The Next Buick Grand National Should Be This Wicked Dual Motor EV

Do car brands experience survivor’s guilt? You know, the crisis of conscience that results from still existing while other more worthy nameplates have died out? I’m not sure, but I can think of a few that maybe should have such feelings.

In the 2008 financial crisis, General Motors was forced to axe a number of their brands. If presented with the choice of killing Saturn, Buick, GMC, Hummer, Saab, or Pontiac, which would be your first choice to walk the plank? For many Autopians, the no-brainer first choice to kill would be Buick, a brand that my 84-year-old mother thinks is “for old people.” Of course, when that brand is one of the most popular names in an emerging Chinese market, that probably isn’t going to happen. Buick survives to this day, despite the fact that in the United States there hasn’t been a car made by the brand since the 1971 “Boattail” Riviera that most enthusiasts would ever consider owning – with one notable exception.

It’s not that Buick hasn’t tried. To be fair, the Park Avenues and last Rivieras from the early nineties had rather pleasant styling, and their current line of cars is reasonable if not exciting looking. We’ve also been shown some recent concepts from both sides of the globe bearing the brand that are rather nice:

Still, “nice” is not a word that you would use to describe the single Buick product made in the last fifty years that most Autopians might want. In fact, it was a rather crude, powerful, and downright nasty machine: the Grand National.

This brutish vehicle started out as a Buick Regal, a personal luxury coupe that most of us GenXers know as the type of car your Aunt Cassie drove to Our Redeemer Lutheran Church each Sunday. She had two Regals before this and the current one “drives real nice.”

So how in the hell did such a matronly car become a monster that ripped from zero to sixty in under five seconds? As you’d expect, it’s a strange story.

Turbo Scouts

If you were a Boy Scout in 1973, there was something called the Explorer program where you could learn real-world grownup skills in things like business and law enforcement. Sounds kind of awful, actually. Thankfully, if you were in the Flint, Michigan area at the time, you might have had Ken Baker as your Explorer mentor. Baker was a young engineer at Buick who wanted to expose kids to automotive engineering, so if you were in his group instead of getting “let’s make a balance sheet, kids!” you might hear Ken say, “let’s use forced induction on a motor until the air cleaner blows off!” With new emissions regulations and a fuel crisis in full effect, the advantages of turbocharging were exactly what he thought the people needed. According to Baker, he managed to obtain one of the newly-revived Buick V6s and worked with the Scouts to cobble together a turbocharger setup for the thing. Ultimately Baker found a scrap Skylark on the premises to drop the motor into, and reportedly the compact Nova-twin was a blast to drive.

Two years later, Baker was called into the office of a boss who was now aware of the Scout project. Ken assumed he was there to be told his current job was gone because of his skunkworks shenanigans, and indeed, it was: after hearing of the increased performance and improved fuel economy the turbocharging project had achieved, Baker was put in charge of getting the Scout-prototyoped turbo V6 into production. Actually, a perfect opportunity to show off an early turbo was imminent: Buick was to be the pace car for the next Indy 500.

The turbo V6 put into the 1976 Buick Regal used for the race ran 21 psi of boost, which was more than the actual race cars were running, and had a form of knock sensor and pre-ignition control to limit the chance of engine damage. Funny fact: the replica pace cars that Buick actually sold had a normally-aspirated two-barrel V6 as standard with a whopping 105 horsepower. Gaze in wild wonder at the monstrosity below with fifty pounds of stickers and less power than a Hyundai Accent. Seriously, people paid premiums to buy these things. When Jason talks about Glorious Garbage, I can’t think of a better example than this:

It took two more years for a production turbo to appear in the smaller new-for-1978 Regal, making around 165 horsepower with a four-barrel carburetor. This initial model was marketed as a product with the power of a V8 (well, a malaise V8) and the fuel consumption of a six cylinder. In reality, there wasn’t much difference in EPA economy figures: 17 city/ 25 highway for the turbo versus 16 city/ 23 highway for the V8. You can see below that Buick even put the turbo in the big LeSabre coupe – which is actually a surprisingly handsome rip-off of Paulo Martin’s Fiat 130 Coupe.

However, Buick needed $557 to give you a similar-powered 305 V8 in the Regal Sport Coupe over the standard turbo – an odd fact considering the turbo motor must have cost GM more money to make than a small-block V8. This is possibly the reason why Buick seems to have slowly stopped pushing the turbo V6 on customers in the ensuing years. Still, the turbo wasn’t done with corrupting Buick – not by a long shot.

No More Mr. Nice Guy

The original 1982 Grand National was actually named in honor of Buick’s winning of the NASCAR Manufacturer’s Cup in the previous years. Of course, those NASCAR stockers didn’t have turbo power, and the turbo engine wasn’t even standard in the first Regal Grand National. Hell, the cars weren’t even black.

