Best and Worst GM cars of the 90s

Best and Worst GM cars of the 90s

Transcript

- What about the '90s? I don't have any-- all my experience with GM cars was like '80s and then now since I've started driving them for work. I don't have any experience in 1990s GMs.

- I think the '90s were a great era for GM, especially in terms of design. If you look at the cars, you're like, it's hard to see how they in any way competed with the, like, a Camry, or Accords, like those things just because like they were always like a different size. They were just going for different stuff.

I would have hated to do a comparison test then because it would have-- or maybe it would have been interesting. I don't know. But I'm going to say for the best was the Oldsmobile Aurora because, yes, I do have a model of this thing.

- Wow.

- Yeah, from the Indy 500. I lived in Indianapolis at that time. My father owned this car. It was pretty much because I begged and pleaded him to get one because I thought it was the coolest damn thing.

It was new. It was different. It was futuristic, and it was an attempt, albeit ultimately a fleeting one, to actually make Oldsmobile unique and coherent because if you look at what they were selling just two years before, it is like just the pulling off-the-shelf, badge engineering stuff.

They were all over the place. And this kind of signaled that it was going to be new. I mean, it didn't even have Oldsmobile written on the car except for the radio faceplate. But besides having like the ultimate, like, melting, stoked, super '90s look to it, I still think it looks neat.

- [LAUGHS]

- And maybe I'm just so a child of the '90s that I'm just indoctrinated, but I still think it looks great. The interior was really cool. Like, it wrapped around the driver to an absurd degree. Like, the passenger control for the-- the passenger had their own temperature control on the door because everything was just moved over away from them.

It's not quite like a C8 Corvette, but it was kind of close, just a lot of really cool, unique things in that car that weren't spread around. It was most related to the Buick Riviera at the time, which was also kind of neat. But it wasn't in any way like a four-liter Northstar V8.

It had a lot of power, front-wheel drive, so, yeah. But yeah, it's comfortable. I sat in the backseat a lot in that car going on family vacations down to Florida. And my dad, I think to this day, says it's his favorite car he's ever had. And it looked great--

- Wow.

- It look great in purple, which he had. It was like the color of wine. It was beautiful. They had two purple colors. They had a purple one, and then they had like a burgundy, gorgeous, gold package too. And on that car, there was--

- Oh, man.

- --there was only the badge and the word "Aurora" on the back.

- Great.

- So it wasn't like a Lexus. It was actually kind of complimentary, so, yeah. That's mine. That's the best because I have the model.

- What's the worst?

- So I'm going to go with the Oldsmobile Ciera because it actually was made in '95 and '96, the first years of the Aurora. They were selling this at the same time as that thing, which dated back to 1982. I already said I was taken home from the hospital in the Ciera. I was born in '83.

So, like, yeah, there was a pretty major refresh in like '89. But effectively, it was the same car. Look at the interior of the thing. It is the same as the '80s. So they were selling a car that was old at the beginning of the '90s into the middle of the decade.

So you can say it was like-- I'm not sure you can really say it wasn't competitive because nothing that-- no one sold anything remotely similar to this thing by that time, I mean, because they also had the Cutlass Supreme as a mid-size sedan. And I guess the Olds Acheiva was a compact.

Clearly, people were buying them because they just kept trotting them out. And maybe they were actually better made than the Corsicas-- then the other things that all-- and the Lumina. And that's why they could keep making them because the-- also, the Buick Century, same car. So I think just for the lack of them continuing to trot out a fossil for so long is why that was the worst of the '90s.

- All right, Byron, best and worst of the '90s for you?

- All right, so best is tough. And honestly it's like James said. Like, there are really a lot of good choices in that. And I actually wrote down three different ones. So I'm actually going to go ahead and commit to the C4 Corvette because it's-- I mean, it's a super cool and underappreciated Corvette.

By that point, the C4 Corvette wasn't a complete joke anymore. Like, it was really only a joke because it was way underpowered when it was first introduced in the '80s. And then, by the mid-90s when it was kind of phasing out, it actually had gotten pretty good. And then, we got this cool Lotus-engineered overhead cam V8, like super awesome car.

They're actually still, like, reasonably affordable too. As far as like collectible Corvettes go, you can still get one, at least you could before the pandemic. You could get them for less than $20 grand, which is thoroughly reasonable for what's going to be a highly collectible car one day. Now, they're probably more than that.

But still, I mean, it's a really interesting Corvette until, well, we'll see what happens over the next couple of years. But the idea of overhead cam and Corvettes just never really panned out all that well. And of course, it spawned a very successful kind of sub-brand for Corvette, which had some staying power and a pretty cool car.

The others that I put down were the GMC Cyclone, which just barely made the cut because that was a '91. And now that fast trucks are all big, heavy, fast trucks, it's kind of nice to look back. With the exception of Ranger Raptor, it's cool to look back at truly compact, like, fun, sporty trucks.

And then, of course, Typhoon after that. So I mean, those are pretty cool. I wanted to recognize Firebird kind of in the same way that you wanted to recognize IROC. The Trans Ams there near the end when that generation of that body was on its way out up until around the turn of the century-- man, we got some wild, wild-looking Firebirds. I had friends who built them and loved them. They have reliability.

- So you're talking about not the one that was crafted in the '80s, the one that was in '90s?

- Yeah.

- Is that fourth gen?

- Yeah, that should be fourth gen, that body, yeah.

- Oh, the one with like the four nostrils on the front?

- Absolutely, yes.

- Was that '96?

- Yeah, I think that was-- we were maybe like '99, 2000-2001 if I'm remembering right, but, yes. Oh, man, like, they're wild-looking. You don't see too many of them left today. They're crazy.

- That fourth gen Camaro, when that came out, I still think that looks pretty good. Like, when it had like the teeny-tiny, like-- the headlights that looked like they couldn't have been any more powerful than your common household flashlight. They were so small.

- [LAUGHS]

- And then they ruined it. They put like a big, old Chrysler Concorde lower plastic grille on the front. They had the big, blobby headlights maybe because the old ones weren't good. But either way, that kind of ruined it. I never thought that thing looked good again.

Again, you've got to-- I never hear a lot of good things about that car dynamically. But in terms of them going for something that was completely different, and kind of outlandish, and-- good for them because those cars were absolutely that. They did sell a lot of them. But for them being kind of out there, that's kind of cool.

- What's your least favorite of the '90s? And then, I'm going to hit you guys with some questions that you aren't as prepared for.

- [LAUGHS]

Well, I wanted to bash on the Malibu again. But then, I realized that super, super bland late-90s Malibu wouldn't have been possible without the intervening vehicle, which is the Chevy Celebrity. And the Chevy Celebrity was so uninteresting to anybody after its decade-and-a-half or however long it ran that they just didn't bother. They were like, oh, let's just do Malibu again because that hasn't worked.

[LAUGHS]

There was a Malibu, and then there wasn't a Malibu. And then, we got Celebrity, and then they killed Celebrity because it didn't go anywhere. And then, we got Lumina. And then, we got Malibu back. That's like three revisions ago essentially if you look at Celebrity. I mean--

- The Celebrity ended in '90. So that was, uh, I think you're on the border here.

- Well, I mean, it is what you got because, like, from them-- I mean, do we want to say it's all of them collectively? The Celebrity, the Lumina, and the Malibu are all terrible because realistically--

- Yeah, actually, the Celebrity, speaking of, it's the Cutlass Ciera. It's the same damn thing.

[LAUGHTER]

We picked the same car.

- Man, so many were just, like, just rebadging after rebadging.

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