1970 Buick Electra 225 Limited

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My Mom had a 1968 Electra 225. It was a great car. The seats on it were vinyl, but it had all the power stuff (full power as they called it back then). It rode very nicely, however on freeway cornering it had quite a bit of body roll. It had the air suspension for trailer pulling (RV). I think that had a lot to do with it.

When driving it, my Dad said you have to throw the anchor out when turning corners. It had the 455 2bbl carb in it and got around 12mpg/16mpg. If you had the 4bbl Rochester carb, I imagine it would be more like 10/14mpg.

The guy in the video stated that the a/c was pretty rare at the time. Actually on a car like this it would be expected. Auto a/c, based on my observation became very common in the 66-68 time period. By Frigidaire/Harrison, of course.
 
A440 . . .

The Pantera rescue vehicle story took place around '95, I can't recall exactly what year. Panteras are actually very nice and underrated GT cars. They ride well, are exceptionally stable and quiet at speed, plus as mentioned have plenty of trunk space. They just don't like traffic jambs in summer, but this can be fixed with an upgraded radiator and alternator and a modern gear-drive starter. That particular car had none of the fixes, which is why I worried a bit but luckily there were no traffic jambs on the 5 that day.

Seeing the mention of the '76 New Yorker reminds me of another story. One of my best friends in university was an arch-Porschephile named Michael. In '81 he was a senior and talked his wealthy father into buying him a used Porsche in lieu of a new Camaro or Mustang. That Porsche was an exceptional '73 911S, and when someone else ran into it and caused moderate damage Michael insisted that it be repaired by a certain shop with a long waiting list. Luckily for Michael his dad had just bought a new car and so Michael was able to use his old ’76 New Yorker Broughm coupe, white with a white vinyl top. Michael pretty much deplored the New Yorker, but then again he deplored American cars in general, with only Japanese cars being ranked below them in his mind.

One Monday morning we sat in art history class and chatted about our respective weekends. Michael had gone down to the Gulf of Mexico with friends, a 120 mile trip. On the way down very early in the morning he had followed a friend of his who owned a Datsun 280Z, a car Michael really, really hated. Our conversation went like this:

Michael: I can’t believe how fast my friend drives that Japanese piece of crap!

Me: How fast did he go?

Micheal: I clocked him at 120, can you believe it? He takes his life into his own hands with a car like that!

(I should add I had forgotten the Porsche was still in the shop)

Me: Well Michael, the 911 is a 140 mile per hour car, so why didn’t you just pass him?

Michael: Oh, it’s not fixed yet. I'm still driving the New Yorker.

Me: You were doing 120 down I-45 in the New Yorker???

Michael: Sure, do you think I was gonna let that Japanese piece of crap outrun me?

Me: Um, Micheal, how are the tires on the New Yorker . . . you’ve always said your dad buys cheap tires.

Michael: The tires? Oh, they’re great (he flashes a little smile) . . . JC Penney in the front, Fisk in the rear . . . but the whitewalls match!
 
The New Yorker handled well and was quite responsive for the

It didn't bounce and yaw like our Custom Cruiser on bendy roads. It still gave that feeling of cushy, floating comfort, but I never felt that I was going to lose control of that car. Though, the fastest I ever drove would have been 70 MPH tops. I would never have dared to drive it faster than that.

Talking cheap tyres - did they ever sell re-treads in the States? That's what I used to put on my 1977 Ford Falcon here in Oz. I left tread behind on a couple of occasions, which can be an unsettling experience.

I've attached a photo of a '77 Aussie Falcon. Mine was a midnight blue, four door, six cylinder, sports edition. A little less flash, no air slots or sun roof, than the one in the photo, but not too dissimilar. I bought it in 1982 and traded it in for a 1976 Ford LTD 4 years later. It was a good car and easy to repair. The only thing I didn't like about it was the big, black, square plastic dashboard - very unaesthetic.

 
Gas Mileage

Its funny, but mileage varied year by year, for instance,65 66 and 67 Oldsmobiles with the 425 engine would get 18 to 20 mpg on the highway, 68 69 and 70 models with the 455...about 8 to 12,mpg 71 and 72 models about 17 to 18, 73 and 74 models 10 if you were lucky, I had a 63 and a 65 and both would FLY! and get descent mileage the 63 was a Starfire, 394 cid with 345 hp, it would get about 18 on a road trip...this was in 55 mile per hour days,the 65 was a 98 Luxury Sedan it would get almost 20, usually about 18 or 19,my mothers cousin had a 66 98 they bought almost new and drove over 20 years and it always got 19 or so on a trip, her sister had a 68 and you did good to get 10 with it...go figure???
 
