Oldsmobile then spent an entire page explaining the same robot production process I wrote about above. No matter the version of N-body car you read about, mentions of quality and style came up often. Performance sort of took a backseat here, with Oldsmobile mentioning the fuel-injected engines and rack and pinion steering almost in passing, like it was a box to be checked while writing the brochure.

The N-bodies released in 1985 and you can watch the legendary John Davis of MotorWeek take the Calais for a spin:

Davis notes that the Calais was styled to align with the rest of the Oldsmobile lineup and its suspension was harder than expected, but hardly harsh. The upshot of this was that the Calais cornered largely flat with predictable understeer. Unfortunately, GM didn’t bake a ton of maneuverability into the chassis and the car had a wide turn diameter of 36 feet.

The base engine was a Pontiac 2.5-liter four of Iron Duke origin, but now called the Tech IV. It made 92 HP and 132 lb-ft of torque. At launch, the hot engine was the 3.0-liter Buick V6, which made 120 HP and 150 lb-ft of torque. The hotter engine got the Calais to 60 mph in 11.4 seconds and did the quarter mile in 18.2 seconds. Davis noted that these numbers were above average for a non-performance car. You even got up to 26 mpg with the V6. Unfortunately, getting the hotter launch engine meant you couldn’t get a manual transmission.

Davis liked how the Calais interior was sporty and well thought-out. But then he got to the parking brake, where the MotorWeek team noticed you couldn’t pull up the parking brake without bumping into and opening the center console. Ah, GM. Davis noted that Pontiac and Buick got around this problem with a smaller console or no console at all. Davis was also impressed with how quiet these cars were for just the price of $8,500 and concluded with high praise, saying the N-car was “[T]he best executed small car yet from General Motors.”

Later, sedans would follow the coupes and in 1988, Oldsmobile launched its innovative 2.3-liter Quad 4 engine in the Calais. The four-cylinder Quad 4, which featured four valves per cylinder, a “direct-fire” distributor-free ignition system, and some aluminum parts, initially embarrassed the 3.0 V6 with 150 HP and 160 lb-ft of torque out of the gate. Then, Oldsmobile kept adding more power, making the Calais incrementally hotter.

Compact Hot Rod

As the story goes, Oldsmobile always had higher ambitions for the Quad 4. Oldsmobile saw the engine producing 200 HP or more by way of turbocharging and MotorWeek even got to test a prototype Quad 4 turbo in an Oldsmobile 98. The Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme that was the pace car for the 1988 Indianapolis 500 was a one-off open roof car that had a boosted Quad 4 making 250 HP.

Sadly, the turbo Quad 4 never went into production, but Oldsmobile was pretty obsessed with beating land speed records with Quad 4-equipped Aerotech cars. Oldsmobile partnered with two outside firms to tune the Aerotech cars, Batten Heads of Michigan and Feuling Engineering of California. The folks at Batten upgraded the Quad 4’s block, cylinder head, fuel injection, sump, and more before adding a Garrett turbo to reach an impressive 900 HP.

Feuling went even further. This firm’s engine went all-aluminum like Batten’s did, but Feuling figured out how to turn up the taps more, getting the engine to churn out 1,000 HP. Really, these engines were basically Quad 4s in name only. Hot Rod Magazine even admits that this engine technology wasn’t going to trickle down to grassroots racing, but maybe one day you’d see stuff like this in racers. At any rate, this engine helped pilot an Aerotech to a speed of 257.123 mph in 1987.

Oldsmobile’s goals for the Quad 4 went even further from there. There were reportedly plans for a V8 based on the Quad 4 and Oldsmobile even began building custom Quad 4-powered Calais for SCCA competition. However, the SCCA reportedly wasn’t fond that the Quad 4 SCCA cars weren’t running on production engines, so Oldsmobile responded by selling a roadgoing version.

But what do you call a factory hot rod? For that, Oldsmobile reached into its bag of names and pulled out the 442, the car that was born in 1964 as Oldsmobile’s answer to the Pontiac GTO and died a sad death after 1987 after only slightly spicing up the G-body Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.

Reviving the 442 name to slap onto a compact front-wheel-drive car was a controversial decision, but this time, the car was hot enough to make a solid case. The new 442 launched in 1990. The Calais itself would end production after 1991, so these 442s ended up sending the Calais out with dignity and style.

