We drive the new-for-1971 personal-luxury-oriented Oldsmobile Toronado

For 1971, Oldsmobile’s pioneering front-wheel-drive Toronado moved away from being a sporty personal-luxury coupe, and really leaned into the luxury end of things. With its blunt nose, formal roofline and body sides no longer pulled taut against bulging wheel arches that emphasized the rolling stock, the Toro’s sporting swagger all but disappeared. With nearly two… The post We drive the new-for-1971 personal-luxury-oriented Oldsmobile Toronado appeared first on The Online Automotive Marketplace.

StephenColbert

Jan 10, 2025 - 00:56

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We drive the new-for-1971 personal-luxury-oriented Oldsmobile Toronado

For 1971, Oldsmobile’s pioneering front-wheel-drive Toronado moved away from being a sporty personal-luxury coupe, and really leaned into the luxury end of things. With its blunt nose, formal roofline and body sides no longer pulled taut against bulging wheel arches that emphasized the rolling stock, the Toro’s sporting swagger all but disappeared. With nearly two points of compression taken out of the big 455-cu.in. V-8 to accommodate upcoming unleaded fuel mandates, power was down (though only marginally); with an extra three inches of wheelbase, five inches of length and 350 pounds on board, well… we can see where this is going.

Or can we? Only one way to find out.

Jim Schultz’s True-Track-equipped Galleon Gold 1971 Toronado was purchased from the original owner in the mid-1990s; it has just recently turned 100,000 miles, judging by the number of zeroes at the start of the odometer during our drive. It looks, and feels, like you could shave one of those zeroes off the mileage with little question; quite coincidentally this paint scheme exactly matches the model featured on the opening spread of the 1971 Toronado catalog, complete with black vinyl top. (Not coincidentally, we found a rocky background to emulate the catalog spread’s backdrop.) We had an opportunity to drive this ’71 back-to-back with Jim’s ’70 Toronado GT around a high-desert loop near his Chino Valley, Arizona home, so that we could get a real feel for the evolutionary changes that Oldsmobile made year-to-year.

Changes? At a glance, the only thing that remained was Oldsmobile’s much-touted UPP (Unitized Power Package), combining a north-south-mounted V-8 and torque converter, with the front-drive transmission riding side-saddle, getting power from the engine via the rubberized Hy-Vo two-inch chain, then to the wheels via a final drive unit and front axle shafts with CV joints at either end. The engine remained Oldsmobile’s top-of-the-line 455-cubic-inch torque monster, and how you view the power rating for ’71 will depend on whether you’re a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full type of person. Compression dropped to 8.5:1, down from 10.25:1, in anticipation of America’s switch to unleaded fuel. At the same time, GM adopted and published the new SAE net horsepower ratings, which tested engines fully dressed with accessories. The base ’70 engine was rated at 375 horsepower SAE gross; the ’71 engine, shared with the W-30-equipped 442, was rated at 275 horses SAE net. That drop says more about the revised testing system than about the engine losing power, as published ’71 SAE gross figures still put the low-compression 455 at 350 hp using the old system. Not such a huge drop after all, is it?

The semi-unitized chassis was exchanged for a full-length perimeter frame, trading any vestige of sporting feel for increased solidity, comfort and silence. The front torsion bars were traded for coil springs; similarly, the quad-shock/leaf-sprung rear made way for coils and trailing arms. The heavy-duty F41 suspension was available, but more than ever it seemed to be not in keeping with the spirit of the Toronado.

The first-generation Toro gradually moved from flamboyant outlier—all hidden headlamps and flared wheel openings and dramatic fastback style—to something increasingly formal as time went on. By 1970, you could tell that Toronado was quickly moving away from the wilder aspects of its style. The popularity of the ’69 Lincoln Mk III’s crisp lines helped seal Toronado’s new direction, and for its 1971 restyle, Oldsmobile looked toward the strong-selling, previous-generation Cadillac Eldorado. Indeed, Olds division honcho John Beltz had Stan Parker (who developed the ’67 Eldorado) as his styling chief and recalled David North (who styled the ’66 Toronado) from GM’s UK Vauxhall division based on an Eldorado proposal he had previously sketched up. Headlamps were now exposed, and while its face was grille-free, a pair of outboard bumper-mounted vents helped the engine breathe. The roofline was more formal as well.

