As I’m sure you recall, the notorious SWG (Stephen Walter Gossin) somehow pulled off the impossible and brought a 31-year-old, swampy, rotten Buick mostly back to life. The car’s body is destined for the scrapheap, but its glorious Buick 3800 V6 engine will live on in a Pontiac Fiero. ADDvanced has a story that will tug on your heart:
This is going to be a long one, and it’s time for me to eat a little crow.
I was one of the ones critical of SWG spending any effort whatsoever on this vehicle. Yes, the SC 3800 is cool but other than that it’s a typical 90s GM car with a boring slushbox, jello suspension, questionable build quality, and there’s also still a ton of these around with relatively low miles so it just didn’t seem like the juice was worth the squeeze. Removing the engine and shoving it into a fiero is the absolute best possible use for this vehicle, so huge congrats on finding the perfect buyer!
Since that article, my dad got sick and passed (which is bullshit) and he left me multiple vehicles in various states of disrepair, one of them being a 1995 Buick Riviera with the SC3800. If I remember correctly, he bought this car in 1996 from a dealer buddy who took him to a car auction and he picked it up only a year old for around $17k which was extremely cheap at the time. He had a beater, he had a project car, he had a tow vehicle, but this was to be the long distance, high speed roadtrip car.
Sidebar: At this point in history, Mercury Racing was still a relatively new company and had been given a large budget to absolutely destroy the competition (Johnson, Suzuki, Yamaha) in boat racing leading to their sponsorships of races and prize money all over the country. My dad grew up racing hydroplanes/runabouts and many of his race buddies graduated to larger, faster boats with air entrapment hulls to reduce drag and go even faster. This was the golden age of tunnelhull boat racing, and my summers growing up were filled with roadtrips to boat races all over the country, in the Riviera.
Back to the present: The car started and drove, but as SWG so eloquently put it, the time of hand is heavy. The car was rarely used anymore, but the suspension was in need of complete replacement, it wouldn’t idle properly, and most obnoxiously, the car suffered from all sorts of electrical gremlins of the worst kind: intermittent. Multiple things were happening; the temperature of the HVAC would randomly crank it all the way to hot or all the way to cold, and the stereo would either fade out slowly so you’d think it was just the end of a song, or it would turn itself ALL THE WAY UP and try it’s best to either blow out your eardrums or the speakers themselves.
I want to give SWG a massive ego boost here, as I too have spent untold hours staring at these very same service manuals and studying the electrical schematics and brothers, it is not fun. I went down so many paths in each subsystem and eventually realized it might be the steering wheel controls or cable fritzing out and causing mayhem. It wasn’t; I unplugged it completely, it still did it. I kept disassembling, testing, probing, and the car was looking worse and worse.
And then I saw it. In 1995…. Canbus wasn’t a thing yet, but the car DID have a central nervous network where different modules communicated to each other… and the hub where a lot of things connected was the AC Delco Stereo itself. Going for a hail mary, I lobotomized the suspect sterio and I splurged on a 2 DIN Pioneer Carplay capable deck. VICTORY. No more electrical gremlins, no more blowing out my eardrums, the car could now be driven despite all the other issues it was having.
This is getting long, but since then, I have given the car a tuneup, fixed a few of the broken things in the suspension with many more to go, recharged the AC, and taken it on a few roadtrips just like my father and I did decades prior.
And now?
Now I get it. I’ve always hated 90s GM products; they didn’t build driver’s cars like Japanese/Germans of the same time period; in my opinion they were just going after a geriatric userbase that valued comfort over all other things, which made the cars extremely boring. And they are… in town. But on the freeway? They are FANTASTIC cars. Extremely quiet, incredibly comfortable, stable, capable of passing most other traffic with minimal effort… the miles just fly by and cruising at 80-90mph for hours on end just feels fantastic. I now realize that this wasn’t a boring car; it was Buick’s version of creating a GT coupe, an affordable domestic version of something like a Mercedes SL500. The goals are exactly the same; a large, heavy, powerful coupe meant for crushing multiple states per day while providing as much luxury as possible to the passengers.
That heavy hand of time keeps moving, and I’m overloaded with projects so I’m slowly selling off all the other vehicles that were left to me.
But I’m keeping the Buick.
