“Fight the enemy where they aren’t.” That’s the often-recited line from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and it’s good advice to many car companies. General Motors in particular took these words of wisdom to heart in the eighties. With the platforms GM had on hand, there was no way it could compete with the sublime road manners of a contemporary 5- or 7-series BMW, and the vault-like build quality of the W126 Benz was beyond them. You know what they could offer that the Germans were too stuck up to do? Wiz-bang gadgets! Trick features! Buttons galore!
Silly as the gambit was, the 1988 Pontiac Bonneville SSE pulled it off, and it’s a fun one to revisit.
Lost In the Salt Flats
As head of the Pontiac division in the sixties, John DeLorean revitalized the brand as the last word in General Motors performance cars with products like the Tempest, GTO, and Firebird. However, these were all typically compact to mid-sized products, and sales of Pontiac’s big sedan offerings often trailed behind the similar cars from other GM brands. Big-car buyers typically wanted luxury machines – a Cadillac for less money – and had no interest in the hot-rodded, full-sized sedans they might hear revving on the streets of a Saturday night.
After the first energy crisis, sales of GM’s downsized-but-still-large B bodies stayed strong; understandable since these things offered ample interior space in a package that don’t even seem that large when you see a surviving one parked next to a modern SUV (and you’ll still see a surprising number around today since these were easily some of the most reliable and durable GM cars ever). Unfortunately, Pontiac’s version was not as popular, despite it being one of the coolest-looking ones with optional Trans Am wheels.
Sales dwindled to the point that Pontiac dropped their B-body Bonneville after the 1981 model year. Yes, there was even a V6 option to increase gas mileage figures, though I can guarantee I’d have my foot to the floor most of the time and would never equal those EPA estimates. Note that it was also available with the dreaded 5.7-liter diesel V8 in 1981; that motor had been largely fixed by then, but contemporary road tests showed a zero to sixty time of just under 20 seconds.
For 1982, Pontiac put the Bonneville name onto what was once the G-body LeMans; a good car in its own right, but a mid-sizer that really didn’t do justice to the big and bold Bonneville legacy.
In fact, with the drop in fuel prices and renewed demand for large cars, GM realized almost immediately that they’d made a mistake and brought in the Canadian-built Parisienne for 1983, a slightly-rebadged B-body Chevy Caprice, to top off the Pontiac lineup.
General Motors heavily downsized the larger Buick, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac cars for 1985 and 1986 as the C- and H-bodies. These drastically smaller cars were heavily criticized for being lookalike products with zero qualities to differentiate them. The top H-body below is the Oldsmobile, while the bottom one is a Buick. At least I think so. Do we even care?
Thankfully, when Pontiac designers penned their version of the new H-body in 1987 as the Bonneville, they made it more than stand out. With cars like the Audi 5000 Turbo, BMW 7-series, and AMG Benzes, the era of big performance sedans was upon us, and GM gave us something that at least looked like one.
Bonnie Strikes Back
The new front-drive Bonneville might have shared much with the other GM brands, but Pontiac infused it with a unique sort of European character – a late-eighties Pontiac European character, at least. The top of the heap 1988 SSE edition was sort of like the car equivalent of the German-themed Frankenmuth resort in Michigan that the Bonneville below is parked in front of; a place that from a distance appears to be in the Black Forest but in actuality is not far from a Bob Evans restaurant.
Check out those body-colored wheels, the blacked-out trim, spoilers, and ground effects – somebody in the Pontiac design studio saw the AMG Mercedes 500SELs on Miami Vice, right? It’s so hokey but straight-up cool at the same time. If you wanted to “Ride Pontiac Ride” in full-sized luxury, the Excitement Division had your car.
Smoked out taillight covers? Oh yeah. Rear headrests and a lower bumper diffuser like you were about the hit the Autobahn? You bet. Headlamp washers on an American car? Yessir. The SSE had all the (superficial) trappings of something ready to make a run on the ‘Ring, people.
Meanwhile, the Bonneville SSE was bone stock under the hood. The Buick 3800 V6 was always a durable thing, and 165 horsepower from this multi-port injected mill wasn’t horrible for the time, but you were not about to make a run through the Dolomites chasing Alpinas. At least it had that sort of overdone throbby Pontiac exhaust note.