The Oldsmobile Calais Quad 442 utilized a High Output version of the Quad 4 that was good for a healthy 180 HP. The base version of this car, the Calais Quad 442 W-40, was a nod back to the old 442 muscle car’s W-30 package. And that name? The original meaning from back in 1964 was four-barrel carburetor, four-speed manual transmission, and dual exhausts. Of course, Oldsmobile couldn’t copy that with the new car, so now “442” meant four-cylinder engine, four valves per cylinder, and two camshafts.

The Calais Quad 442 W-40’s H.O. Quad 4 made 180 HP and 160 lb-ft of torque by way of hotter cams. Oldsmobile also paired it with a five-speed manual sport ratio transmission, the FE3 suspension tuning package, variable effort steering, a leather steering wheel, alloy wheels, wider tires, a spoiler, and full instruments. The Quad 442 didn’t bring much in the way of style, as the major changes included blacked-out trim and small gold stripes plus the aforementioned wing and wheels. In a way, the Quad 442 was a sleeper. It looked like your dad’s Oldsmobile, but it wasn’t.

The Calais Quad 442 W-40 was a rare homologation special. Yet, even rarer was the W-41 package, which came and went in 1991. Torque stayed the same, but Oldsmobile’s engineers found another 10 HP to squeeze out of the Quad 4, making the W-41 good for 190 HP. If you bought the racing-only version, you got a healthy 240 HP with help from a forged crankshaft and titanium connecting rods but had to sacrifice the air-conditioner.

How was the Quad 442 received? The Orlando Sentinel described Motor Trend‘s road test:

The drama for the dollar afforded by the Calais Quad 442 is evident in a recent “Bang for the Buck” test conducted by Motor Trend. The magazine tested the performance of 17 cars in several categories, then divided the performance points each received into their asking prices. The humble, normally aspirated Calais Quad 442 placed third in a field dominated by more expensive, high-performance cars, many of them equipped with turbochargers and superchargers.

Certainly this reworked, $11,000, front-drive family compact wasn’t going to beat all-out sports cars like the Chevrolet Corvette and Mazda RX-7 Turbo II in events like the 0-to-60 dash and the slalom. But it was interesting to see how well it did.

It finished in the middle of the pack in the slalom, and its rapid time of 7.59 seconds in the 0-to-60 wars was better than the Mitsubishi Starion, the supercharged Toyota MR2, the turbocharged Toyota Celica All-Trac and the V-8-powered Chevy Camaro IROC-Z convertible.

Motor Trend found out that the Quad 442 out-handled the Chevy Camaro, Eagle Talon AWD, Ford Mustang, and the Toyota MR-2. Oh, and that 60 mph acceleration time? That’s just as fast as the old 1964 4-4-2 muscle car that Motor Trend tested in 1964. By all accounts, it appeared as if Oldsmobile turned its boring compact into a muscle car.

Unfortunately, not all was well. Despite the speed, Motor Trend didn’t think the car was that fun to drive. The car also had a tendency for understeer and the FE3 suspension couldn’t stop excessive body roll. I suppose in a way the Quad 442 was like a muscle car in more ways than one.

Nobody Bought Them

Still, the Quad 442 was properly quick for its day. Sadly, it was also expensive. A 1991 Oldsmobile Calais Quad 442 ran you $13,216 ($30,994 today). That was a bit of a problem. If you spent around $500 more, or about $13,756 ($32,260 today), you got a Ford Mustang LX with a 5.0-liter V8. Sure, the Quad 442 handled better, but the Mustang had more power, more torque, and weighed close enough to the Quad 442’s 2,518 pounds.

On the other hand, the Quad 442 was thousands less than an equivalent import while sometimes making more power. On a third hand, pretty much all of the Quad 442’s competitors weren’t getting by on an old platform and a design that was solidly stuck in the 1980s.

In theory, the Quad 442 could still have been a winner. In practice, few latched onto the Quad 442. Some 3,789 W-40s were sold between 1990 and 1991 while somewhere between 200 and 241 W-41s went home only in 1991.

This is also another case of a rare car not equaling value. One of the last W-41s to show up for sale went for an embarrassingly low $3,400. Archived ads suggest these cars rarely even touch $10,000 when they sell. Normally, this would be material for an Unholy Fail. However, I think this one is different.

The Quad 442 wasn’t built to sell well. It was built specifically to satisfy racing bodies and to show that Oldsmobile was cutting edge. In this case, I think time heals a lot of wounds. This car is no longer competing with anyone and is nowhere near that original price. If you can find one of these things for sale, it sounds like you’ll get one of GM’s coolest cars of the early 1990s and it won’t even break the bank to buy it. It might even be a talking point at car shows. Sure, it’s worthless, but that just means you can enjoy it even more.

(Images: GM, unless otherwise noted.)