1970 Buick Riviera on 2040-cars

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GM investing $167m in Spring Hill for new midsize vehicles

General Motors has announced a large investment in its Spring Hill, Tennessee facility. The former home of Saturn production will be getting a $167 million addition to a previously announced $183 million, to cover a pair of new midsize vehicles. The investment is expected to create 1,800 jobs at the factory.
That $350 million is being divvied up for a pair of programs at Spring Hill. The first will take the bulk of the money ($223 million) and create 1,000 of the 1,800 jobs, while the other will take the remaining $127 million and generate the leftover 800 positions. But GM says the investment will cover "midsize vehicle programs." So what could they be?
The leading candidate in our minds is a new crossover for Buick, called the Anthem, that will slot between the Encore and Enclave, but will be slightly smaller than the Equinox and Terrain. As we've explained, the new model will likely be the first product to sport GM's new D2UX platform, which will eventually replace both the Delta and Theta platforms. Spring Hill is already building the Equinox, so there could be some credence to this theory.

Junkyard Gem: 1993 Buick Roadmaster Sedan

In 1931, GM's Buick Division introduced an eight-cylinder engine in its stolid rear-wheel-drive sedan models, and Americans could buy big, comfortable Buick four-doors with straight-eights and — starting in the 1954 model year — V8s driving the rear wheels for more than a half-century after that. Then, the last rear-wheel-drive LeSabre left the assembly line in 1985, and it seemed that an era had ended forever. But wait! For the 1992 model year, Buick revived the Roadmaster name and applied it to an old-timey giant sedan with a V8 engine sending power to the proper wheels. Production of the Roadmaster sedan continued through 1996, and I've found one of those throwback Buicks in a Denver self-service car graveyard. Yes, in an America full of front-wheel-drive cars contaminated by European or — even worse — Japanese influences, The General brought back the spirit of the 1931 Buick sedan. Sure, it was really a near-identical twin to the "whale-body" Chevy Caprice, complete with Chevrolet small-block V8 engine, but that didn't matter. This was the kind of Buick that our prosperous great-grandparents bought in 1932 and 1948 and 1957. And the appeal of the great big eight-cylinder Buick sedan wasn't just limited to the United States. When the film adaptation of the great Marguerite Duras novel, L'Amant, was made, only a 1932 Buick 90 sedan would have made sense for the wheels of the wealthy Saigon heir. A big reason Buick is such an important brand in China right now is the legacy left by the memorable Buick machinery that owned the roads of 1930s China. These days, most of the 1992-1996 Roadmasters you'll see will be the station wagons, but we mustn't forget the sedans. Looking at the interior of this car is like a flashback to the 1960s, when stately Buick sedans had squishy seats you'd just disappear into when you climbed in. Cool-sounding names for ordinary features had gone out of style decades earlier, but not for the Roadmaster! Dynaride was a rear suspension that used air shocks and a compressor to keep the ride height level regardless of load. The last model year for a genuine Buick V8 engine was 1980, though you could make the case that the Rover V8 (made until 2006) was really a Buick all along. The engine in this car is pure Chevrolet: a 5.7-liter small-block V8 rated at 180 horsepower. Buick was a big Olympics sponsor at this time, while Oldsmobile handled golf. Still, the Buick-buying demographic of 1993 tended to approve of golf.

Junkyard Gem: 1982 Buick Riviera Diesel Coupe

After appending the Riviera name to various cars during the 1950s, Buick finally made the Riviera a model in its own right for the 1963 model year. Seven more generations of Buick's rakish personal luxury coupe followed over the next 36 years, but only one ever had an oil-burning engine available from the factory. Today's Junkyard Gem is one of those cars, a vividly purple '82 Riviera with 105 horses of Oldsmobile diesel power under its hood, found in a Denver-area self-service boneyard recently. Starting in the 1966 model year, the Riviera had been living on the same platform as the Cadillac Eldorado and Oldsmobile Toronado, both of which featured radical front-wheel-drive powertrains that used longitudinal V8s powering the front wheels via sturdy chains. However, despite the common platform, the Riviera alone kept the then-traditional front-engine/rear-drive setup, making it something of a corporate oddball for the next 12 years. Then General Motors decided to downsize the Eldorado/Toronado platform for the 1979 model year, and the Riviera got those cars' front-wheel-drive rig at the same time. Sales of the smaller Rivvy were strong, no doubt due in large part to certain geopolitical events that sent gas prices skyward and caused fuel rationing and gas lines. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, diesel fuel was much cheaper than gasoline in the United States. Mercedes-Benz and Peugeot had done reasonably well selling diesel-engined cars here during the 1970s, and so General Motors developed a diesel-burning version of the Oldsmobile 350-cubic-inch (5.7-liter) V8 engine. As was typical of naturally-aspirated automotive diesels of the time (every modern car's diesel engine is turbocharged), horsepower was miserable but torque was strong; the engine in this car was rated at 105 horses and 205 pound-feet. The 5.7 diesel first showed up in the Riviera for the 1981 model year. The base engine was a 4.1-liter version of the Buick V6, while the oil-burning Olds cost an extra $924 (about $3,206 in 2023 dollars). A comfortable and smooth-riding Riviera with the cheap fill-up price and long range of diesel sounded great, even if you had to line up with Freightliners and Peterbilts to get to a pump, but there were problems. Oh, so many problems! Oldsmobile's 350 V8 had been around since 1968 and it had proven to be both reliable and powerful.