“Here is a marvelous high-speed touring car. Its comfortable ride and straight-as-a-die tracking on straightaways make it a very attractive vehicle for long-distance driving. Its front-wheel drive is also a great asset on wet, icy, or snow-covered roads, in loose sand or mud.
Handling and braking were our biggest disappointments in this car — hard to explain after five years’ development. The engine apparently is too heavy for the chassis to benefit from front-wheel drive in terms of cornering. Especially in low-speed maneuvering, the front end showed excessive plowing. The rear wheels locked up in the brake test. Going into a curve braking, rear wheel locking threatened to throw the car out of control.”
— Jan P. Norbye and Jim Dunne (1970, p. 36)
RE:SOURCES
- Norbye, Jan. P and Jim Dunne; 1969. “The ’70 Personal Cars Combine Luxury and Sportiness.” Popular Science. February issue: pp. 30-38.
ADVERTISEMENTS & BROCHURES
- wildaboutcarsonline.com (Automotive History Preservation Society): Oldsmobile Toronado (1970)
“Handling and braking were our biggest disappointments in this car — hard to explain after five years’ development.”
In fact, it’s extremely easy to explain. What enthusiasts regard as “disappointing handling” was TOTALLY DELIBERATE. What enthusiasts regard as “disappointing braking” was merely “good enough for Grandma, don’t spend any money making it better”.
Folks–including enthusiast-magazine writers/editors–seem to think that GM was incapable of engineering something better. This is not at all true. The massive understeer, and huge roll on cornering were intentional, and perhaps not the engineer’s first choice. But when The Boss and his lawyers say to make it roll and plow, you make it roll and plow. The “active safety” of a good-handling car was sacrificed for the appearance of safety–the predictable, familiar, excessive understeer.
We see the same stupidity now that lawyers instead of engineers are deciding where “new” tires go on a car that has two new tires and two used tires. The lawyers want the new tires on the rear, when anyone with a brain would put them on the front.
Corporate lawyers are pathologically terrified of oversteer; including what enthusiasts would refer to as “neutral” handling.
Take that Toro (or ElDorado) and add Polyurethane suspension bushings and more-sane alignment angles, you’d be surprised how nice it handles. Doing this the best way involves cutting and moving some suspension brackets. Easy enough to do when the frame is being welded together. Harder but not impossible when the car has already been built. But even adjusting the alignment within the existing frame mounting points can make a difference.
The aftermarket can solve the braking, and too-small-tires problems, too. All it takes is a heaping helping of dollars.
General Motors across the line should have introduced disc brakes for all 1966 cars and trucks, especially for the Toronado. After all, the engineering development took place in 1963-1964 and 1965 with F-85s and Olds 88s with stretched front sheet mental. Okay, give G.M. another year due to the need to develop how to proportion disc-drum combinations. Plus, why Olds and G.M. did not want to spring for radials like Michelin Xs, it is beyond me. For all of the great engineering that went into the
Toronado / 1967 Eldorado, the launch those cars with inferior brakes was a bad decision. My father had a ’66 Toronado test-cycle car in 1966, and while it was a beautiful car, especially in winter weather, it was not a car you could throw into a corner at high speed. It also stopped like a ’55 Buick without heavy duty brakes !
The results of this test are interesting. Oldsmobile added a brake proportioning valve to the 1967 Toronado as standard equipment, and then power front disc brakes became standard (finally!) for 1970. It is therefore perplexing as to why the car didn’t have better handling and braking by 1970.
The other thing that I remember from this test was that the 1970 Thunderbird was praised for its handling. Which was a surprise, as I’ve always thought that the 1967-71 models were regarded as wallowing barges even by the lower standards of the day. But apparently Ford made several changes to the suspension tuning of the 1969 models.