That’s fine; no one who wanted a straight-six Bimmer engine powering the rear wheels would ever set foot in a Pontiac showroom anyway. Even if they did, they’d die of visual overload.
Interior By Sci-Fi Movie Set Designers
To appreciate a German “luxury” car interior in the eighties, you had to sort of reframe your points of reference. The quality of materials was usually impeccable, and the seats could hold you in comfort all day long. At first glance though, these cabins had the austerity and warmth of an operating room, often lacking features that cars a third of their cost had.
No, if getting your money’s worth meant More Stuff to you, then the Bonneville SSE was your kind of car. Look at all of those buttons! Pontiac made you feel like you were getting a lot in terms of switches per dollar.
Being 1987, you might have expected a digital mess, but the primary instruments on the dashboard were indeed analog, including a tach. Stray even a little bit beyond these gauges, however, and you can forget about Munich simplicity. You naturally get the car-shaped schematic with the many “function monitors” in glowing green:
Check out the compass that looks straight out of an arcade game console. Sure, it would be more legible to just display “E” or “NW,” but where would the fun be in that? This gauge looks like it’s telling you where to drop the photon torpedos. So rad!
Today, many more functions than this would be combined into a single touchscreen. In 1987, if it was a standard feature, you saw all the buttons for it all the time in the SSE. I do have to say that if I got into this thing as a rental car at 11 PM on a rainy night, I’d know how to change stations immediately. I can’t do that with a new Camry.
If you grew up watching Speed Racer, you’d expect to see a button on the steering wheel below to launch the car with the hydraulic jacks. It’s not there, but at least these radio controls meant you didn’t have to go digging for those tiny ones on the dashboard. It also meant you were sure to turn up the volume or change stations when you hit the horn.
Those massive seats look like La-Z-Boy recliners done up as dentist’s chairs with scary headrests, and at first glance, they appear to be the world’s most comfortable thrones. Brochures claim “14-way adjustment,” which means most people probably got them into contorted settings that took an hour to put right.
In fact, if you look carefully, you’ll see that there are seat controls unintuitively across the front of the lower cushion and also another separate switch on the side of the seat:
But wait! There’s more! On the center console, you got another set of identical-looking buttons to make all sorts of adjustments to the seats that you probably shouldn’t, including what appear to be controls for decapitation. Man, that wood sure looks fake, but at least it really is fake, unlike the real stuff in a Mercedes that’s so polished and clinical that it looks fake.
It doesn’t end there! Even the trunk is fully trimmed out, and the standard self-leveling rear shocks mean you can dump in all the junk you want and the headlights won’t shine into the trees. I don’t know if that black bag is factory tools or a first aid kit, but it’s certainly More SSE Stuff.
That air compressor to raise the back of the car also has the option to let you stick on a hose and use it as an inflator.
There’s even an on/off switch, and I’m pretty sure they give the hose to attach as well, if it’s still in the car nearly forty years later that is (maybe in that mysterious bag?).
Could an $80,000 BMW 750iL let you pump up your kid’s basketball in the trunk? No, I don’t think so. German “luxury,” my ass.
I Was Hoping For A Glovebox Microwave
Enough about the toys! How did the Bonneville SSE drive? Motorweek was impressed enough with the mid-9-second to sixty acceleration and rather flat cornering from the upgraded springs and sway bars, though I’m sure the bumpy stuff would set it dancing. Naturally, they hated the interior and mentioned that you could get the same powerplant in the less glitzy rung-below SE model.
That’s kind of missing the point of the Bonneville SSE. This thing couldn’t touch an Audi 5000 Turbo on a run between Munich and Stuttgart, but last time I checked, there are no Alpine passes between Detroit and Chicago or Cleveland. The speed limit was usually still 55 then, so who needed a Bahn burner anyway? The 1988 SSE was the European performance-looking sedan that lacked nothing except for actual European performance. Thankfully, Pontiac would rectify at least the straight-line deficiencies with later models featuring supercharging and even extra cylinders that I was about to talk about today, but just flat ran out time wasting digital ink discussing the absurd KITT-like kit on this machine. I can promise you I’ll get to those hidden gems shortly.