The Roady

As most of u know my 93 Roadmaster was totaled jan 25th. doin 80 on the interstate she got a incredible 26mpg god I miss my big baby girl rides better than my 02 Park Ave
 
Those old GM's----

The Buick of 1966 still had the 401 in it with 325 horses. From '67 to '69 the 430 with 360 horses and 1970 was the first year the 455 (7.5 liter) was used cranking out 370 horses. By '73 it was down to 225 horses with just about the same fuel-mileage----duh. And by '76 a lame 205 horses.

All of 'em were guzzlers, but hey, in those days (pre-'74) a gallon of Premium fuel was about 19 cents.
Brent, the old Jim Wallace station up off of Roswell Rd. used to have it even cheaper and I could get a pack of cigarettes for 25 cents.

It took a long time for GM to allow Buick a leather interior. The 1979 Riv had a leather option and the 1980 Park Avenue also had a leather option. Up until then it was a really nice cloth, or on later models that crushed velor or that ghastly vinyl. If you were a good enough customer (and knew the owner of the dealership well enough), you could custom-order a Cadillac leather interior (or nearly any other Cadillac option) at GREAT extra-cost.

I remember the '70 duece as being fast and nimble (on the straight-away) for such a heavy (approaching 5000lbs) car. They had great styling. (The commercial vehicles were also fast, however they were lead-sleds in a turn and the extra weight of their specialized bodies did not help. I won't even go into the braking issues some of them had.)
The early Buick 455's (and Cadillac's 472) had (IMO) poor sound muffling capability. The Oldsmobile 98's of that period had a much more refined engine/drivetrain. It wasn't until the 1974's that they finally made them fairly quiet and I'm sure the lack of horsepower had a lot to do with it.

Oh, and check-out this '69:

 
Brent.. not a lot to tell on the car. I only had it for about 3 years and sold it. I had about a 30 mi roundtrip to work and gas was getting expensive. I was only 19 when I bought that car new which seems kinda young but I really really really wanted a big boat and it was so gorgeous looking. Word was already out about the downsizing and it was my one and only chance. I wasn't rich by any means so in order to pay for it I was working two full time jobs and some weekends at a nightclub bussing and selling aromas, trinkets and trash in the coatcheck. LOL
You know I can't even remember what I paid for that car now. I'm thinkingg around $7 g Cdn but I could be waaay off. Anyways it wasn't cheap.
 
I could have sworn that my Mom's 68' had the 455 in it. Hmmm, maybe the memory is still fading. Some of those vinyl interiors of the time looked pretty nice, imho.

I always thought the GM had the nicest looking cars of that time period, with Ford having the nicer interiors.
 
Pantera

I remember lusting after that Pantera when it was new, and mentioning this to my dad. He came back with one of his trademark classic comments: "You don't drive that car, you wear it."
 
Check out this----

1970 Ninety-Eight Coupe.
It must have been a special order as it is strangely optioned. Standard two-way power seat, no cruise, no FM on the radio, no cornering lights. But it does have tilt and a tape-player.
Still, this is a bomb cream-puff.

 
As an eBay Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Great Stories and Great Links!

Man if money were no object I would love to have one of the beauties for sale from the links! Heck I would just love to drive one!

Brent
 
GM 455; horsepower rating change

Great thread!

Just to add a bit to the discussion on GM 455s:

Buick went from 430 cubes to 455 in the '70 model year.
Pontiac went from 428 cubes to 455 in '70 also.
Olds went from 425 cubes to 455 in '68. I always thought this was interesting since Buick was higher than Olds on the food chain. Incidentally all three 455 engines were very different with virtually no interchangeable parts. Back then each GM division certainly had its own identity.

On horsepower ratings:

In 1972 the US automakers switched from the inflated "gross" horsepower ratings to the much more accurate SAE net rating system. The new system was similar to the DIN system used by the Europeans where the engine was tested when tuned to factory specs with all accessories installed and functioning. The "gross" system had allowed for the fudging of numbers by running engines with no exhaust system, air cleaner and accessory drive belts along with tweaked ignition timing to get unrealistic numbers.

