@@donk499 Maybe laced with GM Optikleen or GM EOS(Engine Oil Supplement) The owners manuals always said to ask your dealer for the specific usage of GM EOS.
True that. '71 Pontiacs were, car for car, the best looking lineup on the road. This was true every year from about 1967 until 1978. '79 Firebird was ugly, so that was the end of the run.
I miss being young enough to walk home in 115 degree Phoenix heat, which I did, after every single Pontiac I ever owned broke down on me. Maybe an ancient one like this would be slighly more reliable, but I, for one, am glad Pontiac went the way of the Dodo. 🤷🏻
As a former GSM this is predictive programming at its finest. The over the top Bullwinkle fractured fairy tale approach captures the hearts and minds of the sales staff to think "only they" have the product that is going to mesmerize the consumer. Remember, there were only 3 major network TV channels then, the internal and external customer were in lock step.
Those Total Television and Gamma Production cartoons (Bullwinkle, Underdog, Dudley Do-Right, Tennessee Tuxedo, etc.) were AWESOME. Although very suitable for children, they had SUBTLE touches of adult humor which typically went right over the kiddie's heads. BTW, I miss my Grandma's old 1971 Pontiac Grand Prix which was handed down to me in '84 when I graduated from Fresno State. Had the 400 four-barrel and most everything one could get on that model. It'd seen better days but still had some life left in it. Yep, shoulda kept it.
I'm 71. in 1967 the Summer of Love introduced psychedelics to America. By 1969 tripping was a way of life for tens of millions of people under 25. cops were clueless. They knew you were wasted, but there weren't any DUI laws, only DWI. So the driver blew .00 and walked a straight line while rapping " Hey man, your one of us, come join in, it's heavy man..." It took another year or two before marketing realized this, the MY 1970 Mopars had the first trippy ads with wild paints and interiors to match. Four track, then 8 track decks came in, and AOR [Album Orientated Rock] stations flourished. All was well for half a decade, with people toking and tripping while driving at triple digit speeds as long as your car could take it. There were few cops and even less traffic at night. Suddenly, it was over. Cars were deballed, Disco was here, rock music in bars disappeared. The malaise era was upon us; 55 mph speed limits, POC's [Pissed Off Cops] would jump anyone driving over 65, and urine testing became routine. Cars strained to go 85, the speedo couldn't go any higher. Miami became "Paradise Lost" As the Reagan administration dumped thousands of tons of coke [CIA "Air America" 7500 Tons] and The new Firebird/Camaro made a sizzling 165 hp, the Corvette LS82 topped the charts at 185, auto only! Jap cars spread quicker than AIDS, Detroit car sales tanked. Muscle cars didn't like rationed 87 octane no lead, most were wrecked or rusted out. I sold my modded Chally RT440 and bought a new 6 cyl Econoline van with 120 hp with a 4 on the floor manual. My go fast days were over. I wasn't a kid any more.
I always knew I was born in the wrong decade. At 50 now, by the time I was of driving age, the insurance companies made damned sure I was severely restricted by what I could afford to own or operate. If it were a manual anything, more $. If it were a V8 or a turbo 4, lots more $. If it had only 2 doors, more $. If it were black, red or blue, more $ ( no lie, white or grey cars cost less to insure) And let's not even talk about an old muscle car or anything from the 70s aside from a 6 cyl sedan or a wagon. As I said, all the fun of being a new driver was gone. I'm told it's even worse now, as teens don't even care about getting their driver's licence at all, spending their $ on Ubers. Hey at least they won't be pulled over for staring at their dumb phones..
First of all, totally captivating writing my mom is the same age so this rang completely true to me. Second I was 18 in 2006 half the age I am now and my first car out of high school was a 1970 Ford torino gt I found for $2500 it started and ran very well only one rear quarter panel was starting to rust but only upon close examination did it not look perfect. I tagged it as an antique and the insurance was shockingly affordable for a 18 year old dude 😊
Well spoken I’ve heard similar stories before kids growing up with Christine and the SS396… their first brand new car being the 77 Regal or a maybe a Dodge Aspen with no ac and a shaking 6 cylinder but every piece of malaise trim possible… gas hits 50 cents a gallon everyone wants a diesel which disgraces the most dignified of GM models, or a Volkswagen or Datsun… then next thing you know Cadillacs are your grandfathers car, Oldsmobiles are your fathers car - even downsized and both assimilated into a vague ambiguous corporate profile and then even the likes of Clark Griswold has a bland ass Taurus. 🤷🏻♂️ Something definitely got lost in translation, and it’s sad.
