Video: For 1988, the Great American Road Belongs to Buick

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At GM’s oldest car division, the sales pitch for 1988 was “the great American road belongs to Buick.” Here’s what the brand had to offer that year.

 

The theme of this Buick campaign reminds us more than a little of a familiar Ford top line from a few decades earlier, “the American Road.” In fact. the address of Ford’s world headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, famously known as the Glass House,  continues to be One American Road to this day. But here General Motors’ oldest division added its own minor twist to the story line, declaring that “the great American road belongs to Buick.”

And just as with the Ford campaign from years earlier, here the strategy is image-building rather than straightforward product exposition. You’ll note that the focus is on Buick’s most glamorous models: the new two-seat Reatta, the personal-luxury Riviera, the redesigned front wheel-drive Regal. and the flagship Electra Park Avenue. Meanwhile, Buick’s more vanilla models—Skyhawk, Skylark, Estate Wagon, and the volume-leading Century and LeSabre—are not seen. Buick sales were actually slipping in ’88 at around 460,000 units, down from 650,000 the year before and a significant decline from 1985, a million-car year for the brand. Anyway, here’s Buick’s selling story for 1988.

 

 

7 thoughts on “Video: For 1988, the Great American Road Belongs to Buick”

  1. You can see the motorized seat belts in position over the empty passenger seat in the last shot. Everyone seemed to hate them but I had them in my 85 Cressida and they didn’t bother me.

  2. Truly the malaise period. The American automakers started down hill with the introduction of the first FWD, and with a few exceptions, have continued to turn out throw away vehicles that seldom last 10 years or more. I had a 84 Regal, drove and rode like you were on a cloud. Looked into an 89 or 90 FWD Regal, what a POS. Rode rough, ran rough, you could feel every crack in the road.

    When was the last time you saw one of these FWD GM cars on the highway? I still see the older RWD versions all the time. Really, Buick should have been given the funeral and Pontiac and Olds spared. They were much better cars.

  3. I continue to be surprised that GM and Ford, having been around since before most of their competition, have little idea how to run a car company. They didn’t understand the European import invasion of the 50s, nor the Japanese efforts in the 70s.

    Cadillac is finally starting to get some mojo with the Celestiq but Buick is almost a non-entity. Chevy is on track with the Corvette but that’s a niche car and they’re killing the Malibu. After 60 years, they’ve yet to build a small or mid-size car to compete with Honda & Toyota, something the Koreans were able to do fairly quickly. Ford is glued to trucks and the Mustang which isn’t great but at least they have a firm image. American manufacturers seem to have taken a bigger hit with the non-acceptance of EVs.

    I haven’t mentioned Chrysler because they’ve been lost since the 60s and have been in more hands than a dollar bill. The only company that seems to be doing OK is Tesla, who I never thought would last three years. I think their success has little to do with the actual cars they make. It’s my belief that within 10 years the Big Three will be the Big One.

  4. Thanks as always for the interesting piece. Coincidentally, I happened to note recently that by 1988 Oldsmobile had lost over 50% of its sales from 1985; I hadn’t realized Buick had too. Yikes.

    The elephant in the room had to be the Taurus/Sable, launched in fall ’85 for the ’86 model year. Besides selling extremely well itself, the T/S made painfully apparent that GM’s car lines were comparatively unimproved, uncompetitive, and maybe even obsolete.

    I reckon GM lost far more sales over time from the perception of inferiority exposed by the Taurus (and never really corrected) than the Taurus itself ever generated for Ford.

    Sorry for the digression / enjoyed the article. Thanks!

    • The Taurus was an absolute game changer including having an interior that didn’t look like a cheesy living room.

  6. I had a 1988 Delta 88 with the corporate V6. It soon became obvious that GM played tricks with the carb linkage geometry to give the impression of a lot more power on the initial tip-in than was really there. The initial surge really was all there was.
    You can only fool people for so long before the chickens come home to roost, but Detroit is still learning that lesson!

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