The 1971 Oldsmobile Toronado arguably represented the first time that General Motors executives panicked in response to weak sales from a car styled under head designer William Mitchell.
Whereas the first-generation Toronado was a remarkably bold design for the times, its successor represented a complete retreat. Pretty much everything about the 1966-70 Toronado’s styling was thrown away in favor of a fairly generic persona.
Bill McGuire (2023) has called the new design “distinctive.” I would be more inclined to agree with a wag who said the car “looks like an Eldorado with its dentures out” (shamwowj, 2023). Yet ads hilariously referred to the 1971 Toronado as “The Unmistakable One.”
Motor Trend uncritically reported Oldsmobile’s spin
Motor Trend reported that the similarity of the Toronado to the previous year’s Eldorado “was not an accident nor was it a money-saving ploy. The old Eldo was quite popular and people who buy Eldos tend to be quite firm in their opinions. Retaining a taste of Eldo in the Toronado opens the field to two types of customer. The ones who do not like the new design of the Eldo and did like the old, will be pleased with the Toronado. The Oldsmobile customer who couldn’t afford an Eldo but liked them, will now be able to possess the styling that they have been hankering after the past” (Brokaw, 1970; p. 70).
Let’s translate Oldsmobile’s p.r. spin that Motor Trend credulously repeated: The first-generation Toronado barely outsold the Eldorado despite a considerably lower price. So for 1971 Oldsmobile ditched pretty much everything about the car except for the name. This was an unusually panicked move by General Motors.
And that got me to thinking: Might there have been a way to boost the Toronado’s sales while salvaging more of its “brand DNA”?
Why throw the baby out with the bath water?
The 1971 Toronado illustrates how even General Motors was captured by an increasingly rigid design orthodoxy that all but required American luxury cars to adopt a boxy, formal styling that evoked the classic cars of the 1920s and 1930s.
What was the alternative? The 1983 Ford Thunderbird hints at a promising road not taken. That car sports a number of styling cues which align with the first-generation Toronado to a surprising degree. They include a strong lower-body crease, flared wheel openings, and a notchback roofline with more rake than was typical for a personal coupe of that era.
The Thunderbird’s sharply angled front end was arguably too esoteric for the early-70s, but the swept-back radiator grille suggests that a partial deviation from a broughamtastic fascia was plausible. The Toronado could have gone in any number of interesting directions that offered a suitably luxurious front while maintaining a measure of styling continuity with the past.
Instead, Toronado designers largely played it safe. They did add a few innovative details, such as high-mounted taillights and the elimination of a center-mounted grille. Alas, by 1974 a traditional grille was snuck back in.
Playing it safe didn’t lead to a sales breakthrough
GM management presumably argued that a more conservative design was needed to boost the Toronado’s sales. The first-generation models were the poorest selling of any premium-priced personal coupe, whereas the 1971-76 models outsold its corporate sibling, the Buick Riviera.
Even so, that wasn’t much of an achievement. The 1971-76 Riviera was a sales flop and the Toronado fell far behind the Thunderbird in market share before the latter was shifted in 1977 to compete with the mid-sized Monte Carlo.
The 1971 Toronado was another indicator that GM styling was losing its golden touch. In this case it may have been driven more by conservative management than Mitchell’s stylistic predilections, but it still represented an evolutionary wrong turn.
NOTES:
Market share was calculated from data published by the auto editors of Consumer Guide (2006), Gunnell (2002) and Flammang and Kowalke (1999).
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Auto editors of Consumer Guide; 2006. Encyclopedia of American Cars. Publications International, Lincolnwood, Ill.
- Brokaw, Jim; 1970. “Almost a limousine.” Motor Trend. November issue: pp. 67-71.
- Flammang, James M. and Ron Kowalke; 1999. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1976-1999. Third Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- Gunnell, John; 2002. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975. Revised 4th Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- McGuire, Bill; 2023. “Act II: The Second-Generation 1971 Oldsmobile Toronado.” Mac’s Motor City Garage. Posted Nov. 28.
- shamwowj; 2023. “1971 Oldsmobile Toronado.” Reddit. Posted one year ago.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES:
- oldcaradvertising.com:Â Oldsmobile Toronado (1971)
- oldcarbrochures.org: Ford Thunderbird (1983); Oldsmobile Toronado (1967, 1970, 1971)
I recall reading an interview with Oldsmobile General Manager John Beltz where he admitted that the resemblance of the 1971 Toronado to the previous generation Eldorado was no accident. The goal was to pick up customers who wanted an Eldorado but could not afford the real thing…along with some customers who didn’t like the 1971 model.
A sportier take on the second-generation Toronado may have made it look too much like a super-sized 1973 Cutlass S. If the Toronado had come across as a bigger Cutlass, that certainly would not have helped its sales. As it was, both generations of Cutlass – 1968-72 and 1973-77 – were better looking cars than their Toronado stablemate.