The grey example above was listed for a mere $7800 a while back. That’s a lot of car for the money with that nearly bulletproof 3800 under the hood and an exterior as ironically fun as a Members Only jacket. They’ll likely never be worth anything, so just get in and enjoy those big lounge chairs for miles.
This H-body Bonneville didn’t change the doomed course of Pontiac’s big sedans, but it certainly kept them alive for more years than we thought they could with a product that was perfect for the go-go eighties. The SSE was the ultimate statement in putting the sizzle over the steak, and boy, did it sizzle.
Pontiac Points: 68 out of 100
Verdict: The ’88 Bonneville SSE is the glorious cartoon interpretation of what middle American thought that an Autobahn cruiser should be. It was deceptively durable and comfortable – just don’t expect to outrun a Bimmer (or even an Olds 88).
The curves of the front and rear ends don’t seem to match the very square passenger cell of this car.
Think of it as the awkward adolescence as it was growing into its 1990s perfection.
Solid one Bishop! Always like these cars. All the curves still work with the squared off belt line and C-pillar just fine. My Pontiac 6000 had that same car graphic and some buttons, but not this awesome.
Excellent write-up. I was always intrigued (wait, that’s an Oldsmobile) by the Buttonpalooza steering wheel.
Design-wise, i preferred the 1993 era SSEi with 205 supercharged hp that seemed to benchmark the Infiniti J30 instead of ze germans.
It was so cool in it’s day and has aged really well. Give me more buttons!
Well you sold me on the 1988 Bonneville. I’m also ready for body color wheels to come back instead of black continuing to persist in OEM trim packages.
So true. I had a white Grand Am with paint-matched factory wheels. It was glorious.
So did I, a 1986 SE V6. Those rubber side skirts, so 80s! I added a stupid spoiler to be “cool”, along with my bass because 16 year old mind…
If you had only selected our Medium Premium Lease Special CUV 2.0T in no-cost Black, then you’d have body color wheels at no extra cost!
Too bad you chose our Medium Premium Dark Grey Lease Special CUV 2.0T for $17.92/month plus tax more – See you in 39 months!
*smile and wave bye-bye*
Being from Bavaria and barely a teenager in 1987, I thought the Bonneville was one of the best-looking cars, period. I still think the slim headlights and pointed indicators look really good.
Fun fact: The Bonneville was available in Germany back then through certain big Opel (GM) dealers, but I would be surprised if they even sold 100 of them in all of Germany.
However, I still have a German edition Bonneville brochure in my collection.
Interesting. Did they bother rebadging it? Any changes vs USDM?
No rebadging, no different trim levels, just the necessary adjustments to European regulations (speedometer in kph, hazard warning and rear fog lights). In the late 1980s, many different GM models were offered in Germany, but aside from Chevy trucks, Camaros/Firebirds and Corvettes, they only sold in tiny numbers.
I spent my (early to mid 90’s) childhood visiting my family in Poland. Part of the novelty was realizing I had never seen any of their cars in the US, and never saw a “US” car there. It would have broken my little brain if I had ever come across a Pontiac.
Distinct memories of seeing my dad’s Maxima in the airport parking lot coming home and thinking it looked like the biggest car ever made.
There was an annual „Sonderschau“ at the Opel/GM dealer where the current „US“-range was on display (and I managed to grab the brochures). Aside from that I can‘t remember seeing a Bonneville (or, say, a Cavalier convertible) „in the wild“.
That’s a pretty cool idea. I know the world is smaller now with the internet and all, but I’d still be up for heading to a Toyota dealership to check out JDMs we don’t get here.
Yes, that would be great 🙂
However, a certain range of GM cars was indeed officially available in Germany, including the Bonneville.
They were also sold in Sweden but i’m not sure if it was thru official GM dealers or thru private importers. But there was one next to my Gymnasium (our High school) in 89-90 that i saw every day coming to school. And they were cool and different to the usual european GM products from Opel.
Back in the 80s, my Dad had a new company car every 6 months. When the SSE came out, he switched from Delta 88 and Park Avenues to a string of SSE. I figure he had about 6 different ones in various colors – gray, maroon, white and blue. All had color matching wheels. 17-19yo me thought they were sporty and fabulous!
The seats had a billion different adjustments but no memory feature. With 3-4 different drivers in the family, each time someone got in, there was a good amount of time spent adjusting the seat before any forward motion would occur.
