Today’s Buick wagon almost has it all: a two-way tailgate, eight-passenger seating, and a V8 under the hood for serene motoring. Let’s see what such an all-encompassing throwback might reasonably be worth. The seller of yesterday’s fairly rare explained in the ad that it suffered from a flywheel judder, something they claimed to be a common issue on the GTI.
Of course, that was using common in a derogatory fashion—in the same manner as is described the “common cold” or a “commonly held misconception.” That wasn’t the only strike the GTI faced, and at $4,900, those added up to a fairly common outcome: an 82 percent No Dice loss. According to the current count, there are around 7,220 different car and truck models sold globally, spread across 130 different brands.
That’s a lot, and it could be forgiven if some of those makers double-dipped or found themselves with some model overlap. That happened to Buick back in the mid 1980s while transitioning its big cars from an earlier RWD platform to the new hotness FWD design. All of the sedans and coupes made the switch, but with no estate planned for the new H-platform that took center stage in 1986, the longroof edition of the older RWD B-body had to soldier on for another half-decade.
Not only that, but at the time, the Estate was sold under both the Electra and LeSabre model names. Aside from grilles, badging, and some trim, it’s challenging to tell one from the other. We know this is a LeSabre because the ad.
