The Buick Road Hawk Was So Embarrassingly Bad I Feel Guilty Just Telling You About It

The late 1970s and early 1980s weren’t the best time for American cars. To put it charitably, it was a fetid sea of garbage and disappointment, with the occasional buoy of adequacy bobbing by, precariously. Is that too harsh? Maybe. But it was called the Malaise Era for a reason, don’t forget. And while there are plenty of cars once could pick that exemplify the amazing half-assery and misguided thinking of the time, I’m not sure there’s one that gets this idea across any better than the car I want to talk about today, the 1979 to 1980 Buick Road Hawk. I’d consider this a Glorious Garbage sort of car, but the truth is that I fudged a little to get it into the category, as it’s a bit lean on glory, if we’re honest.

It’s probably worth explaining the origins of the Road Hawk as best I can, working backwards from what it was to where it came from. The Road Hawk was a special trim level of the Buick Skyhawk, which was really a re-badged Chevy Monza, and was sort of the up-market version of that car. The Monza was, in turn, an H-Body car, which you may recall was the platform the deeply crappy Chevy Vega was built on. All of this is to say that the fundamental bones of the Road Hawk weren’t exactly stellar from the start, beginning as they were on a late ’60s economy car project that was originally supposed to have a Wankel rotary engine, and as a result was saddled with all sorts of peculiar compromises, like the overly-large transmission tunnel that was required by the abandoned rotary engine.

After the failure of the Vega and the Pontiac version of the Vega, the Astre, the H-platform was used for the aforementioned Chevy Monza and Buick Skyhawk, as well as the Oldsmobile Starfire and Pontiac Sunbird – so many birds and fires and stars in these names! The good news was that the basic body design, which first appeared as the Monza, was actually pretty attractive, especially in its fastback form:

I think those wraparound taillights are pretty slick, as is the slightly arch of that fastback. It’s a clean, good-looking car, I think! The Buick variant was essentially the same design, just with some different badging and details. One detail I particularly like is how they molded a little Buick hawk logo into the taillight lens, seen somewhat more defined here thanks to many years of unwiped car wax:

That logo itself is interesting because that hawk was an unusual departure for Buick, the first time they didn’t use their triple-shields badge on a car. The hawk stayed around only between 1975 and 1980, then flew off, seeking out new opportunities in the sky, I assume.

Here are some pictures of the whole Skyhawk, not just a closeup of a taillight lens:

Like the Monza, it was nice looking; the sort-of-Targa-bar is another nice detail, that stainless steel colored band connecting the two B-pillars over the roof of the car. It was a smaller, sportier take on Buick, which was a brand that had generally tended more towards staid, older clients. But Buick wanted more people who ate their dinners after 4:30 pm to buy their cars.

This urge to get more youthful buyers seems to have been at the root of why the Road Hawk came into existence. Buick was trying to figure out what it would take to bring in customers whose next stop after the Buick dealership wasn’t a mausoleum, and they thought that a more sporty and bold version of the Skyhawk could be just the thing. And it wasn’t a bad instinct! The Skyhawk already, at least, showed Buick’s willingness to try something sportier and more engaging to drive than their usual couch-filled comfort barges, so taking that idea to the next level made sense.

The problem was that instead of taking the idea to the next level, Buick seemed to have started to climb the stairs to the next level, realized that it looked like actual work, and just kind of left the Road Hawk sitting on the lower third of the staircase, propped against a bannister.

The base price of a Buick Skyhawk in 1979 was $4778, a bit over $21,000 today. In light of how expensive cars are today, that’s not bad. Then, to get the Road Hawk “upgrades,” you had to drop another $675, a bit over $3,000. That three grand got you a few minor genuine upgrades, like better and heavier anti-sway bars, stiffer suspension, and better tires, but besides that, it’s still just an H-platform car with all the associated compromises and foibles, with a wheezy 3.7-liter V6 that somehow manages to only make 115 horses from those nearly four liters.

Those 115 horses also have to drag around the weight of the obvious parts of what makes your Skyhawk a Road Hawk, those huge plastic panels glued onto the rear quarter of the car:

Oy. You can see what they were trying to go for, I think, but the execution is just so depressingly apathetic and clumsy. Look at those rear panels up close:

Now, granted, those pics aren’t of a new car, but they really didn’t look that much better. And for your own sanity, don’t try to imagine the sort of rust that’s hiding under those panels. Did the designers even bother to refine this thing after the first sketches? Look at how the quarter panel there blocks the wraparound rear marker lamp, so they had to slap on a rectangular one below, as the original one is doomed to spend its life illuminating, redly, whatever spiders have decided to build webs in that 3/4″ of space between the huge chunk of plastic and the original body.

They’ve made the hatch heavier, added rust traps, required extra lighting units, added overall weight, which affects acceleration and fuel economy, all while making the car uglier. Bang up job, fellas!

It’s not just me being a salty bitch here; reviewers of the era agreed, like Mike Knepper here, writing for Motor Trend in September 1979:

Mike is pretty brutal here, saying

“But what about its looks? The front end works nicely. The air dam is handsome, functional, and nicely integrated. But look closely at the rear quarter-panels. That’s right, folks.

Those fiberglass pieces that give the tail that upswept look are glued right on the fenders, as if one day at the styling studio they broke for lunch and forgot to come back. The new rear-end profile is good-looking enough, but what a cheapo way to get it. Shame, shame, Buick.”

See? People in the ’70s weren’t fools.

This thing really ticks all the Glorious Garbage boxes: more expensive, performance well below what its appearance wants to suggest, crappy, half-assed construction, garish and overdone – it’s got it all! I mean, sure, that’s mostly the Garbage part, but there’s a little bit of Glory in there, like this amazing bird-and-stripes-heavy interior:

That one in the interior pic is an automatic, too, all but guaranteeing no fun will be had in this thing. They had a four- and five-speed manual, but I’m not sure what the take rate of those was. I mean, the take rate of the car overall was pretty anemic, with only about 2100 sold. So they’re pretty rare.

Of course, despite what Facebook Marketplace sellers may claim, rare does not always equal valuable. Sometimes, rare just means “nobody wanted these,” and I think that applies here. In fact, these seem to be held in so little esteem that one of the very few videos I could find of one of these cars today isn’t some loving walk-around by a smitten owner or an informational video from some eager YouTuber, but instead this video of one getting crushed into an open-face Dodge Neon and Shadow sandwich on Oldsmobile:

Yeah. Normally, I’m not fond of seeing old cars get crushed, but this one really didn’t hurt so badly.

Still, maybe these are interesting to someone? If you’d actually like a Road Hawk of your own, I’d maybe suggest you reconsider your life choices and perhaps either stop drinking or take up drinking, depending on which path led you to this sorry place.

It’ll be okay.

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