Junkyard Find: 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Brougham

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

Now that we’ve looked at the corpse of a GM product that flopped in the American marketplace, let’s exhume an example of a GM product that sold like crazy: the Middle Malaise Era Olds Cutlass.

The downsized ’78-81 Cutlass didn’t sell quite as well as the previous generation, but it was still a solid showroom performer for The General. You could even get a 442 version!

These cars, close relatives of the jillion-selling Malibu, retain some popularity with the gangsta-style crowd, though not as much as the “box Caprice.” Clearly, these wheels weren’t enough to tempt an auction buyer prior to this car’s last tow-truck ride.








Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

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.

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  • Econobiker Econobiker on Feb 01, 2012

    Grandparents had a green w/ white half vinyl top with matching green interior. I think that that is one of the biggest losses to the old ways- crazy car interior colors. Now it is black, grey, or tan(ish) due to parts commonalization. You used to be able to get floor mats in red, blue, green, black, brown, and clear- now just grey, tan, black and clear and funky designs on black.

  • NoGoYo NoGoYo on Jun 14, 2013

    I've never seen a pre-shovel nose G-body Cutlass, but I did find a fiiiiine 1976 Cutlass Supreme Brougham for sale today! http://s257.photobucket.com/user/rockmanDX3/media/100_0558.jpg.html Sorry folks, but you can't have it. I NEED this car.

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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