QOTD: The Best Body by Buick?

These pages have spilled more than a bit of digital ink on the Buick brand in the last couple of weeks. For today’s QOTD, we’re about to spill a little more.

Buick’s current roster holds a couple of good-looking arrows in its quiver, not the least of which is the Regal Tour X (which, it should be noted, is listed proudly as a WAGON on Buick’s own build-and-price site), particularly in the natty shade of Rioja Red Metallic. Here is your Monday question: which Buick vehicle of yore hit it completely out of the park in terms of styling?

I’ll open the bid with what is probably the world’s most unsurprising and least original response — the fabulous and absolutely jaw-dropping 1965 Buick Riviera. Styling penned by the Bill Mitchell design team evokes a coke-bottle shape and, with those covered headlamps hidden by clamshell doors, it totally looks like a charlatan who would flirt shamelessly with your wife at the company Christmas party. A 425-cube V8 seals the deal.

Let’s throw this conversation open to concept cars, too. Twenty years later, Buick popped out the futuristic Wildcat. Hardly the first Buick to bear that name, your author can remember eyeing photos of the ’85 show car in a book at his rural community’s library with élan usually reserved for the girly magazines Aubrey Anstey kept in the top rack of the town pharmacy’s magazine shelf.

And, to this day, I still desire a 1987 Buick GNX. Built at a time when, at GM, building anything that beat the Corvette was verboten, Lord Vader’s coupe was faster in the measured quarter-mile than the greatest supercar ever built, the Ferrari F40 (12.7 seconds vs 13.0 seconds respectively, if you’re wondering).

What’s your pick from the back issues of Buick’s catalog?

[Images: General Motors]