The ’71 Toronado also managed to pack a pair of safety features that were a good decade and a half before other vehicles were so equipped (whether by federal regulation or the magic of the marketplace). Oldsmobile’s optional True-Track system was an early iteration of what has become known as ABS, or anti-lock brakes; the nose-heavy Toronado was long known to lock its rear wheels in a panic stop. True-Track arrived as a late-season option on 1970 Toronados (and Cadillac Eldorados, which called the system Trackmaster), but was more properly rolled out with the new car. It was a $205 option. The other was likely meant more as a styling spiff than a safety feature: all second-generation Toronados received a pair of high-mounted combination brake lights/turn signals, mounted outboard beneath the rear windows and exposed via a pair of reliefs at the outer edges of the trunk lid.

Oldsmobile’s driver-centric “control center” features a central gauge cluster paired with accessory controls wrapped around the driver.

Two things hit immediately, before we ever turned a wheel or twisted an ignition key. First, the newer car felt far wider despite only an inch difference between them; it bordered on a struggle to rest my elbow (attached as they are to gorilla-length arms) on the door sill as we drove, so wide was the new model’s interior. Second, the older model’s instrument panel was far chattier: the earlier car had a brace of gauges on either side of the gimmicky barrel-roll speedometer (a feature exchanged for a conventional sweep-needle-on-fixed-numbers unit for ’71). What looked like gauges in the ’70, offering messages about oil pressure and engine temperature and such, were in fact warning lamps rather than gauges; the ’71 Toronado dispensed with the illusion and moved the warning lamps inboard, closer to the center of the cluster. The newer car’s instrument panel brought other controls—lights, radio, climate control—closer to the steering wheel in a pair of pods that flanked the speedo. The pods were finished in a warm semi-reflective brushed bronze color—a darned sight more attractive than the sort of faux-woodgrain that would usually festoon the interior of an American luxury car of the period, and a finish that reminded us of the instrument panel in another front-wheel-drive coupe of the period, the Citroen SM. A clock remained resolutely positioned, inconveniently for the driver, over the glove box in both cars. Otherwise, dimensions felt similarly generous between them, surely helped by the lack of a driveline hump intruding into the passenger compartment.

One other differentiator is the view over the hood. The earlier car showed a flat expanse, with peaked fenders giving a sense of the furthest edges of the nose; it felt as wide as it did long. Not so the ’71: the center section was raised at the leading edge, over where a grille would normally appear (or were the side sections leading to the headlamps lowered?). The effect is that, despite the fenders remaining peaked, and despite the scant few added inches in length, the hood feels like it extends dramatically further into the distance. Ultimately, the ‘71 feels like a bigger car—far bigger than the paltry year-on-year numbers might otherwise suggest.

Despite the dramatic reduction in compression from 10.25 to 8.5:1 in 1971 to accommodate adoption of unleaded fuel, had gross horsepower continued, the 375 gross horsepower, high-compression engine of 1970 would only have had a 25hp gross advantage over the 275hp net-rated ’71 455.

The high-compression ’70 didn’t like the tank of ethanol-laced fuel it carried on our drive, and so pinged at anything more than half-throttle. The ’71 had no such issue, and while it didn’t quite have the snap of the earlier car off the line, it was designed for smoothness and elegance—an accumulation of speed rather than full-on acceleration. The through line was that Toronado’s legendary feel of stability on the open road was very much on display. Steering was quick—a little quicker than you might assume for a vehicle of this one’s age, heft, and target market—with a reassuring weight to it, though at no point did anything resembling feel enter the equation. The ride was pillowy-smooth, though to be fair the roads we traveled had been paved not long ago, and braking was sure and straight. (We didn’t get into it hard enough to activate the True-Track.)

As it was a temperate afternoon when we slid behind the wheel, we elected to drive with all the windows down. This decision perhaps was at odds with the personal-luxury mission of providing an all-encompassing cocoon. Though we didn’t regret our choice, we did get a sense that the ‘71’s bluff exterior generated a bit more wind noise than the ’70 during our 60-plus-mph cruise through the high Arizona desert, but it was one of those days where the comfort of the breeze trumped the appeal of the hermetically-sealed cocoon.

As highly regarded as the early Toronados are in the collector-car market today, the second-generation cars seemed to better capture the automotive zeitgeist when they were in showrooms. Toronado sold just over 40,000 cars in 1966, but sales quickly tumbled thereafter, bouncing between 21,000 and 28,000 units per year across its first generation. The new formally styled ’71 launched with 28,980 built during a strike year, but’72 sales approached 49,000 cars, and nearly 56,000 were built for 1973, making it the highest-production Toronado ever. That’s nearly as many sales in three years (134,000-ish) as Toronado had in its first five years (140,000 and change). Sales would calm down post-OPEC I, but those three years alone justified Oldsmobile’s pivot toward pure luxury. But don’t let facts get in the way of conventional wisdom.