Oh Adam... I need to do a spot of LSD to truly appreciate this retro ad! Probably need to go down into the Midwest Basement with a bean bag and lava lamp, cranking WWWW on the Quadraphonic Receiver to make the experience complete!
It was the weirdest of times... It was the trip-iest of times, dude. What else can we expect from that bizarre time where the 60's gave way to the 70's?
To me this was peak pontiac/gm! Long low wide, pretty cleanly styled, sleek and smooth, distinct from each other but without a lot of extraneous doodads and cladding, much less busy than the 60s creases and chintzy ornamentation, and definitely nicer and more sorted out than many of the late 50s jukebox designs. In a way more like an extension of the rounded and smooth early 50s style, just stretched in every direction with that same nice rounded smooth style that looks elegant and posing without being obnoxious or gaudy . It's really elegantly imposing, roomy, and an amazing ride, truly luxurious cars that an average man could afford, Rolls-Royce comfort and power for the middle class. How far we have fallen.
Big cars that were sporty, but also victims of their era. Primitive emission control technology meant low mpg and less horsepower. Rust took its toll, up north at least.
He did a lot of tv commercials including the 1973 Levis jeans ad. Him, Peter Thomas, Casey Kasem, William Schallert, Mel Blanc, William Conrad, and many others did the narration for almost everything in the 70's.
That was Nordine? I'm a big fan of his work but, with the poor audio quality I wasn't sure. (Oregon jazz station KMHD just played a piece of his this afternoon.) I worked for a company that created that trippy "computer" animation via pre-digital "Scanimate" equipment, same hardware that animated the onscreen song lyrics in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"
I couldn’t say it any more concise. Oh to be a fly on the wall when this video was started in a training session. I can only imagine the, pardon my French, “WTF” comments being muttered.
It was an analog video animation system called Scanimation. It was used all the time on _The Electric Company_ and also made a few appearances in _Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory._
The narrator of the beginning segment (up to 7:18) is clearly Ken Nordine. He later did a radio show called "Word Jazz" on WBEZ in Chicago. Maybe they gave him the assignment and he just did his thing. If you want to go down a worm hole search Ken Nordine Word Jazz. Make sure you have a favorite beverage or THC delivery system or both at hand.
The name you are seeking is Ken Nordine. That's his voice doing the narration, and most likely his agency, or the agency he was working with, who produced this film. The swirly, bendy visuals were a product of cutting edge video technology featured at one point in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" the same year. Nordine was a renowned voice poet at the time, with albums of work. He would later be overexposed in a series of Levi's commercials that are now legend. Fifty years ago, he was at the top of the game.
3 minutes in, and Ken Nordine is the answer to why this film is like this. Go back to 1957 and listen to Word Jazz by Fred Katz and Ken Nordine. There were some real cool cats working at the agency.
Wow, what a great concept, I am 75 and never thought of that, I had a Mercedez it was on the passenger side, now a Lexus on the driver side, you should have patented this point and would have been a billionaire by now, just great!
I think a lot of full size American cars in the 1970s had the fuel filler behind the hinged license plate bracket. A good idea in terms of access from the left or right, but it also required you to bend over compared to the fender mounted filler doors.
Rear crash standards actually killed the rear filler neck. For some time now, they have been mounted on the left side as fuel tanks moved forward, which is safer. Oddly enough, Ford's vertical mounted tanks on the full sized cars, which was ahead of the rear diff, was a novel safety idea.
I had a 1974 "Grand Prix." Loved the car. The "only" excuse I can find for the instruction video was it was the "70s" ! Leftover 60s bleeding into the 70s. It happens every decade !
There are several training videos floating around the internet for the 1973 Pontiacs staring the stunt driver Bill Hickman. At the time he was stunt driving Pontiacs for the movies The French Connection and The Seven Ups.
Reminds me of our avocado green and gold kitchen, shag carpet in the living room, and lava lamp sitting on our new 18” color TV. Oh, and the bean bag chair near the fireplace. What an era!
"In closing, if you bought a 1970 Pontiac you own an engineering disaster and you must get rid of that pile and get a 1971 to be right with the automotive world" lol. As far as the introduction with the LSD inspired graphic arts man I couldn't stand to watch it after about 1 minute had to fast forward to where that bad trip ended eyes couldn't take it anymore. Bizarre .
