Junkyard Find: 1990 Buick Reatta
Published: March 25th, 2019
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The Buick Reatta is one of the more interesting attempts made by The General to steal back some North American buyers who had defected to European luxury brands. For a while, I’d photograph every junked Reatta I found, but more and more kept showing up in big self-service wrecking yards and I stopped paying attention for a while.Only about 20,000 Reattas were made, but the last 10 years have seen Full Depreciation for these cars. Still, I hadn’t done a Reatta Junkyard Find since 2012, and I spotted this shiny-looking ’90 in a San Francisco Bay Area yard a couple of weeks back, so here we go!
The E-Body Riviera served as the basis for the Reatta, which meant that this supposed Mercedes-Benz 560SL-killer got its power from a primitive pushrod V6 engine. Shifting was slushbox-only, of course.
The Electronic Control Center went away after 1990, but the ’90 model came with a futuristic-looking digital instrument cluster.
Like many GM cars of this era, this Reatta had a broken hood latch, and I wasn’t willing to tear up all my knuckles trying to pry the hood open for engine-compartment photos. If you must see an early-90s Buick 3800 V6, you can look at this car.
The Reatta’s radical styling and two seats scared away the increasingly elderly “traditional” Buick buyers, and the younger crowd preferred the R107 Benz (which outsold the hell out of the Reatta in the United States). The same sort of thing happened with the Oldsmobile Toronado Troféo.
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Handcrafted luxury for two.
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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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Slow, ugly, impractical, leaf-sprung front-driver, what a truly epic halo car.
Seeing this sitting next to an Aveo, which is over 20 years newer than the Reatta, it's clear that GM has not evolved since the 1980s. In fact, GM has regressed.