Oldsmobile

Oldsmobile was, for most of the twentieth century, one of the most consequential names in the American automobile — and at the end one of the most quietly redundant. Founded in 1897 by Ransom E. Olds, it was older than General Motors itself, older than Ford’s assembly line, and arguably the company that taught the industry how to build a car in volume. When GM finally retired it in 2004, it ended 107 years of continuous production.

The brand’s claim to history is not marketing. The Curved Dash Oldsmobile of 1901 is widely credited as the first mass-produced automobile, built on a moving-progressive assembly process with interchangeable parts years before Ford’s Model T line. Oldsmobile went on to introduce the first commercially successful fully automatic transmission, the Hydra-Matic, in 1940, and the high-compression overhead-valve Rocket V8 in 1949 that helped launch the postwar horsepower era.

For decades Oldsmobile occupied a comfortable rung on GM’s ladder — a notch above Chevrolet and Pontiac, below Buick and Cadillac — and in the muscle-car years its 442 and Cutlass models gave it genuine swagger. By the late 1970s the Cutlass was among the best-selling cars in America, and in the mid-1980s the division was moving on the order of a million cars a year.

Then the identity dissolved. A disastrous diesel engine in the early 1980s poisoned the brand’s reputation, and GM’s corporate badge-engineering left Oldsmobiles looking and feeling like Buicks and Pontiacs and Chevrolets. The company’s own “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign all but confessed the problem. Squeezed between Japanese imports and GM’s own crowded lineup, Oldsmobile lost its reason to exist. GM announced the wind-down on December 12, 2000, and the last car, an Alero, was built on April 29, 2004.