This letter is in response to our story, “1966 Oldsmobile Toronado: Just another shiny thing from General Motors.”
Your analysis is just flat wrong! Our next door neighbors bought a new Toronado in 1966. It was the deluxe model in a beautiful seafoam green color and not the base model like your pictures. Toronado was space aged, high tech, beautiful. Everything else looked old. The floor was flat inside. The speedometer rolled. It looked like a rocket. It burned rubber with the front wheels. It had ventless glass and hidden headlights. People compared it to a Cord. I was in awe. My father was envious. He bought a new 1966 Dodge Coronet wagon that year. Boring!
You seem to put today’s “sensibilities” against yesterday’s glories. There are no comparisons. I am from those times and the Toronado was spectacular. All of my friends thought so too.
— D. B.
Indie Auto invites your comments (see below) or letters to the editor (go here).
It’s hard not to apply modern sensibilities to designs of nearly 60 years ago. Oddly enough, it can work both ways. I’m 71, probably a bit older than the author. There was at the time a certain resistance to the excesses of Exner and Mitchell back then, and I was one of them. However, now I look back at these cars, perhaps through the veil of nostalgia, and I am stunned at their rococco beauty.
Welp, the primary point of my article was that GM wasted the potential of front-wheel drive on a big personal coupe. Car and Driver magazine said much the same thing . . . more than a half-century ago. This is hardly a new “sensibility.”
I thought I gave the car’s styling an even-handed assessment, e.g., I noted that it anticipated the fuselage look of the late-60s and early-70s. My main complaints were that it was a size too big and that the “lobster-arm” front fenders and overly tall pop-up headlights didn’t work very well.
D.B.’s letter strikes me as a classic example of how some people can have trouble stepping back and looking at a favorite car objectively. There’s nothing wrong with being enthralled with the Toronado’s styling. The 1966 model is indeed iconic. At the same time, we can still acknowledge that the 1966-70 Toronado 1) didn’t sell very well because it was too sporty looking at a time when the big personal coupe market was shifting to brougham and 2) was not the best use of front-wheel drive.