The steering wheel radio buttons are stuff of legend, I’ve known about them for decades but I’ve never actually LOOKED at them. Volume? yes. Tune? absolutely. mute? you betcha. But my word there are four (maybe even 5) buttons just for changing radio stations! And why the heck would you need such prominent FADE buttons?! Who’s fading their stereo ON THE FLY?! This is breaking my brain, surely there were more useful buttons you could have used. Like why do I need Scan button? Why do I need a recall button if right next to it are the buttons to swap between presets? If I’m not swapping between radio presets then the station I’ve tuned to is the next one on the dial…so I won’t need to push recall I can just tune backwards!
HELP
Why do I need a Scan AND Seek button?! If I’m scanning radio channels, why would I need to SEEK them? What am I looking for?! In later ones they replaced some of the more dumb ones with heater controls, which is much better.
Did you also know that the Bonneville steering wheel buttons actually aren’t hardwired though? They actually use an internal IR blaster much like a giant remote, that way the wheel didn’t have an obvious failure point of a wire inside the steering column. GM nasal passages in the 80s were just as wide as wall street ones it seems!
But the cruise control was still on the turn stalk, for your convenience.
That’s the insane part, they could have put literally any button on the car on the wheel and the most prominent was freaking FADE
We all have our hill to die on and I love that this is yours. But yeah I noticed there’s no BALANCE. Honestly both are pretty useless but for some reason I feel like BALANCE > FADE.
(And yeah when a passenger is sleeping I BALANCE over to the driver side but who are we kidding, we’re all in the same 20 sq. foot box. And yes I did measure and that’s the actual area of width x distance from the front speaker to the rear headrest)
It’s such a weird decision dude!
Naw. we both know it’s because, somehow, it’s $0.07 per unit cheaper to modulate FADE than BALANCE.
I have vague memories of cars that gave you a little joystick so you could really go wild. They should bring that back. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
Seek found the first available radio station with an adequate signal and stopped there. Scan found that station, played a few seconds of it, and then continued to the next available station until interrupted by the driver stabbing the Scan button a second time.
Scan was handy on out-of-area trips when you had no idea what radio stations were out there. You’d hope that Scan would find you listenable music among the more common Dollars for Jesus, Farm Report, and Polka Classics stations of rural America.
I know how they work, but I maintain that there is no reason to use scan and there never was if seek was on the wheel. If it’s on your wheel you could just seek endlessly AT YOUR LEISURE, not what some MIDWESTERN CHUD thought was adequate rate.
I hated scan growing up because I never wanted to stop the scan, but I’d like to give stations playing an ad a chance to show me the good so to say.
It dawned on me that standard radio controls are already obsolete/ancient technology. My 4 & 6 yr olds have no concept of what a radio even is and halfway through trying to explain it to them, I realized I sounded like an idiot:
Well you see you pick a channel (already a foreign concept) and then you listen to whatever is on.
Can you skip it if you don’t like the song? No.
Can you pause it if you want to talk? No.
Why does it sound…fuzzy? It’s usually much worse.
Why are there so many ads? B/c 20 ppl are being paid to do this.
Can’t we skip the ads? No.
Can we listen to a channel with kids music? No. Those don’t exist because…actually that would have been a good idea if it was 1985.
Can we just listen to Spotify? Yes. This concludes the first and last time you will ever listen to radio.
As an avid sports talk and SiriusXM user hopefully my kids learn about the radio but I’m not hopeful lol
Yeah I don’t follow Sport but I grant that is an appropriate use case. Interesting to count Sirius as “radio” (yeah I know it’s in their name). But I guess it’s closer to radio than streaming and therefore equally foreign/baffling to my kids.
It’s radio! It’s not terrestrial but it still tunes in like a radio. the fact that you can rewind it (I never do) is not my concern
wait — you can “rewind” Sirius?? Has it always been like that?
for at least a decade lol
See I hated scan bc it would inevitably land on someone talking about God’s hatred of sodomites and I’d have to listen to it for 6 seconds. Which, ok fine, except for wide swaths of frequency the next station will also be someone talking about sodomites. And so on.
You’re looking at it backwards. Someone at GM said “Fuck everything, we’re doing
5 blades12 buttons.”BTW- Teenage me would have been FADEing the hell out of that constantly.