The massive drop in horsepower from 1971 to 1972 had more to do with that rating change than anything else. Here is an example: A 1971 Chevy 350 2 barrel with 8.5:1 compression was rated at 245 gross horsepower but virtually the same engine in 1972 was rated at 165 SAE net horsepower.

As the '70's went on the pollution control devices and even lower compression ratios did blunt performance and economy. Manufacturers tried to keep economy up by using very high (numerically low) axle ratios to keep cruising RPMs down. This made for a quiet highway car that had no bottom end performance. Cars also got heavier until the late '70's which compounded the problem. If you want a '70's car today 1972 was the last "good" year in my experience with regard to performance, driveability and economy before they got crazy with lots of patchwork fixes to pollution control.

Keep 'em on the road as long as you can!

Andrew S.
 
Andrew S.

Great observations. Wasn't it goofy how Chevrolet's biggest-block was a 454 (couldn't let them be even with the rest).In the pre-war years it was Cadillac that did GM's pioneering with the electric-starter, lights,and V-8, V-12 and V-16's engines, just to mention a few of their "firsts". Cadillacs won quite a few races back in the immediate post-war years and well up into the '50's.

For many years (post-war) Oldsmobile was considered the "test-bed" for high-performance engines in GM cars. (I can tell you the "bad-ass" of ambulances for many years was a Cotner/Bevington Olds. Ninety-Eight.) So it was not until much later that GM had any success in lining Buick up ahead of Olds. especially in the minds of the general public. Given the choice between the two, from '64 to '73 I would much rather have had a Ninety-Eight even though I think the Electras looked much more elegant in comparison. A '67-'68 Duece Coupe was sculpture in motion, IMO.
 
I know I'm dating myself, but I did my six hours of Driv

I did my Driver Training in 10th grade at a program offered at San Diego State University (the program trained college students working on an education credential who needed certification in Driver Training), rather than through my high school, which was the norm at the time.

Reason? They had openings (my high school had a wait list), the teachers were reasonably cool masters degree students instead of burned out old men, and they offered an optional additional two hours of manual transmission training after the mandatory six hours behind the wheel of an automatic.

Also, there were only two students per teacher/vehicle, and each session was two hours weekly. So we racked up the required six hours in six weeks, versus the high school program where you got 15-20 minutes once a week and it took an entire semester to accumulate six hours of behind the wheel time.

The automatic vehicle used during the first six weeks was a Buick Electra 225. Had an instructor's brake but no dual controls. What a tank!!! The other great thing about our program was that it was AT NIGHT (7-9 pm) so we learned to drive in the dark from Day One. Once you can handle a 225 Electra in the dark, you can handle anything, and driving a normal-sized car in daylight seemed like driving a go-kart (very simple).

I opted for the optional additional two hours of manual training and we used a Toyota Corolla 4-on-the-floor. Although my parents owned automatics, the first car I bought used was a manual---and every car I've owned since then has been an manual as well. It's a dying art in the USA, though, as fewer than 10% of cars sold are manuals.
 
likewise....

....when I took the behind-the-wheel driving exam for licensure, I didn't show up in my father's 387 Camaro. Duh. I brought mom's Buick 400 Sport Wagon (complete with glass roof----the photo below is very similar to mom's, including the fake wood, though mom never had alloy wheels or wide tires or a two-tone paint job---her's was light beige though...).

That way, the examiner didn't think I was a hot rodder but rather a good little boy who ran errands for mom in her station wagon. The neighborhood around the Department of Motor Vehicles in San Diego has a lot of steep hills---perfect for testing a candidate's parallel parking skills, and that's just what the inspector did with me.

I successfully parked between two cars on a steep uphill slope, but when I rolled the wheels into the curb, as is required in CA on steep hills, the back end of the wagon stuck out dangerously into traffic. I was about a foot away from the curb (legal), but the wagon was BIG and stuck out to where I was worried someone might clip the car.

I turned to the inspector and said, "Sir, I believe I am parked legally, but I don't think it's safe." He said, "well, what would you do if I wasn't in the car with you." "Re-do it, to get closer to the curb, so when I cramp the wheels to the curb, the tailgate doesn't stick out so much" "OK, go ahead and do it".

