Junkyard Find: 1989 Buick Reatta
My trip to California to judge the Skankaway Anti-Toe-Fungal 500 24 Hours of LeMons started with a jaunt to Los Angeles, where I saw this extremely rare Hyundai Scoupe in a junkyard. Not so rare as the Scoupe, yet more interesting from an automotive-history standpoint, was this Buick a few rows away.
For reasons I can’t explain, the interior of this Reatta was full of bowling balls. Mysteries abound in junkyards.
At this point, all the Reatta fanatics are going to freak out, because this one still has its touchscreen ECC. ZOMG!
The Buick two-seater didn’t sell as well as The General’s commanders had hoped, for reasons that every TTAC reader can no doubt recite in his or her sleep, and so it joined the Allanté as another costly GM exercise in German-fearing squanderitude.
The luxury competition on the other side of the Atlantic wasn’t building a lot of cars with pushrod V6s based on late-50s technology, and we don’t need to get into discussions about front-wheel-drive and the lack of a manual-transmission option.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
What foreign cars ever had a CRT? Edit: This was supposed to be a reply to the above comment. I don't think anybody really "pulled ahead" in automotive CRT technology as much as the industry abandoned it entirely.
Wow. I made my living restoring classic cars for a number of years. Much of what this group declaims as junk was actually pretty well engineered and a pleasure to work on. But not a Reatta. They had so many bad ideas; I had the misfortune of being contracted to restore one of these. Nobody here mentioned the Teves antilock brakes; what a nightmare. Imagine power brakes where the power comes from pressurized brake fluid stored in an accumulator and pressurized by an electric pump. That's not the worst of it; the antilock computers are failure prone and good replacements for them are incredibly rare. The master cylinder assembly tends to leak like a sieve; changing one of these will spoil your day in a big time way. How about that cam sensor? They mounted a magnet in a plastic holder and clipped it into a hole in the cam gear. This triggers the cam sensor mounted in the front cover of the engine. Wrong plastic; it gets brittle and crumbles and drops the magnet into the bottom of the front cover. The really bad news: it clips into the back of the cam gear; you'll have to pull the cam gear to install a new magnet assembly. Got a code 15 check engine on your Buick V6? Have fun. For extra bonus fun, change the serpentine belt. See that motor mount that passes through the middle of the belt loop? Yup, have some more fun. WTF were the engineers thinking of? Fortunately the one I was cursed with working on was a '91 and it didn't have the touch screen. Those are a nightmare, too. I spent a huge amount of time and effort putting that mess back into order - the owner knew it was going to be expensive. He ran out of money before the job was done, though. Don't lust after one of these unless you have more money than sense; they're a nightmare. Fundamental rule: DON'T BUY OLD LUXURY CARS. Don't do it, you'll be sorry. And I'd strongly recommend that any vehicle with the early Teves hydraulic-boost antilock system be immediately banned from the roads. It's horribly unreliable, failures lead to no rear brakes and no boost on the front disk brakes, and good replacement parts are almost impossible to find.