(and telling my passengers “they wouldn’t have put the button there if they didn’t want you to use it” way after it stopped being fun for anyone)
Steering wheel fade buttons are truly the most diabolical buttons ever affixed to a steering wheel, they could have been even MORE BUTTON if they made the fade buttons smaller, and added balance too but NOPE that’s where the general thought was the line.
Best I can tell the ’91 Grand Prix is the clear winner with 15. 17 if you count the side horn buttons (and yeah I’m counting rocker buttons as two).
I think 9 out of 10 ppl would say it was AI Slop if they saw a pic.
No radio station save feature? Older cars had that! That’s my only note about the gadgets, though. Love the inflator in the trunk. The outside still looks like crap, though.
The versions sold in midwest farm states were known as the SSEIEIO.
I owned two different ‘87 Bonneville SEs (consecutively) in the early 90s. The Saab wanna-be tri-spoke wheels were cool, and were slightly less gadgety than the SSE. Enjoyed both of them, then went back to Swedish cars.
Here a button, there a button, everywhere a button button.
I had the same wheels, I thought they were cool AF. I almost bought one at a junkyard few years ago but I thought wife would be like “da …. Is that” and where would I put it?
Had a 93 SSE that was supercharged. It was a fun car. My brother had a 92 SE and my dad had a 98. They all worked flawlessly and the supercharger always gave me bragging rights over the rest of my family. The Bonneville and everything else built on that chassis just seem to run forever.
Fun times.
Bishop, great article. I look forward to the other bits you didn’t have time for. You have become my favorite author here. That may mean first among equals with some of the other writers, but an accolade nonetheless.
Thank you for the very kind words. I just like to explore all the cars us Stranger Things era eighties kids remember, and I’m glad that there are others of a similar mind!
A) while the execution is silly, I think the “immersive” compass isn’t a bad idea. While not rocket science, it’s a pain “calculating” where the sun will set if I’m going southwest or whatever.
B) I wish someone would make the rental car version of the NV200. There are certain qualities needed in a rental car (simplicity, easy-to-find everything etc) that would greatly improve the experience and probably safety. But of course there’s no profit incentive for anyone to do this…
This past year I had a new Hyundai Sonata for a rental car and I almost had to google how to shift the car into gear. The gear selector is this candy bar-shaped rectangle coming off of the side of the column, and there were up/down arrows on the end of it indicating D and R. I tried moving the stalk up and down, but that didn’t work, tried moving it in and out, that didn’t work. I finally figured out that the end of the rectangle rotates, and that is how you change the gear selection. Incredibly unintuitive design, and I feel like it’s something that would get broken in a lot of rental cars by people trying to move it like a more standard gear selector.
A couple years ago I got a MB C-Class for a rental car and almost got in an accident because of its stupid gear selector, which is just a stalk on the side of the steering column. I was pulling out of a parking lot and it had started raining and I thoughtlessly tapped the stalk like I would do in my Mazda to activate the wipers and instead the MB shifted into neutral while I was trying to pull into traffic. Scary stuff.
wild. And that’s the thing: some weird unintuitive gear selector isn’t an issue for an owner (you get used to it really quickly) but is either annoying or dangerous for renters.
Yeah, the actuation of the Hyundai selector was fine once you knew what to do, but nothing about a rectangular bar suggests that you are supposed to twist it.
LOL, I LOVE the SSE and Frankenmuth is my home town! The SSE and Olds Trofeo were like local celebrities in the late 80s/early 90s in that town due to the locality of so many GM plants back in the day.
I would drive either of those rigs today!
“This thing couldn’t touch an Audi 5000 Turbo on a run between Munich and Stuttgart, but last time I checked, there are no Alpine passes between Detroit and Chicago or Cleveland.”
Last time I checked, there are no Alpine passes between Munich and Stuttgart either.
I do really love the button laden luxury of the Pontiac, though. 8 year old me would have thought this was a really fancy car.
Came to say the same. My excitement for a toy/product was proportional to the number of buttons it had.
However, there are sort-of-taller-hills called the Swabian Alb (mind you, „Alb“, not „Alps“).
No, but there are Autobahns, unlike American. However, you can often run at over 100MPH with traffic on 94 between the Motor City and Chitown until you get to the I-80 mess around Indiana.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to come across too snarky. I loved the article.
