Categories: Cars

Junkyard Find: 1991 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais with Manual Transmission

The General’s Oldsmobile Division reached a high-water mark of sorts for the 1991 model year, with 11 distinct models available. Out of all of those, the absolute cheapest was the base-model Cutlass Calais. Here’s one of those cars, found in a self-service boneyard in Albuquerque, New Mexico last week.

In 1991, if you wanted to lord it over your Chevrolet- and Pontiac-driving neighbors while standing proudly on the Oldsmobile rung of Alfred Sloan’s “Ladder of Success” (which retained something of an echo of its former relevance by that time) yet didn’t quite have the money for an automatic transmission, the entry-level Cutlass Calais with three pedals was the car for you.

The MSRP for both the two- and four-door 1991 Cutlass Calais was $10,295, which comes to about $24,131 in 2024 dollars. Chevrolet never offered an N-Body, but Pontiac did: the Grand Am, which started at $10,174 ($23,847 in today’s spondoolies).

A discussion of the model name for this car gets us into some fascinating GM branding history. Oldsmobile’s first Cutlass was a 1954 concept car named after the futuristic-looking but dangerously flawed Chance Vought F7U Cutlass naval fighter plane (Oldsmobile also swiped the names from the boondoggly Convair F-102 Delta Dagger and the obsolete-from-day-one Lockheed F-94 Starfire later on, because ~~aircraft manufacturers wouldn’t sue the most powerful corporation in America~~ those names were too cool to spend their lives stuck on bad airplanes).

Fast-forward to the the 1961 model year, when Oldsmobile used the Cutlass name to designate a sporty F-85 trim level. The Cutlass name grew in importance as the decade went on, with its marketing officially splitting off from the F-85’s for the 1966 model year (though the F-85 name hung around as the designation for the cheapest Olds A-Body trim level all the way through 1972).

Cutlass sales just got better and better during the 1970s. The Cutlass reached the top of the new-car sales charts for 1976, and it remained at or near that pinnacle for quite a few more years after that.

Obviously, the showroom magic of such a powerful name needed to be shared with other cars (see: the Toyota Corolla Tercel) and so every model year from 1982 through 1997 gave us Cutlass-badged cars built on multiple unrelated or distantly-related GM platforms. For 1991, there was the N-Body Cutlass Calais, the A-Body Cutlass Ciera/ Cruiser (the latter not to be confused with the same-year Custom Cruiser) and the W-Body Cutlass Supreme.

The Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais was just the Oldsmobile Calais for the 1982-1987 model years, taking over a name that GM used for the cheapest Cadillac models from 1966 through 1975. Australians could buy the Holden Commodore Calais from the middle 1980s all the way through the termination of Holden in 2020, while an Opel-badged version was sold in a few Asian markets.

Most Detroit car manufacturers naming cars after European places choose locations that have warm climates and/or lots of glamorous rich people (e.g., Monaco, Biarritz, Granada, Torino). Calais is neither warm nor particularly rich and it got comprehensively obliterated during World War II, but the name must have seemed exotic and classy by 1960s Michigan standards.

This being the base Cutlass Calais for 1991, it has Iron Duke power under its hood (no, I have never claimed that the Duke is one cylinder bank sawed off the Pontiac 301 V8, but even the staunchest Duke fanatic can’t deny that the Duke borrowed from the 301’s design in order to save GM a few bucks on tooling and components). This one is a throttle-body-injected version rated at 110 horsepower and 135 pound-feet.

I believe the Tech IV aka Tech-4 name was applied only to fuel-injected Dukes, but there’s probably an exception or two (because we’re talking about GM here).

This base five-speed manual transmission saved the car’s original buyer a hefty $540 on the optional three-speed automatic. That’s about $1,266 after inflation.

However, that savings was eaten up by the cost of the optional air conditioning, which was $805 ($1,887 now). Priorities! At least the Delco AM/FM radio (with extra-chintzy-looking cassette-door block-off plate) came standard.

Only 88,521 miles at the end. The highest-mile Oldsmobile I’ve ever found in a car graveyard was a 1986 Calais with 363,033 miles, by the way.

It ends its career parked next to its Pontiac-badged sibling, a 1988 Grand Am with Iron Duke power and a luxurious automatic transmission.

1991 was the last year for the Cutlass Calais, after which it was replaced by the Achieva.

Judging from the papers I found inside the car, it hadn’t been used since the early 2000s. That explains the low miles.

With New Mexico checked off the list I have now documented discarded vehicles in the junkyards of 17 U.S. states. I’ve been to Texas junkyards but didn’t shoot photos, so I think I’ll need to do the 433-mile drive from Denver to Amarillo soon.

They were dealin’ these cars in Pennsylvania at the end.

1991 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera in New Mexico junkyard.

[Images: The Author]

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Source: The Truth About Cars

WBN