This 1986 Oldsmobile 98 Regency Was Certainly one of GM's First Fashionable, Full-Measurement, FWD Automobiles

I like the sealed beam headlight too

Just found your channel.
LOVE IT!!!!

My mom friend who was a pawn shop owner got a 1988 98 regency brougham in the early 1990's (for very cheap), it was mint and I was supposed to have it as my first car but it was t-boned going to the car wash 4 days before I had my drivers license.

LOL…. No offense or anything to the people that actually like this pos, but I was an Oldsmobile dealer technician in the 80's and these things had some of the dumbest and really terrible problems.
The windows fell of the track constantly and the window switches failed often.
The rear tire geometry creating horrible wear patterns was impossible to correct.
If you lived in cold climates, the rack and pinion would leak internally causing the steering assist to fail intermittently. I replaced several of them every week. (At first they had us rebuild them with a kit. lol… after that didn't work over the entire fleet, GM gave us complete new racks to install.
The weight distribution was SO bad that it felt like the roll center was a mile high. The torque steer was ridiculous.
Those stupid wheel covers were rarely quiet making a lot of squeaky noise. Vast amounts of time was spent trying to get them quiet.
The "rich" door panels?! And that stupid chime module….. lol Surely you jest.

My car was underated I would smoke most foreign cars in the day

I’d call it a shimmy.

I’m in upstate NY. This car is mint.

Absolutely agree with all. Some of the best cars GM ever made. My favorite is the Electra T type

Hello Adam, I found your channel a few weeks ago and have been eating everything up. Awesome stuff! It's been a pleasure watching you go through your collection and the designer interviews are fantastic! Bob Lutz too! Have to ask – do you have any knowledge or experience with the final Olds 98, the 1991-1996 generation? I just picked up a really nice 1996 98 and find the design fascinating. It's attributed to Chuck Jordan (wikipedia) but I have to think that many others were involved. Maybe Mr. Manoogian remembers? It's a really quite different design that does not share much with other contemporary GM cars, and seems to owe more to the full size sedans of the '60s than anything. Would be amazing to learn more about it from people who were there at GM design in the late '80s / early '90s. Thanks again for Bringin' Brougham Back (yeah).

imho, I don't care what all the people from the US say, but if I had to award any GM engine the award of best american engine, it would be the 3.8L-3800 range, it went from a solid V6 to an engine which even made the V8's look like chumps.

I would say most (if not all) domestic automobile engines over the years had offset gudgeon/piston pins which tends to reduce the piston rocking in the bore-and the attendant noise and wear that accompanies it. Offset pins didn't seem to help the early LS 5.7s and 5.3s as they sounded like a diesel during cold start thanks to piston slap. There has been talk over the years that reversing the pistons 180 degrees on the rods is worth a little power, but I've never seen a dyno or 1/8 mile test that definitively showed a measurable difference.

We had a 86 buick park avenue and a 89 Olds 98, both great cars.

Elegant

Had a 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciara with the 2.8 Multiport FE with the sluggish 3speed auto without overdrive. Blue paint and trunk luggage rack.
The transmission is what died on it. Otherwise the motor was peppy enough with that FE. Adam's right about the interior space. You get a feeling of roominess sitting in any of the seats .
I miss the comfort of a cushiony soft bench seat. Cars like this aren't supposed to be sports cars, they're made to be comfortable cruisers. I've always preferred the layout of the horizontal speedometer. Yeah, it takes up space, but small price to pay for style

I had an 86 Tornado with that engine & it ran extremely well.

Never understood this move by GM.
They were killed by the competition (demonstrated by the infamous commercial by Lincoln).
I always wished I could go back in time and ask the people who designed this car some questions, it seems clear that they didn't like cars.
I understand they were trying to hit some MPG goals. No excuse for this bland transport box, with a luxury name and price.

They should have kept this in the Delta/Lesabre class, and given the Regency/Electra/Deville a really nice update (on the OLD PROVEN PLATFORM).
They could have put the weakest engine in those big B bodies for MPG; the average big car luxury body didn't care. Often those cars made 150hp or less, but the gearing made low speed driving fine, and the highway speed limit was still 55 mph for 10 years (and never thought to go away, ever).

