Ten Years after the End of an Era

Ten years (and a few weeks) ago, the last Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line at General Motors Corp.’s Lansing Car Assembly plant. Oldsmobile was named after founder Ransom E. Olds, the man who started the Olds Motor Vehicle Co. back in 1897, making Oldsmobile the oldest automotive brand name in the U.S., and second oldest in the world only to the Daimler nameplate in Europe.

The Olds Company became part of General Motors (GM) in 1908 when it joined the collection of pioneering carmakers that included Buick, Cadillac and Chevrolet. Oldsmobile was a leader in the early auto making business. It was the brand that first used chrome-plated trim and eventually built some of the most recognizable cars in the U.S. auto industry. Oldsmobiles were very popular through the 60s and 70s, and by the 80s, the brand was selling more than 1 million vehicles per year. It was near the end of that decade however, that Oldsmobile sales began to slump. Company executives observed that the cars had somehow become “old and ordinary” to much of the buying public and analysts worried that the brand’s image problems might be insurmountable.

A late-1980s campaign designed to attract younger buyers by advertising the cars as “Not your father’s Oldsmobile!” fell flat, and the brand’s senior citizen vibe only increased. Company execs also thought the cars were too similar to the offerings from other GM brands to the point that they were almost clones, but with different emblems. Out of a grand total of 32 million Oldsmobiles built, more than 14 million of them were built at the plant right next to the brand’s headquarters in Lansing, Michigan. People at the time thought of Lansing as the ultimate automobile company town, and said “Without Oldsmobile, there would be no Lansing.” That observation moved closer to reality as sales tumbled further in the mid-1990s and then Oldsmobile’s presence in Lansing faded even more dramatically when GM moved Oldsmobile headquarters to Detroit in 1998.

When GM closed the Fisher Body plant along with several other dated Detroit plants a few years before the “big” bankruptcy, the handwriting was already on the wall for Oldsmobile. By 2000, GM didn’t have the money it needed to invest new product lines and rumors that the giant Detroit automaker might kill off the Oldsmobile division along with stable mates Pontiac, Saturn, Saab and Hummer, began to ring true. When a New York Times review described the then-current Oldsmobile Alero as “white-bread mediocrity” and “Cars for people who don’t like cars very much”, the end was in sight.

On April 29, 2004, the last Oldsmobile Alero rolled off the assembly line in Lansing and thousands of employees lined up to sign their names underneath the hood. That last example of rolling Oldsmobile technology was displayed at the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum in Lansing for several years before it moved to a more permanent residence at GM’s Heritage Center in Sterling Heights, Michigan, where it sits today. Although it was the end of an era and the end of Oldsmobile, the brand still lives on in garages, photographs and museums, as well as on the road today, thanks to the efforts of thousands of dedicated Oldsmobile fans.