Old television ads from the 50's showed products and demonstrated and explained why you should buy. The part of this training video with the engineers explaining the new cars and visual demonstrations makes sense in any era. The start of that video would make me want to get up and walk out of the room.
And they tended to state that 'this product is the finest in the world' and try to convince you why. Now it's all about how it makes you feel, which this approach is certainly emblematic. Remember the Infinity ads that did not show you the car? Adam could certainly do at least a hundred videos about horrible car advertising; the ads that implied, 'buy this car and the women will be irresistibly drawn to you' type.
Adam, To answer your question, they were smoking Marlboro, Winston, Camel, Lucky Strike and Kool cigarettes among other brands. Some were smoking non-Cuban cigars including those smaller, tipped cigars which are sometimes referred to as 'cigarillos'. Finally, a substantial minority were smoking their tobacco from a pipe as had been the custom since the days of Sir Walter Raleigh. The non-smokers involved in producing this film would have certainly ingested copious amounts of second hand smoke and gone home every day with their clothes reeking. Beyond all this inhalation of dubious substances, during lunch breaks and after office hours many of those involved in the production would have consumed substantial quantities of legal drugs like alcohol. These alcohol-altered discussions may well have impacted the final editorial choices. All in all, large quantities of nicotine and a myriad of other perfectly legal poisonous chemicals would have played a large role in shaping the final form of this film. Just Say Yes to Pontiac®and Just Say No to Drugs. 😉 One thing we can all agree on is the fact that automotive engineers ought to wear short sleeved dress shirts and ties at all times. 😁😁
Thanks for posting this! When you get past the animated silliness, the product and technical aspects of the presentation video are actually quite interesting. Particularly when they talk about the changes for 1971. Good to see the key PMD players featured also.
Advertising really took a strange turn after Don Draper took off and headed west... In all seriousness, this is kinda neat but I can't imagine a 54 year old Pontiac salesman who drove a beige Bonneville watching this in late 1970 in preparation for the new cars. They must've thought society had totally collapsed and management was off their rocker. I think it's pretty cool! I can appreciate Pontiac trying something wildly different than the very cut and dry training films for other cars. You can find plenty of 1960d training films on YT for Mopars and they were white bread compared to this multi grain loaf of oddity.
I agree. Though fun to watch, those old 50 and early 60s ads and training vids are so corny and so obviously biased. I just like to see the cars in action, when new. In this series, Pontiac really pushed the Grandville hard into Buick Electra and Olds 98 territory. Kinda surprised GM brass gave the OK. Either way, the lower priced full sized cars sold way better. My GM biased grandfather used to say that if you had a bit more $, you bought a Pontiac rather than a Chevy. If you had a little bit more, you bought a Buick. If you couldn't quite afford a Caddy, you bought an Olds.
I remember Car & Driver's headline for their road test of the new Pontiac Grand Ville: "Grand Ville: French for Big City, American for Big Boat." The narrator must be Ken Nordine--great voice. He did the "trippy" Levi's commercials and many more.
I think this was produced the week Cheech and Chong visited the Pontiac advertising department? Too many very long lunch breaks that involved the use of a green leafy substance? Wow what an acid trip 😮😂
SWEET!!! Ken Nordine! Of all the recordings in my Ken Nordine collection, I don't have this one. There are a lot of snippets of his other works embedded in this. Check out "Word Jazz" or his collection of "Colors". Anyone else remember Ken's Levis commercials? Ken was one class act. A real loss when he passed away in 2019. Thank you for sharing this "gem".
I remember being so excited about the new '71 cars as a kid in late summer of '70. Many of the '71's were thrilling... but I was SO disappointed with the Pontiacs. I expected them to be sleek and amazing but that grill treatment was purely horrific (even for a kid)... literally inspired a kid version of "What were they thinking?"
That’s just pure LSD for that intro. The rest of it is great. If only I had a Pontiac to fill the emptiness in my heart. Gotta love it. We need more stuff like this today.
Makes me want to go buy one. Actually I graduated from HS in 1971. Psychedelic was in every thing from clothes to music to TV commercials. The beginning of the movie, I'm sure it was sent to the dealers as a 16mm movie, was a presentation to jazz up the sales people. Video tapes did not come main stream for another 6-7 years. Doing a full on color cartoon was a very expensive and time consuming thing. A 7 minute kids cartoon would take up to six months to create. Weekly shows like the Bugs Bunny Show was an hour long and the studios had different teams to develop the content in parallel to put an annual season. Remember, there were only three national TV networks and many communities would be lucky to get just two. A real time trip, for out dude and thanks for posting the groovy movie.
