It wasn’t a bad design but just imagine it with a lower top and wheels pulled out further at each end. Dave Rand was principally responsible for the design. Now, who is the customer if not a Buick buyer? Buick targeted “younger buyers on their way up that had the wherewithal to buy a $25,000-30,000 car but also older retired buyers who could be purchasing it as sort of a reward.” Buick forgot one of the main tenets of GM marketing: “You can sell an old man a young man’s car, but you can’t sell a young man an old man’s car.” What was Buick thinking?Īs for the design Buick settled on a two-place coupe. RELATED: The Reatta Is The Coolest Affordable Buick You Forgot About “You can sell an old man a young man’s car, but you can’t sell a young man an old man’s car” 1990 Buick Reatta | Mecum It was wasted tech Buick customers could care less about. How about a digital cathode-ray tube gauge panel? Great! And a CRT touchscreen? Golden! The problem was 1) the technology wasn’t quite up to the task and 2) the typical Buick buyer got scared away from blinking digital information blasting from the instrument panel. So 165 hp and a zero-60 time of nine seconds flat combined with fully independent suspension and four-wheel disc brakes started things off. It got GM’s new 3.8-liter V6 with port fuel injection and counter-rotating shafts to counter the V6’s inherent vibration. Really? That’s like asking to make a cardboard box like a steel safe. GM management said to develop something that could compete with the Mercedes SL. Now it needed something, not like the Allante, Corvette, or Fiero. Now Buick needed something, not like the Allante, Corvette, or Fiero 1990 Buick Reatta Convertible on a riverbank | General Motors But as we said that went to Cadillac with equally dismal results. Based on extensive consumer research what Buick came up with was the Allante. The historical record indicates Buick thought it needed a halo car but not as good as a Corvette nor as bad as the Pontiac Fiero. A worthy candidate for any Worst list, we present the 1988-91 Buick Reatta. We could somewhat understand if it was a Cadillac, but Cad had its own expensive two-seat loser called the Allante. With no logic to why Buick needed a hyper-expensive two-seater with a crapcan engine it came and went without hardly a memory of its existence. We’ve always said GM works in mysterious ways and there is no better example than the Buick Reatta.
0 kommentar(er)