Cutaways are some of the greatest educational tools in the automotive universe. Yesterday, Jason wrote a Cold Start about a cutaway air-cooled VW chassis, and honestly, it looks so awesome. I’d have a cutaway in my living room if I lived in something a bit larger than a broom closet. Anyway, 10001010 says:
The chassis is amazing but we’ve seen cutaway batteries on this site before.
Yes, that’s a reference to the time Jason took a chainsaw to a battery! Classic Torch.
Good stuff 10001010, and here’s a huge digital hug for that wonderful (and lengthy!) comment, ADDvanced. This might be the longest COTD I’ve ever published! Have a great day, everyone.
That comment/story came together in the last five words: “But I’m keeping the Buick.”
Mic drop.
ADDvanced, great story. Sorry about your dad. I lost mine 20 years ago and it’s still bullshit. I still have my 90 year old mom, however, and her 1998 Olds 88. She no longer drives, but she still loves her car, so I drive her around in it wherever we go. It has the NA 3800, which does ok to move the beast in town, as long as you know to keep the throttle pressed to delay the 1-2 upshift in the lazy slushbox. It has the indifferent build quality and electrical gremlins of all the FWD H-bodies of that era, including intermittent window switch failures, and a catastrophic failure of the HVAC blower motor. We live in the desert SW, so the clearcoat has been roasted away and the headliner is slowly disintegrating. No matter, because when we get the 88 on the interstate, she shows off her skills. The ride is glass-smooth, even at 90, and she returns 25 mpg at 80 mph sustained. The 88 was built for road trips.
The 3800 Olds 88s were surprisingly good. At least to me. I had a ’90-92 model year specimen 30 years ago as a company TV news car and it delivered 30+ mpg on the freeway and the FWD did a great job getting around Cleveland in the snow. And there are parts of Cleveland that are somewhat hilly. Even with maybe all-season tires, but definitely not dedicated winter tires, somehow it managed to scrabble its way up to where I needed to get to without a lot of drama.
Those were sold off and replaced by Ford Crown Vics by a dealer that owed a fair amount of money to the station for their TV ads. I got one of the first of them and it was fun driving that around with three antennae (cell phone, two-way radio and a scanner) sprouting from the trunk lid. Even some cops thought we were Feds. I left that job for one in Seattle in September of ’94 but kept in touch with my buddies and they said the RWD Crown Vics were pretty squirrely that winter. A couple of guys threw two or three bags of cat litter in the trunk to put some more weight on the drive wheels and then throw on the ground to use as a traction aid when needed.
My car at the new job was a 4WD Tahoe and while it never got stuck, the best fuel economy I ever saw it get was ~16 mpg. Comfy and quiet though.
I just replaced the blower motor and I think I have touched ground (pun intended) on the intermittent power window issue (I used 600 grit sandpaper on every ground wire I could find).
My parents’ first new car was a 1986 Olds 88. Prior to that, they owned a used 1979 2 door Ford LTD S, first year of the Panther platform and the single headlights, which they sold to me in high school. Looked like a cop car, so I probably got away with speeding more than I should have, lol.
Once I got rid of the hated 7200 Motorcraft Variable Venturi carb and replaced it with a Holley two-barrel, it became a docile beast, except in wet weather. Even with 139 net HP, the rear end would break loose when the roads were slick. I carried two spare used tires and cement blocks in the trunk in the winter for the weight too!
To be honest, it doesn’t rain or snow a lot in New Mexico, so the roads have lots of time to soak up petroleum products to release when wet. They replaced the 1986 with the 1998 Olds 88. Here in New Mexico, we can have lake-effect level winter storms, especially through Raton Pass going to Colorado, and blizzards on the eastern plains, and in the summer, we are on the far western edge of Tornado Alley, so summer thunderstorms can blow up quickly. Both of the Olds 88s have always been confident and sure-footed throughout the myriad trips between Albuquerque and northern NM to visit relatives. I own a 1999 Tahoe 2-door 4wd, and I agree, that is one smooth ride, but at the expense of 15 mpg highway. If I don’t have to go off-highway, I’ll take the Olds.
Ah, the weird 1995-only Riviera.
The 1995 Riviera was the introduction year for the eighth-and-final-generation of that nameplate. On top of having the Series I supercharged engine, the 1995 also had GM’s OBD 1.5 standard and older electronics (head unit, climate controls, keyless entry).
