Junkyard Find: 1975 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Regency Luxury Coupe
The Oldsmobile 98 was available for most of the 20th century, and the average swank level remained quite high throughout. Of course, there was a certain element of Simu-Swank™ as Oldsmobile’s core buyer demographic became older and the Malaise Era ground on. We’ve seen a few Ninety-Eight Regency Junkyard Finds, including this ’84 Regency and this ’94 Regency Elite, and today we’re going to look at a plush mid-70s Regency with Whorehouse Red interior and 210-horsepower 455-cubic-inch engine.
I went to high school in the early 1980s, and at that time this car was the most punk-rock vehicle you could own. Fill the rear package shelf with red-paint-splattered doll heads, slap some Exploited stickers on the bumper, and you were ready to go.
Let’s check out some of the luxury features, such as this classy door-pull bracket.
No comment.
Back then, Oldsmobile drivers smoked all the time. Actually, just about everybody smoked all the time, and they smoked in places like elevators, supermarkets, offices, and hospitals. Because you didn’t want to have to reach for a lighter to fire up your next Pall Mall, the Ninety-Eight Regency had a lighter-equipped ashtray in each corner of the passenger compartment.
I think I’m going to go back and buy these cool strap/interior-light setups for my van.
Even though my experience with Detroit-made junkyard clocks tells me that this clock stopped forever at 5:42 AM on April 19th, 1977, I’m going to bring a battery pack to the yard and test this one. If it works (ha, ha!) I’ll add it to my car-clock collection.
Not only is there fake woodgrain on the dash, there’s fake woodgrain on the knobs!
They don’t make ’em like this anymore, which is probably a good thing. However, in spite of its faux-classiness and single-digit fuel economy, the Malaise Era Ninety-Eight was seriously comfortable for long highway drives. It was very quiet and had that floaty isolation from road harshness that octogenarians of a previous age came to expect as their right.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Yes, that is a Holley 2bbl. Could either be a 350 or 500CFM. Many people used the 500 model for racing on smaller displacement engines. This engine has a 4bbl manifold, someone obviously used and adapter to swap the holley on, but it's gone now. I know buick actually offered a 2bbl carb on the 455 at some point during the 70's, can't remember whether or not olds did.
@acuraandy, if your gran fury was the civilian version then it came from the factory with the A999, which was a 904 with a lower first gear to help acceleration with the tall axle ratio. Fleet and police M bodies mainly got the 727. I have two M bodies, an 82 Diplomat which was a detective car and an 85 5th Ave. The dippy has the 727, a double roller timing chain and windage tray, as well as trans and power steering coolers.