That was a freaking journey. Wow. I love some of the vintage sales material that Osborn Tramain has uploaded, where the automakers compare their car to the competitors.
What an ego stroking materialistic extravaganza. By 1971 its not hard to imagine that more than a few car salesman and training executives were partaking of significant amounts of pot and acid for inspiration. The sense of manipulation one feels watching this and the pressure to conform to a goose stepping standard is enough to make a reasonable person run for the exits.
10:45 Do I detect some rhetorical slight of hand here? I've always heard that B-body cars had the same floorpans, all having the same legroom regardless of wheelbase, meaning that both the '70 and '71 Bonevilles and '71 GrandVilles had the wheelbase stretched between the front wheels and the firewall, giving them no more interior space than the Catalina. I suspect that they were saying "more interior room", knowing it meant that the '71 had more space (mostly more width) than the '70, but they were hoping the dealers and customers would think that the wheelbase stretch for which they might be paying was actually giving the longer models more legroom, though it wasn't.
Still have my ‘72 Grand Prix ordered new from Ace Pontiac. Maybe this video helped my salesman seal the deal? Funny, we’ve transitioned from boasting about the number of ashtrays to the number of cup holders.
This fits the year perfectly. I was in 9th grade when this came out. Lots of ads and other media was like this. Nobody back then would have thought this was anything out of the ordinary.
GOOD GOD I think that training video is absolutely, positively AWESOME! I've never seen anything quite like it, it's AMAZING! Now, what it has to do with selling cars, I haven't the foggiest idea lol.
When I was in high school in 1971 my parents bought a '71 Grand Ville, beige with a brown vinyl roof. My best friend's parents bought a '71 Electra 225 Custom. The difference in driving and ride was very noticeable. The Electra just felt like the heavier body it was on, and it was definitely quieter. However, that Grand Ville certainly had a long hood! The last Pontiac my parents bought after 25 years of Pontiacs.
This is a great find! This is vintage Ken Nordine, the brilliant "word jazz" guy, who made strange, trippy, spoken-jazzy numbers like Flibberty-Jib, jazzy 90-second "colors" spots for Fuller Paint Company, and TV commercials not unlike this for Levi's. Thank you for sharing this!
Hell, anyone who watched TV in '71 would recognize this as new ways to advertise. The voice-over comes directly from radio. Nothing weird about this...but this was typical 70s.
Just a sign of the times. It was 1971 and maybe GM was just trying to appeal to the younger generation. Some of the Oldsmobile commercials were trying to be "Hip". "Youngmobile". You're talking about an era who came up with the movie "Yellow Submarine" and shows like "HR Puff & Stuff".
Since you asked... here's my two cents. The video was produced to be so ridiculous that it would be talked about non-stop after the sales meeting. In the showroom, not too full of customers yet, the sales staff will gather in their favorite groups and make fun of the video they were just subjected to. Their sarcastic recitals of the dialog from the video will spread laughter through the group. The best bits are repeated often. All along the sales staff are spewing the rhetoric that the corporation wants them to in a fun and creative manner. This, in turn, gives rise to new, fresh, funny, and creative conversations with customers. I sold cars for a short while and always dreaded the video "pep talk" on a Saturday morning.
The explanation at 10:45 of the longer wheelbase for the Bonneville (and Grandville) implies that the only difference is a longer hood and interior is the same. The online brochures for the 1972s (cannot find 1971) shows legroom is the same for short & long wheelbase cars. Explains why starting in 73 they all used the same wheelbase because there was no difference in interior room, and the 73s were getting longer anyway because of the bigger bumpers.
Yeah … that explanation in the video really stunned me. The length is extended from the A-pillar forward. How will you get more interior room that way. AMC had been doing that trick for years with identical interiors.
It was probably 90% marketing/styling and 10% ride quality. Any thoughts about efficiency (of either space utilization, weight, fuel consumption etc) were still a few years off, and didn't really happen until the 1977 downsizing. I never understood the distinction between so-called mid-size and full-size cars of the late sixties and early seventies ... they were both enormous and with a ton of wasted space ... which is how the '77 downsized cars kept pretty much the same usable interior volume despite drastic shortening and weight reduction.
