The Buick Reatta is one of the many GM cars of its era that didn’t make a lot of marketing sense; the average age of Buick buyers in the late 1980s was about 113, and that’s not a demographic whose members tend to be comfortable with low-slung two-seaters full of intimidatingly futuristic electronic devices.
is one of the many GM cars of its era that didn’t make a lot of marketing sense; the average age of Buick buyers in the late 1980s was about 113, and that’s not a demographic whose members tend to be comfortable with low-slung two-seaters full of intimidatingly futuristic electronic devices. You still see Reattas on the street now and then, and I found an ’89 in a Los Angeles junkyardlast year. Here’s one that I spotted last week in a Denver self-serve yard.
The Reatta had a lot going for it, but it listed at $25,000 (about a grand more than the BMW 325i), it was sold under a marque associated with the elderly, and it was a front-wheel-drive car with no available manual transmission.
The Buick 3.8 liter V6 was a sturdy, well-proven engine, but it was a pushrod unit that made the kind of vacuum-cleaner-sucking-up-a-rubber-band noise under full throttle that turned off buyers of high-end European machinery.
It looked good, though, and some younger folks appreciate that. My fellow Alameda Highalum, Kreayshawn, daily-drives a ’90 Reatta on the East Bay streets, and she says “Oh my God, I like love that fucking car!”
Someone has yanked the touch-screen instrument clusters out of this one, which means there’s some other Reatta that will benefit from this one’s demise.