I never found this generation of Toronado to be particularly attractive. All of the large 1971-78 GM personal luxury coupes were too big, and the addition of 5-mph bumpers in 1973 gave them a bulky, tank-like look. The 1972-76 Ford Thunderbird wasn’t any better. The only entries in this class that really worked during the 1970s were the Lincoln Continental Mark IV and V.
I’m thus not sure that sportier styling could have saved it. The car was simply too big for its intended mission.
I agree that the 1971 Toronado was entirely too big. I suspect that designers got stuck with the big GM body because the mid-sized platform wouldn’t be redesigned for another two years. GM could have decided to eek out a few more years of production from the existing E-body, but under that scenario Oldsmobile would have still needed to decide how much to change the Toronado’s persona given the car’s low sales. The 1970 models’ weird donut bumper, exaggerated “clown pants” wheel openings and full fastback strike me as needing major changes.
How then to differentiate the Toronado? GM had so many car lines that even in the best of conditions it would have been difficult to consistently do so. The problem could get even more difficult if the bean counters insisted on too much part interchangeability or a design orthodoxy became too rigid.
For example, by the early-70s it seemed to be required of all American luxury coupes that they had an upright power dome hood with jutting fender blades and a boxy greenhouse. This was a significant shift from the second half of the 1960s, when there was quite a bit more stylistic diversity. The 1966-70 Riviera, Toronado and Eldorado were admirably differentiated for cars sharing the same platform. So too were the 1968-71 Thunderbird and Continental Mark III.
The 1971 Toronado epitomized how that design diversity vanished. Would more evolutionary styling have looked too much like a 1973 Cutlass S? I think that would have significantly depended on the quality of the execution (and might have plausibly been an advantage in the same vein as Mercury mimicking the higher-priced Lincoln’s styling). The production Toronado instead arguably looked too much like a Cutlass Supreme — or a Pontiac Grand Prix.
I had a high school classmate with a 73 Toronado in 1980 and 1981, and frankly it is one of my favorite luxury coupes of the era. The classmate hated the car and preferred the VW Beetle his mother later gave him to the Toronado.
My father replaced his 1970 Pontiac Bonneville with a 1971 Toronado. Like all 1971 and later G.M. full-size cars until the downsized 1977s, the cars were even more gas-guzzlers than the 1969-1970 full-size G.M. cars. The big gripe with all of the 1971 full-size G.M.s including the Toronado-Riviera-Eldorado triplets were the trunk-lid- louvred interior ventilation system standard on all G.M. cars except for the Corvette. My dad hated his 1971 Olds, so he replaced the Toronado with a 1972 Delta 88 Royal coupe, which he loved. The 1972 G.M. cars had the interior ventilation system completely re-engineered to do away with the drafty rear seats. (Apparently almost all G.M. dealers howled about the complaints from 1971 G.M. cars very early in the fall of 1970, so the fix was prioritized for 1972 model-year.) The 1972 Olds Delta weighted less than the 1971 Toronado, so it got marginally better gas mileage.
I genuinely believe that as the 1960s waned, G.M. was losing its grip in many areas: Too many models, too many shared market segments, too many variations, and Bill Mitchell was over-extended. Why the Fourteenth Floor did not have an impending sense of dread is beyond me. I understand why Oldsmobile wanted to keep the Toronado, but if I wanted to plot a new direction for Oldsmobile (and G.M.), introduce a complete line of front-wheel-drive cars for 1971 or 1972, from an Omega to a Cutlass to an 88-98 sedan to a sporty Toronado coupe. G.M. blew it !
The 1970 Cutlass Supreme was the smaller personal coupe that Olds needed. It sold well. Presumably Olds kept the standard Cutlass length and identity to leave room in the showroom for the more distinctive and expensive Toronado.
I agree with Scampman, but if the proposed bigger A-bodies for 1973 were too big in John Z. DeLorean’s eyes, what should have been bubbling over in the minds of G.M.’s designers is basing the new Riviera and Toronado on a Grand Prix / Monte Carlo platform front-drive variant with the “four-fendered Farkel” variant reserved for the Eldorado. (The test mules for the front-drives in 1964 were F-85s!) The wheelbases were not that different, but the Toronado belonged at the top of the model heap in 98 price territory. After all, the Toronado had replaced the 98 Starfire as Olds’ most expensive model.
Those Oldsmobile Tornados were huge cars even back then ! They were upscale luxury cars usually purchased by the wealthier class . It seems silly to compare a much smaller car to an Olda Tornado. The Ford Thunderbird doesn’t look anything like the Tornado . Remember an Oldsmobile is considered a luxury automobile and that’s the way it is ! Theres an age old saying , ” You can’t get a Cadillac for the price of a Chevrolet !”