I still have my dad's 1979 gas receipt for the 1st time he paid over $1.00 per gallon for regular leaded. No lead was higher due to increased demand via the cat converter. He told me that it was right around this time that stations in the midwest started cutting back on what he called 'high test' or premium fuel cuz not many were buying it. That would make a comeback in the mid 80s as turbo cars requiring higher octane fuel started to become the norm. I had 1 of those in a Mopar during the early 90s and if I couldn't find gas rated 91 or higher, that car ran like dog poo.
Man, whatever they were smoking when they produced that video was so good, I got a contact high from just watching it.🤣😂😅
3 месяца назад
Front treatment, is like a modernized 1958 Edsel. Vertical center, with lower horizontal grills, and wrap around parking lights. Dual headlights, off by themselves, above horizontal grills.
You were right.. that introduction wasn't necessary and was very odd even for that era. Afterwards it was very informative. My Grandpa bought his last car a ,'71 Grandville a year before he passed and it came to my Mom and we used it for years. It was a beautiful beast with that V8 and it gave our family years of reliable use. It was comforting to know my Poppy was seeing us enjoy his car from above. ❤️🇺🇲🙏
I spent a lot of time behind the wheel of a Catalina coupe. It took a while, but I got used to it and found the whole car very attractive. Great car for gobbling up many miles. I preferred tthe 72 LeSabre my aunt drove (another car that was highly capable of long Interstate drives). I know people consider them malaise cars - but if you had ever spent time driving them you would proabably have a much different opinion. Context is important - a 1971 Toyota was nothing like these cruisers.
1971 was a strange time. The flower power scene of the late 60s started seeping into the mainstream. The malaise era hadn't really taken over yet. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that some people at the ad agency were literally instead of metaphorically smoking something.
Growing up in the 70s,80s, was a blast man have fond memories,the drive inns, i wish some would make a drive so the younger gen.could experience what we did,im from 1964 model❤
What gets me is someone PAID for the animation…someone came up with the concept…someone wrote the script…someone narrated it…and then, they drop it into a more or less conventional training video…The clash is jarring…The Taj Mahal is a Pontiac dealership? Really? Looks as if the animation was meant to boost teamwork…(but it was just a dream.)
This video was suppressed for many years after a senior Pontiac salesman from Kokomo, Indiana named Wilmer David "Big Bill" Mudgely (class of 1942) followed the apparition of a lizard through a spray of molten lava, clubbed a Chrysler salesman to death and ate his heart before witnessing his own conception, turning into a cheetah, jumping off a bridge, hovering in midair and ascending to the stars as pure vibration. By the time they unlocked the trunk of the Grand Ville and pulled him out, caked in his own vomit and feces, stuck to the matted, stained carpet, he had lost thirty pounds, pulled his gold dental caps with his bare, bloodied fingers, lodged his right leg behind his head, and thereafter spoke only in guttural sounds, grunts and shrieks. They hosed him off, blotted him dry, and quietly arranged to have him flown to a secret sanitarium in the Marshall Islands, mailed a divorce to his wife from Nome, Alaska, arranged for a local church to deliver his three sons a new fishing pole and a carton of cigarettes at Christmastime, and buried this video in an old salt mine, vowing that as long as Pontiac stayed in business, no one should ever know. The next training video contained hypnotic instructions to disregard the previous video. Pontiac's secret was safe, or so it seemed. It was not as through Pontiac would ever make a big mistake and jeopardize its own business ever again, after all. Epilogue: We attempted to locate the Marshall islands sanitarium to inquire after Mr. Mudgely, who today would be nearly 100 years old if he survived. After many false leads, we gave up. There are few traces of the Mudgely family in Indiana. The home was razed and another built in its stead. However, at a small church graveyard outside of town, a joint headstone stands for Wilmer David "Big Bill" Mudgely, USN Petty Officer 3rd Class, and his wife Constance Mildred "Li'l Mil" Bergen Mudgely. It appears Mrs. Mudgely never did sign the divorce and waited the rest of her life for Big Bill to come home, until she perished in 1994. No date of death is given for Mr. Mudgely. At the cemetery there stands a large sycamore tree which overhangs the gravesite. It bears a crude inscription: "AZ TE K." Next to the inscription there appeared to be a nail embedded in the bark, which when we tugged on it, revealed itself to be a golden dental crown. Disappointed, we followed a concrete walkway back to the church parking lot. In the path were human footprints, men's size 11. On further scrutiny, it was determined that all of these impressions were of a left foot.