The 1996-1999 Riviera got more modern stuff, like the Series II supercharged engine (standard for 1998 and 1999), newer electronics, and the then-requisite OBD 2 standard. It also got a slightly different center stack, with a token splash of wood veneer.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the gremlins you experienced were unique to the 1995 Riviera. As it was introduced in early 1994 as a MY1995 (there was no MY1994 Riviera) and got the benefit of new excitement around the redesign, there is an outsize number of 1995s out there.
Yup. The series 1 3800SC is a double edged sword imho; there’s no upgrades available for it, but OTOH it keeps me from adding power to a heavy FWD vehicle which is sort of dumb anyway, and honestly the stock HP/Torque is pretty well tuned for highway passing anyway.
I think the 95 Riviera has a better interior than the other ones, the design of the dash is more honest, modern, and simple. The fake wood hasn’t aged well, and the center stack with the bumped out area near the stereo looks like an afterthought. My Carplay deck upgrade turned out looking pretty great, and I even got the steering wheel controls to work with it.
Thinning down the fleet then I’ll be redoing the suspension and adding a few other things to make it an even better GT.
I lost my Dad last year. I feel that bullshit too ADDvanced. I once bought a 1956 Lincoln and it was just made for cruising at 55mph all day. It was a joy to drive with the ventwindows aimed in (front and rear!). It floated along like Grandma’s living room on wheels and got about 10mpg, It was so smooth you could probably mix drinks in the backseat while in motion. Suddenly I realized big American luxury was truly different back then. What an amazing vehicle.
You should Google “Bris Car Commercial” if you don’t remember it from SNL. It was a parody of an ad when Mercury had a diamond specialist split a diamond in the back seat of a Marquis. 1972 Mercury Marquis Brougham Commercial – Cartier Jeweler Diamond Cutter
Great story! And sorry about your dad, ADDvanced. I also recently lost mine, and I agree, it’s 100% bullshit.
I have experience with 90’s GM big 3.8L cars, and I’ll say the same. Those cars were MADE for highway cruising. My favorite was my brother’s ’96 Bonneville, it was light green with HUNTER GREEN leather. Damn that car was smooth, and those Pontiac seats that could seemingly be adjusted eleventy billion ways were amazing.
Also impressive in those days before eco modes was that a car that size, with a 3.8L V6 and 4 speed auto, could easily get 30mpg highway.
My grandpa gave me his 88 Olds 98 in the mid- 00’s, daily driving it I’d get 27.xx mpg most tanks. A friend had a ’99 Century 3.8, we road tripped it and got 32mpg.
I would 100% daily a 90’s Bonney if I could find a clean one.
Awesome Riviera story. Thats one of the joys of my 94 bonneville. Sure a period E30 handles the twisties better, but the bonneville is amusing in its own right. But on the freeway it really comes into its own.
At the beginning of last year, my 20-year-old cousin had $4,000 to find a car, preferably a small or midsize sedan) after his Altima Coupe got totaled. We looked at Hondas and Toyotas, but the value wasn’t there, and I was loathe to put him in most of the cars in that price range (which included a disproportionate number of 2011+ Sonatas/Optimas and 2013+ Fusions).
In the end, we found one of the last of the classic-era, G-body FWD GM boats: a 2007 Buick Lucerne CXL with the venerable 3.8-liter and almost 200K miles. It had leather, a sunroof, heated and cooled seats, a heated steering wheel, and an honest-to-goodness double-DIN head unit that could be replaced with any number of modern CarPlay/AA setups. It had great service history, and we got it for $3,000, leaving room in the budget for the eventual water pump replacement it would need. By then, GM had even fixed its issues with pearl white paint, so the paintwork was excellent for a car of that age and mileage.
I think the discounting of vehicles like this is due to magazine comparisons and journalists (sorry Autopian lol). They tend to boil things down to stats, and it’s easy to see a higher slalom speed or lower track time being better…. but. cars are more than just metrics. In fact, I don’t even think metrics matter much anymore. The most fun I’ve ever had driving was in arguably the worst performing car I’d ever owned, a 32hp 1972 Austin Mini Cooper.
ADDvanced deserves some kind of published author credit for that, maybe Torch can sketch a totally official certificate on the back of a napkin to commemorate the occasion.