My wife is from a town about halfway between Munich and Stuttgart, so I drive this route regularly and the Alp thing stuck out to me. That being said, you can usually drive much faster on the route you mentioned than you can on an “Autobahn” in the Alps (or on I-80 for that matter). Being stuck in a traffic jam in the Brenner Pass is not my idea of spirited driving either.
Since I would describe where I‘m from exactly like that („about halfway between Munich and Stuttgart“), this is another reminder that this is, indeed, a small planet, du glaubsch es net 🙂
Agree. I love the buttons, and saw the SSE as the pinnacle of tech.
I figure that steering wheel predates airbags, though, or they’d fly at you like Batman’s gauntlet blades in the Dark Knight.
can you imagine how many buttons they’d have crammed on there if silly airbag laws hadn’t stopped the party?
I don’t know why automakers have basically given up on making seats like that, other than maybe in large trucks, they really were fantastically comfortable. The ones in the Oldsmobile Touring Sedan were maybe even a little better, with thigh length adjustment
GM still does! Just sit in a higher trim escalade
What if I don’t want a truck?
Don’t some lincolns come with like 50-way adjustable seats or something crazy? Still an SUV though…
This era of the Bonneville is one of the few 80’s/90’s GM cars I genuinely like. I’ll take the attempt at being modern for the time over say, no effort at all.
I’d love to see the stats on the number of customers that were actually considering both an Audi 5000 and the Pontiac Bonneville. Millions, I’m sure ????
About the same number as cross-shopped a Ford Grenada ESS with a Mercedes, probably
One of my best friends had the 1991 edition of the SSE and she absolutely loved that thing. She hung on to it until the mid 2000s until basically forced to give it up. She died in an SUV in an horrific multi car crash on I-81 in Pennsylvania, but I’ll always picture her tooling around in that big old Polo Green Bonneville SSE. If there’s any justice, it was waiting for her when she ascended.
In this vein, the 6th gen Grand Prix is my favorite. Similarly wonderful interior, but wedge-ier exterior, presaging the 90s.
me 2! Im sad I never owned one, I love the W bodies!
I’m unapologetically a huge Pontiac fan, I owned a few back in the day. I drove many others and loved them all. The 165hp seemed like plenty in these, seemed much faster than 9 seconds. Then again coming from early 80’s GM with the choked motors it def would be faster!
See, I’m not the only one who loved GM’s steep throttle tip-in from those days. Gimmicky, sure, but it was a neat little trick that helped make their cars everyday fun.
The torquey GM motors always made them feel quicker in every day driving than other low-torque, higher-HP cars.
GM never quite got that “numbers” and buttons and gadgets (especially) are not what made a car special.
I mean, if you consider how neatly everything fits into a touchscreen now, the car world has far more useless features out there today that nobody ever really uses.
To put it another way, it’s almost a shame current cars aren’t getting raked over the coals for the same basic problem. They just package it better because we have the tech now.
Which is why I don’t own a single car with a touchscreen. And touchscreens are not an improvement over the buttons, IMHO.
Nope, just that you can put 100+ functions in a touchscreen using the same space as a dozen buttons. I can see the allure. I just don’t like them, I simply tolerate them. If manufacturers offered a screenless option (especially at a discount), I’d take it!
By this point, I at least thought we’d have full DIY code reading and diagnostic capabilities for all these screens, but nope.
No kidding – the ability to read out codes in the car should have been part of OBD from the start. My ’01 Grand Cherokee could display the codes on the 8-segment LCD odometer display! Zero reason that a car with a big, beautiful screen can’t use it for something actually useful.
I had that display and it was silly it would not. You had to short out two pins on the OBD connector for it to read codes. Would be like a Morse code thing with the service engine soon light flashing your code. Like 1 12 was ok I recall. Was two pins in the corner, I recall. I made like 20 custom “keys” to connect the pins in shop class and gave em away or got some cigarettes as collateral from non friends. Otherwise you just bent a paper clip.
My WK GC would literally just display the codes instead of the miles on the odometer display. But for the life of me I don’t recall what combo of button presses made it do it.