Despite not necessarily delivering all that it promised at first, Buick still offered the turbo engine which gained more grunt with every model year, reaching 180 horsepower for the first Grand National. By 1984, adding sequential-port fuel injection allowed the motor to cross the 200 horsepower mark, which was more power than any of the V8s offered in the Regal. And in 1986, adding an air-to-air intercooler brought horsepower figures up to 235 – again, laughable today but heady numbers then.

What about the ultimate Grand National, the GNX? Buick rolled out the GNX in 1987, the final year of the now decade-old rear-drive Regal. Every part of the engine was further massaged for the 547 production examples, ultimately getting (according to Buick) 267 horsepower out of the 3.8 liters. I’m not sure how the engineering team avoided the ire of GM’s top brass when the concurrent Corvette only pumped out 240 horsepower – but the actual power disparity between the turbocharged Regal and Chevy’s supposed-to-bed best performer was even greater than that. Buick completely understated the GNX’s power figures, and the engine actually produced a cool 300 horses and 420 foot pounds of torque – enough to propel what was once an old lady’s car to 60 miles an hour in 4.6 seconds. As with all other post-1984 Grand Nationals, it appears that the Regal’s glass and lights were masked off before the whole business was sprayed with gallons of gloss black lacquer before monster rolling stock was added to each corner. I promise you that Aunt Cassie no longer thought that this was a “nice” car. You want sophistication? Look away. You want big, dirty fun? Here’s a set of the familiar rectangular-ended GM keys- just don’t injure yourself. Once that turbo kicks in, we can’t make any guarantees for your safety.

After the Grand National died with the rear-drive G Body in 1987, Buick experimented with turbo power on some cars they showed to the press but nothing came of these. You can see them in the video below; note that they prototyped rear wheel drive Regals and Reattas out of front wheel drive models, which might have been interesting, but probably not. Actually, the only car in the bunch that we’d want is at the end: sweet Jesus, is that your mom’s woodgrain-covered full size Estate Wagon? Zero to sixty in 5.2 seconds?

Look at that thing go, and how flat it corners. You rode around in the back of one of these as a kid, right? How can you not want that thing right now?

Anyway, that shouldn’t have been the end of absurdly fast Buicks, but it was. Let’s make another Buick that us enthusiasts can actually give a shit about.

Back In Black

Today, electric power can give us mind-blowing acceleration, and the GNX Grand National deserves a chance to be reborn. Just like forty years ago, a “new” Grand National would be totally off-brand from the other cars in the lineup, but the exposure to the brand would hardly be a bad thing. I’ve seen some Photoshoppers make a Grand National by blacking out the swoopy Wildcat concept, which looks rather silly. My guess is that those doing the renderings thought that a blindingly fast car should be a sleek and sporting shape, meaning that they’ve totally missed the point of the original. The fact is that a Grand National needs to be an upright-looking sedan, a mild-mannered car gonebad; that pleasant-looking Electra concept would be a far better basis to corrupt. Plus, it’s supposedly a crossover so that’s even more of an enigmatic choice for a performance car.

In a concession to safety, I’d put front and back motors in this thing so that it would be all-wheel drive. Power? Let’s work backwards: what’s the fastest Corvette you can buy today? The 2.5-second-to-sixty E-Ray? Let’s make this new Grand National at least a few tenths of a second slower so that the powers-that-be at GM won’t shut it down. We’ll shoot for just under 3 seconds. You’d have a wickedly fast car that, with the right tires, could safely go out in a snowstorm with four passengers and a trunk full of luggage on board – you can’t do that in a Corvette.

Up front, I’ve added detailing to mimic the original car, even making composite headlamps that look like distorted Pep Boys sealed beams. The fake “grille” features vertical stripes similar to the 1980s car, and they could glow softly at night, unless you’re really punching it and then they’d glow brighter in anger. And just like the original, if Buick produced that Electra in some “stock” form then a new Grand National wouldn’t require The General to make an all-new car. See the original concept below?

We’d just have to change the nose and tail to something slightly more upright to make a GN, plus blocking off part of the rear quarter windows to make the four-door look like a coupe (the show car had “Lambo” doors which this production model would not possess).

As an EV, you could easily have touch screens for the “transmission” and just a range gauge to go with a speedometer. Obviously, as a true Grand National we want to keep a floor “shifter” even though it doesn’t need it. I’d like to stage the power output either by controlling front and rear motors separately or limiting the power output, so flooring the thing would give you “turbo boost.” Note the “turbo” gauge that is repeated by lights in the back of the “hood scoop” over the frunk. “Turbo? This is an EV!”  I know that all of this would be pure theater and a complete gimmick to add drama, but this thing is all about “throwback” fun as the car throws you back in your seat.

It appears that General Motors is happy with Buick being the neo-Lexus brand of China, and if they can find similar buyers here in the United States, all the better. Most car enthusiasts are not as pleased. Look, GM, we know that we’re never going to see a new Pontiac G8, Saturn Sky, or Saab 9-3 ever again, but can you at least just throw us a bone with a new Grand National? It’s really the least you can do.

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