Not only did I earn full credit for that portion of the test, but he deleted one small error I made (left turn onto a six lane road with three lanes in each direction---although one may turn into any of the three lanes if safe, I chose the middle lane and remained in that lane after the turn, instead of moving to the right lane, which is the default lane you are supposed to use if the inspector doesn't tell you which lane to use---but the three lanes threw me off, I thought as long as I wasn't in the left lane I was ok) because "you showed you could recognize a potentially dangerous situation, which you corrected even though your first attempt was within legal limits".

passatdoc++2-28-2010-22-28-46.jpg
 
Engines . . .

Cadillac does indeed have an illustrious history, including the first production automotive engines using V8 and V16 layouts, but they're far from the first with a V12. Packard introduced their Twin Six in 1916, and produced V12 engines into the '30s. Caddy didn't make V12s until well into the '20s.

On the subject of Buick, it's worth noting that the old Buick "nailhead" V8 was replaced in '67 with a new modern family of big V8s. The nailhead came out in '53, and was famous for having particularly bad exhaust porting. It made good torque and was pretty good at pulling Roadmasters and Electras around, but it didn't breathe well at all. The new family of engines remedied this. They were available at various times in 400, 430, and 455 cubic inch sizes and are completely different from the nailhead 264/322/364/401/425 engines.

Of course no mention of postwar Buick engines would be complete without the aluminum 215 V8. Buick and Olds used it from '61 through '63 in the Special and F-85, respectively. Olds had their own version with slightly different heads, and famously turbocharged it in '63, which made it (along with the Corvair Spyder introduced the same year) the first production turbocharged car in the world. Pontiac also offered the 215 in the Tempest during the same period, but most Tempests of that era were fitted with their own huge inline 4, essentially half a Pontiac V8.

In '64 GM upsized the Special, F-85, and Tempest to become intermediates and dropped the 215 as being too costly to build - it was cheaper to install V8s from full size cars. Rover of England bought the tooling a couple of years later to replace an outdated F-head inline six in the old P5 bodyshell, and to offer an alternative to their own inline 4 in the smaller and more modern P6 bodyshell. An inline 6 wouldn't fit in the P6, so buying the 215 saved them the trouble of creating their own V6 or V8. In 1970 they introduced the first Range Rover, with the 215 as the only engine. This became the engine's most common application, keeping it in production until 2002. Quite a few English boutique sports car makers loved the aluminum V8, including Morgan and TVR. It was eventually enlarged to 4.6 liters by Rover, and all the way to 5 liters by TVR.

Ironically, the other engine Buick offered in the early '60s Special was discontinued by Buick and sold off as well, but also became an important and long-lived engine. This was the cast-iron 198/225 cubic inch V6, initially offered in '62 in an attempt to lower the base price of the Special (the most costly of all the American compacts). Buick designed this engine very quickly once it looked like Special sales were slower than expected in early '61. As such, it was designed to utilize existing V8 tooling and thus retained the 90 degree angle between the banks. This results in an "odd fire" engine that hits on three cylinders, then waits for a non-existant fourth, then hits on three again; essentially it's a V8 missing two cylinders. It was a rough and not very nice engine but it hung around Buick through '67 for those few customers who wanted a six cylinder Buick. After that year they sold the tooling to Kaiser Jeep to replace the old F head Jeep inline 4, and if you wanted a six in a Buick you got a Chevy inline six. Jeep offered the V6 for a couple of years. It was a good engine for the Jeep, but then Kaiser sold Jeep to American Motors. They promptly modified the Jeep to take their own inline six and mothballed the V6 again.

Then in '73 came the energy crises, and Buick realized the old V6 might give them a quick way to obtain a smaller engine of their own, instead of just buying more Chevy inline sixes. So they bought it back from American Motors and reinstalled the tooling back at their own factory. It was still a rough and nasty engine, but Buick went to work quickly to fix that. By mid '77 they had redesigned the crankshaft to make the engine balance as if it were a 60 degree design. They also successfully turbocharged it which allowed V8 performance with greater economy. By the 80's the V6 had developed into a commendably smooth and economical engine.

The real plus of the V6 for GM was in its packaging. The old Special wasn't long enough to fit an inline six, which is why Buick went the V6 route in the first place. The V6 proved ideal for GM's large and mid-sized front wheel drive cars, and was used by Olds, Pontiac, and Chevy in addition to Buick. It finally went out of production in late 2008, not bad for a cheap and dirty design job that was mothballed twice.
 

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