Ah – Google to the rescue – “To display OBD codes on a WK Grand Cherokee, use the ignition key trick (On-Off-On-Off-On) to show codes on the odometer”
Used it to diagnose a bad crank sensor.
On of the (few) things I liked about the Android head unit that I had in my Volvo V70 was that it could run Torque. With a Bluetooth dongle in the port you had a built-in code reader. For what little good that does on a modern-ish Volvo.
I don’t see that happening now that back up cameras are mandatory. Kind of weird the unintended consequences of that reg…
For a fair comparison you’d have to print out a flow chart of every menu and submenu that’s on the touchscreen. My guess is it would be staggering to see all at once.
To be fair, those seats are as comfy as they look. The seat adjustability was finicky with the switches spread out, but once you found the sweet spot, the controls in the center made a bit (I’m being generous) more sense because they were the most likely ones to be used during road trips.
I liked this generation of Bonnie, but ended up buying a newer one to commute in that was a bit less special on most ways (aside from more power from the L36). I have long fantasized about getting one of these 8th gen SSEs and dropping in the Northstar V8 from the 10th gen Bonnie GXP.
I can see that being a sweet build to DD. Even with just the gen3 supercharged 3800, I bet these would wake up quite a bit.
For sure. The L67 would absolutely make the car much more lively, it just doesn’t have the same level of cool saying “I swapped a V6 for a V6” as it does saying the V6 was swapped for a V8. The L67 is a gem, and honestly probably a better swap than the Northstar once you start swapping pulleys.
I decided to look just for fun, and it turns out there is a black on black one of these for sale near me for $2K. A little tired but doesn’t look destroyed. Lowered a little, transmission leaks badly.
I’m not actually going to buy it, but its fun to imagine.
I agree that v8 swap has extra cool factor. The XTS V is a supercharged northstar isn’t it? I don’t know if that block would swap, but I wonder if the supercharger would fit on GXP engine. Then you can have that extra layer of tasty swap goodness. “I swapped in a v8 and then supercharged it” 😀 . I mean, if I’m pretending here, no reason to be reasonable.
I wonder if the adjustment motors on those comfy seats still work on a $2k used example? It would be tragic if they didn’t, but at that price and age it is hard to imagine they do. Now I’m tempted to hit up Autotempest and search my area…
I think the XTS-V was a turbo V6, but the XLR-V and STS-V were both supercharged. I’m not sure if the blower can be swapped from a longitudinal Northstar to a transverse Northstar, but it would be neat (even if it would be prudent to hear stud the Northstar, given the Northstar reputation for eating head gaskets).
The motors still work but all the plastic collars that locate and hold the drive cables have long been checked out as has most of the electronic displays and command buttons.
Yeah, likely so, which really puts a damper on pretending to be making the Deathstar trench run with the compass.
In my experience, the compass was an early fail point. Not that it wouldn’t work, but that it would not hold calibration and therefore it was useless.
Oh yeah, I remember that too. It did look cool, though.
These were fickle AF. When I upgraded my stereo and speakers that threw it off, the subwoofer too. I ended up retrofitting a Cadillac dimming mirror and compass onto mine, plugged into the harness and had that dimmer slider. Found it at a junkyard for $30 in 1998, worked well except when it got to teens or below temps and dimming was inconsistent and looked like Hunter S Thompson vision…
That would be cool, v8 swap. Cadillac XTS-V is a twin turbo V6, cannot recall which engine base, 3.6l V6?
As noted below the supercharged Northstars were the STSv and XLRv, but rwd layout and some extra height from the supercharger. These also had some weird cooling arrangements, so swapping into those would be quite an ordeal given their rwd.
An easier swap might be a newer supercharged 3800 with a pulley and exhaust. I’d bet with a basic tune you could pull that same Northstar power. Now the transmission might decide it’s has enough pretty fast tho…
Seat adjustment for all cars always took a lot of trial and error until MB came out with the seat-shaped controls that made it intuitive. Even then, I think it took a lot of years for other carmakers to copy MB’s control scheme.
This may be the car that Brock Yates expensed a can of flat black spray paint on.
These were pretty cool to 12-year-old me whose family cars in 1987 were a 1982 LeSabre for Dad and a 1985 Chevy Spectrum for Mom. It was peak monochromatic goodness, and how could you not like a an all-black or all-white specimen??