I always found the chrysler dealer comparison videos weird. “Our grille is made from steel, our ashtray is 30% larger, our bumper loops: therefore our cars are better!” 😅
I think they were very proud of the new cars advantages but as demonstrated in your much previous video, how can they say they spent more on the interior? I understand how they were proud of keeping up with sales indicators styling wise and it is a pretty car but yeah that’s definitely a period time capsule. Shows how our society changed from elegant and artistic 65 Impala in the ocean commercial to this “ peel the paint “… our society has ADD and we forget our recent history so quickly with little or no remorse so we don’t understand our past very well.
Wow, you were not joking! What an acid trip that was. I have to say that the designers and animators had a hard time making thheir thoughts into a movie.. LOL!
The guy who made this cartoon and narrated it, Ken Nordine, was a leading beatnik poet in the 1950's. He put out an album with Jerry Garcia and Tom Waits and narrated a Grateful Dead New Year's Eve concert in 1991. He was Linda Blair's vocal coach for The Exorcist. Enough said.
Ken Nordine, the voice, was from the north side of Chicago. He had a vacation home at Spread Eagle, Wisconsin. My grandma tried to fix up my mom with Ken's brother who was a successful engineer.
The intro is difficult to watch without an LSD trip. The cartoonist characters did emulate the habber dashery of the common car salesman. These were indeed very nice cars. The dropping of the Pintisc performance aura forced them and the rest of GM to sell comfort and luxury instead. The 70s were underappreciated at the time. I own two 78 Oldsmobiles that I appreciate for their attractiveness and reliability.
This is so weird. The cartoon is like the fever dreams of an acid trip. It would be interesting to find other ad campaigns that this Ad Agency created.
Thanks for this one, Adam.. I have to admit, that's one of the strangest dealer videos I've ever seen, and I've seen quite a few. It was the Age of Aquarius, the counterculture and psychedelic drug use were near their peak. I wouldn't be surprised if the creators were on a trip of their own when writing this one.
Takes a hit off a joint and passing it on, "Let's make the picture wave and the voices to echo." Everyone else in the room taking a hit, "Yeah, that'd be trippy."
the Early 1970's Pontiacs were truly great cars, my extended family had many of them during my childhood but this training film is as though Dr. Seuss dropped acid and was having a really bad trip I feel I would have to be high as a kite to really follow this film, if you ever needed it this would be proof positive there was No Drug testing at this Ad Agency or at Pontiac for that matter, because someone approved this film for display to their salesmen
So 71, introduction of evaporative emissions across the line..the beginning of a terminal illness that eventually killed off the beautiful era of automobiles.
This is awesome and funny! My Dee (Daddy) sold these new in '71 and I am sure he laughed his butt off at this trippy promo training film - wish I could ask him about it now, but I sadly lost him in 2018.
On a more serious note (slightly) -That Gan Ville was not too bad! I particularly like the Tail Light Treatment with the insets at the trailing edge of the rear quarter panels, and the headlights were really well done. Somewhat pronounced without being elevated to a top functioning styling element. These guys in Styling Studios were able to do an incredible amount with the exact same bulbs across dozens of models. Two 7 inch bulbs 04 four 5.5 inch, they somehow made them all look unique, with some designs being distinctive, as we have here. The slightest bulge to present them above and in front of the surrounding panel, along with a separation created by a tucked seam betwixt the pair. Really, truly nice work. .
The beginning reminds me of an LSD trip. (LOL) That drug was popular at the time. The Grand Ville was a great car. When G.M. came out with the "computer selected" springs, the difference in ride comfort was like night and day. I think the wagon rode better on all coils though, but, that is my personal opinion. Very few people "hot rod" it in a station wagon. The leaf springs handled a heavier load though. The interiors in the Grand Ville were also very comfortable and as quiet as this video claimed. The air conditioners were far superior to those of today. They were not designed to take into consideration the outside temperature in the highest setting like today's cars. They would get so cold that your teeth could actually start chattering OR the compressor froze up. If that happened, you just slid the knob on "vent" for a few minutes and everything would return to normal. The a/c in these cars would cool the interior off faster than in my XTS. The same holds true for my '76 Fleetwood Brougham.