Those climate control and radio gremlins on that Riv are because of the steering wheel switches. They all go bad eventually.
…
I would also check the connectors for those, they can short out even when the switch itself is removed.
GM genius!
That’s a great story of that Riviera. I’m glad you highlighted it, because I missed that in the he comments.
Woooo! 🙂
The more I read articles from the Authors on this site, and the comments on them, I’m starting to think I may be the only one here who actually ENJOYS wiring.
Gimme a basketcase car and the schematic for it, and I’ll have it diagnosed and sorted in a weekend.
If you follow the wires long enough, you will find the problem. You can get wiring nightmare projects for pennies on the dollar, the same way something with a blown engine or transmission goes for cheap.
The difference? Wire/pins/connectors are WAY cheaper and easier to repair/swap than whole drivetrains. You just gotta know your way around a multimeter.
I thought I was the only one too! I even like diagnosing the issue. Clearly you are my people.
I, too, enjoy wiring. It’s pulling everything apart in order to get to and trace the wiring that I do not enjoy.
I’ve honed my ability to quickly narrow down the problem area, by working on 60ft long transit buses for years.
Sounds like you get your exercise there.
Not once you learn how to troubleshoot efficiently.
Nailed it^
When center consoles, trim, door & dash panels crack from age and sun and replacements are not available, it’s just a little less fun.
I can sheers to that. Replacing the cracked and split dash in my 39 year old Mercedes was stressful. Especially replacing it with a 35 year old pristine dash I pulled from the wreckers.
Taking out the dashboard sucks in pretty much every vehicle.
I’m reluctant to take anything else apart inside my 1996 Jaguar XJ12 because all the interior plastics have become so brittle over the last 30 years, or so. Some of the parts are readily available (like the sun visor retaining clips, which both disintegrated one day)…but the larger assemblies are not, or if they are, will come off of existing cars and be in similar shape.
I like wiring just fine on older cars and bikes with simpler schematics. After the 80s they start to get too complex to be fun anymore.
Oh but the 90s luxury cars are where the deals are to be had. No one wants to sort that wiring (except me).
Well I know who I’m bringing my schizophrenic Jaguar to now.
Deal. I’ve battle Lucas Electrics before, I’ve always wanted to sort an 80s Jag.
Erm, 2006, hope that doesn’t change your mind any…
That’ll probably be easier.
The only wiring issue my 1996 V12 Jaguar has is a parasitic draw that will drain the battery if it sits too long. Therefore, I have a switch on the battery and try to drive it on the highway at least once a week.
Unhook one of your battery cables, put your multimeter inline, and start pulling fuses until the draw goes away. Then you know where to start.
You wanna fix my 2005 Phaeton that’s (increasingly frequently) refusing to even try and crank the engine when the key is twisted, but that turns the electronics on and off just fine?
Check to see if the cables are tight at the starter. Happened to my 86 Mercedes AND my 2016 sorento.
Actually I went to school for electrical engineering so the schematics aren’t really the issue for me, it’s the physical location of things.
Like, I can see on the schematics there’s a wire from A to B. But then I get to the actual car… and there’s bundles of wiring all over the place wrapped in black tape, snaking around the tops of HVAC vents and down into the nooks and crannies behind the engine and firewall that are basically inaccessible. Especially those, actually! You know there’s a wire going from one side to the other, but it’s in the harness ,and when you go inside the car, you can’t find where that wire comes out.
It’s like the schematics of the IDEA are there, but they really do not communicate WHERE those junctions and connectors are in the actual car.
And then you have intermittent issues, which are just a nightmare to track down. If it’s actually a broken wire, it’s so much easier to find vs a wire that’s about to break.
Very well said.
My background education is computer engineering/computer science. I learned the physical side by being a professional wrench for 17 years. Best of both worlds!
I’ve learned to embrace electrical work on my Jaguar. Greasy bits? Straight to my Jag specialist. Electrical work? I got it. That includes an instrument cluster repair, calming down the notorious XJ40 bulb failure module (albeit not silencing it entirely), a fuse box replacement, a radio antenna replacement, and removal of an aftermarket security setup. Also not electrical but replacement of an air conditioner blower deep under the dash.
It’s quite rewarding and has saved me a LOT of money in repair bills.