Then, they would have been perfectly stationed; if gas skyrocketed, easy to update the Delta/Lesabre up to a more luxury class.
If gas prices remained low, they could have continued to update the old platform for traditional customers (as they finally woke up and did with the Roadmaster and Custom Cruiser and Fleetwood rebadged and slightly modified Caprice platform).

This is the era when someone at GM said "we stopped designing our cars".
True.
They look like they are still in the box they came in.

Would have been great, roomy, conservative mid-priced cars, but under restyled (and UPpriced to keep the average fleet MPG number down) flagship B Body RWD models that could be built cheaply, and cancelled easily if needed.
Or expanded, if the fuel prices and economy allowed.
Like Ford did.

And I don't buy AT ALL that "these were to compete with Europe".
Nope.
Most European luxury cars were very sleek, rear wheel drive, and of much higher quality.
Ford hit this market very well with the Taurus family.

And in a very puzzling move for GM, they couldn't even replicate their own previous advantages, such as a completely flat floor like in their front wheel drive large cars from just 10 years earlier.

Hard to sell the advantages of FWD if you still have a "transmission" tunnel instead of the revolutionary completely flat floor. A few extra cubic feet of rarely used trunk space is not a fair trade for that feature that would have been a strong selling point (in a model with very few positive features for the typical target buyer).

This would have been better slotted as a "premium midsized" car in the Regal/Cutlass or Lesabre/Delta platforms.

Dumping proven, truly luxurious RWD, extravagant, V8, plush full sized cars was a HUGE mistake. Even if they were slow, or even V6 as was offered in the Lesabre B body, they gave a much better ride, isolation, and traditional body on frame rear wheel drive orientation and durability that most buyers knew/wanted.

These cars were part of the death shot that killed this entire division and drove GM to bankruptcy.

They can be as space efficient as can be, but that simply is not the main buyer incentive for most buyers, especially older, traditional near luxury car customers.

GM had the capital to cover all bases (like Ford did), and how they made such a huge mistake, not able to compete with either Ford nor the Europeans, they essentially made a car that appealed to no one but GM devoted bean counters who don't care about style.

And they could get 90% of the same car with almost identical looks for MUCH less in a Century of Cutlass Ciera, since most cars have 1 or 2 passenger the vast majority of the time, a large back seat doesn't compensate.
Especially when the cars look so similar. You have to give customers SOMETHING for their money, even if it is perceived value. These cars took away nearly all the perceived (and real) value of the previous models, and had the gall to be priced more than those superior models.

Cars without customers, that nearly killed one of America's biggest, most successful companies in a few short years.
Shame.

Honestly I wish I had a good thing to say about 1980s GM cars, especially these FWD automatic ones. I owned a couple of them back in the 80s and 90s and I have to say they are in my opinion the worst cars ever made. Cheap plies of junk that had no acceleration, no speed, handled like wet dog shit, the brakes were terribly undersized and brake fade was horrible, the build quality was terrible, and they rattled and squeaked. The transmissions were absolutely horrible, the paint peeled off in sheets, the bodies rusted out in a few years. They were a nightmare to work on (compared to 60s and 70s cars) There was literally not one good thing about these cars.

We bought an ‘06 Delta 88 new. Traded an ‘82 Trans Am with the 305 chevy engine. Salesman joked that the delta would outrun the TA. I think he was right 😀

My first car was an 86 delta 88. It was a phenomenal car. That 3800 was a truly bulletproof engine.

6:55 My wife would always bring a sweater or coat, in the summertime.
Because on long highway trips, I would turn the air conditioning to the coldest setting. To help, keep me alert.

A guy I worked for had the Royale with soft roof. My folks drove volvos so riding in this was like being in a Rolls for me!

16:16 OMG when this man opens the hood. The cleanliness is unreal. I have never seen a car of this age this clean!

I had an '87 that was red on red. My gf at the time got in it once and said "wow it's comfy" when she opened the door because I'd left it running with a Lorde CD playing at night. And she'd ridden in it before.

Cars like that with a fatass and FWD are fun on dirt and gravel. My 98 was kind of shitty, though.