Maybe the most negative car ad I have ever read. Like the owner is begging you not to buy it. https://racine.craigslist.org/ctd/d/kenosha-1981-oldsmobile-delta-eighty/7106707864.html
Wonder if it would make the 30 mikes to Illinois. It’s a different state. I quit asking my dog if I should buy a car. She just gives me a blank stare.
It is hard to believe someone cared for a 1981 GM diesel for 39 years. Could debate if these disels were or were not the worse engines GM ever built but I can assure you they were truly HATED by many people who bought them. Maybe the seller of this car got one of the good ones but you could not pay me to take it.
I'd drive it. I loved the Diesel in my old Cutlass. Not a lot of room in my driveway these days and I don't think I really want to deal with the seller.
When I sold Chevrolet’s in the early ‘80’s I remember some nice Buick and Olds diesel trade ins. Those poor people got their A$$ handed to them. I think that caused some of the angst. A lot of people just swapped out the diesel for a standard engine. You could afford to do it as the trade in value was like half the normal value.
As I'd been told by a few customers, it was a lot less than half, in most of their cases. One guy spent $8+K on a Delta 88, got offered $2500 with less than 16K on the clock. He elected to keep it and drove it till it puked, some 41K or so, sold it outright for $100.
I think it depends on the year. The first year for the Olds diesel was 1977. My father bought a new 1979 Toronado with a diesel. The car was fine until the 22,000 mile mark, and then it blew a head gasket. It happened while my parents were on a driving trip from upstate New York to Florida. They were in North Carolina when it happened and had the car towed to a nearby Olds dealer. They left the car there while they rented another one and continued on to Florida, returning to the dealer on their way back about a week later to pick it up. My father did ultimately receive a settlement from GM as part of a class-action lawsuit. He ultimately traded the car on an gasoline-powered '81 Toro. So the above is one story. The other one is a friend I had at work in the early '80s who bought a 1981 Olds Cutlass diesel. He had no problems with that car and kept it for 100,000 miles before finally trading it. This is the pattern I've observed about the Olds diesel. The "early" ones (1977 to 1979) were the problem engines. My father always said that Olds used its customers as test engineers on the diesel, and it took a few years to work the bugs out. The 1980 and later Olds diesels, and the car that's the subject of this thread falls into that category, tend to be much better. It took Olds a few years, but they finally got the diesel right. Unfortunately, the damage had been done, the Olds diesel's reputation was ruined, and Olds gave it up a few years later. There are people over at classicoldsmobile.com who collect Oldsmobiles with diesel engines, so there is a market for these, as small as it might be.
I had heard the adage that Olds used their customers as guinea pigs; But I'd also heard GM mostly used Caddy/Buick/Olds customers for a variety of systems testing. Think airbags and anti-lock brakes.
GM shoved the diesel out to the unsuspecting public without enough road testing (110HP and 22.5:1 with weak head bolts) and too many assumptions about owners maintaining their cars (no fuel\water separator!). Once they got the car right they were impressive little fuel economy vehicles if you could get over the lack of power and almost dangerously slow acceleration. GM should have switched to the 6.2 diesel instead of continuing the Olds 350 in 1982 (and maybe warrantying the 350 with the 6.2). Would have built up a lot of customer good will and solved their problems. I am truly amazed that someone cared enough about this bare bones model to keep it original for almost 40 years. Must have been an older person who didn't drive much. Up north seems to have more of these diesels left than the rest of the country.
