1973 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Luxury Sedan for sale on BaT Auctions - ending September 2 (Lot #83,269) | Bring a Trailer If you are the town Dr and don't want to be too flashy by driving a Cadillac, here you go.
I'm not going to bother looking through the nearly 500 pics in this listing, but that looks like a nice car. I always preferred the look of the full-sized Olds over Buick for '73. I just like its front end and I really dig those cathedral tail lights and mini fins on top of the quarters. Very classy.
I think they were. Jaunty will know in a heartbeat. But I think those were available on the ‘73. I know I’ve seen them before.
No. Here's a portion of a page out of the '73 Olds brochure showing available wheelcovers. For the 98, only the second one down was offered. None of them match the ones on this car. It appears that this wheelcover was offered starting in 1975. Can't be 100% certain, but letter C in this image from the '75 brochure looks similar. Again, it was not available on the 98. It seems that the 98 wheelcovers were always the more staid, plain-jane covers. Spokes and so forth were reserved for the sportier cars.
They are period correct Olds wire hubcaps. Possibly a dealer swap. My father bought a new 1978 Buick Electra and didn’t like the Buick Rallye wheels on the car, so the dealer swapped them out for wire hubcaps to make the sale.
I knew Jaunty would know. I knew I had seen them. ‘75 I guess seems correct. I know Chevrolet always had wire wheel covers even from the ‘60’s. Ford and Mercury pretty much had them from the ‘50’s on. The “deluxe” wheel covers were especially popular in the ‘70’s on the LTD,s and Marquis models. I loved the airbag option. Did Olds carry that through until they were mandatory?
No. There were a lot of 1-2 year only items in this era. The original 1971-1976 design for the B bodies called for an air bag option because there was rumblings from the federal regulations about them soon to be mandatory (like the 5MPH bumpers) to get highway deaths down when they were designing these cars in the late 1960s. I want to say 1975 and maybe 1976 were the only years you could actually get them on *some* big cars (Pontiac never ended up offering them despite the hooks and cavities in the dash for them and I believe Chevrolet was the same way). I do also find it funny the airbag ad copy says you don't have to get shoulder belts or the seatbelt interlock system if you get the airbags. That's obviously not what happened - shoulder belts mandatory and integrated from 1974 on and the seatbelt interlock system was gone after 1974 to be replaced with just a buzzer.
They ended up finding out that unbelted dummies would bounce sideways, so when the airbags came back, NHTSA required the belts installed and used, to keep the occupant in place.
Olds offered the airbag system, officially called the "Air Cushion Restraint System," for three model years, 1974, 1975, and 1976. Buick and Cadillac offered it in '75 and '76. It was offered only on the full-size cars (88 and 98, but not the wagon, in Olds' case). Below is the brochure from 1974 introducing the system. Note in the first image on the right side how thick the dash padding is beneath the clock and to the right of that. Stowage of the passenger-side airbag.
I used to work for a guy that had an ACRS tester (he bought out the tools from a GM dealership). We tried to find anyone with an Olds or Caddy with ACRS to no avail.
I remember Allstate did a commercial with a ‘72 Monterey, and a ‘73 Impala that had airbags. They obviously sung the praises and were hopeful they would be standard equipment within the next 5 model years. Think I just saw one of those green Impalas on Ebay not too long ago.
There also was a movie from '74 or '75, where the stuntman crashed an Olds equipped with ACRS. I cannot remember the movie, but I remember the scene in my head, the car was driven at an angle into a cinder block wall.
Chevy made a few in either 73 or 74, but it was not a regular option, I think it was 73 and they were test cars, My sister bought one used in the late 1970's, we didn't even know it had airbags until she hit a parked car with it. Surprise! I think it was an Impala, but I don't remember for sure. I do remember the ugly steering wheel it had.
