The Oldsmobile Silhouette Was a Really Weird Luxury Minivan

This is the

silhouette

of a 1996

oldsmobile

and is the original

luxury

minivan

. It's also ugly,

weird

, and incredibly rare, which means I love it because I enjoy

weird

cars like this. The

silhouette

is also almost completely forgotten in the automotive world, but I'm going today. to review this silhouette and we'll remember that I borrowed this silhouette from a viewer here in san diego who has an amazing group of general motor vehicles from the 1980s and 1990s when he came up and asked if i wanted to review any of them my response was yes, the silhouette mainly because i'm pretty sure i'll never be able to find another one ever again because the silhouette wasn't exactly a huge hit, it first came on sale in 1990 as a

luxury

alternative to the other two general motors

minivan

s, the chevy lumina apv and the pontiac transport, it was a bit of a gamble because no one had created a luxury minivan before, aside from a few trim levels from the chrysler town and country, but general motors decided i had to give it a go and they created the silhouette boldly, unfortunately, the silhouette was terribly ugly and everyone thought it looked like a dust catcher. frankly, I think that's a pretty good comparison.

Another issue was power when this truck first came out. It was only 120 horsepower, later bumped up to 160 and then 180, but still not exactly that strong for a minivan. Another issue was quality, ie the fact that there

really

wasn't any and that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to find a silhouette these days, most of these have completely fallen apart over the years. the years, but never mind the bad styling, weak powertrains and shoddy quality. I like this silhouette because it's interesting and it's quirky and it's weird and it's weird and I've always wanted to check it out so today I'm going to do that first I'm going to take you on a tour of this silhouette and show you all the cool quirks and features of the first minivan. deluxe then I'll take it out on the road drive it and then give it a score dug well I'm going to start with the quirks and silhouette features going in and that means we start with probably my favorite silhouette feature to explain it I direct your attention to the key fob and you can see there are three you have buttons lock, unlock and then a button that looks like a van and not just any van but a perfect diagram of the silhouette with its rather unusual distinctive styling which is a nice touch but anyway you push the button on the van and the back door opens automatically. now it's a power sliding door this doesn't make sense to modern minivan consumers of course it has a power sliding door but it was huge when the silhouette came out this was the first minivan to have a power sliding door and it was like the future would have finally arrived.

really

In life I could push a button and open the door of a minivan it was mind blowing now it's worth noting that you didn't have to push the button to open the power sliding door you could also just pull the door handle like open the door to pretty much any minivan but then you let it go and the door automatically did the rest so you had a power opening door anyway it did an amazing feat of technology when this truck was new but anyway modes once you opened the power silhouette door and it opened automatically and gracefully for you gained access to the second row of rear seats and probably my second favorite quirky cut out feature of the silhouette and that would be the built in child seat look this rear seat behind the driver opens and there is an integrated child safety seat and that means you can open your seat and strap your child in, not you you have to worry about strapping your car seat in and getting it out of your different vehicles and death ling with all the cumbersome things that a car seat entails because it was literally built right into the seat this is brilliant no car manufacturer is doing this anymore and i don't understand why it seems such an obvious feature for a family vehicle

oldsmobile

almost had it 25 years ago sadly we came to a bit of demerit for the silhouette, namely the fact that although it does have this wonderful sliding door that opens automatically, It's only on one side and I don't mean the electric gate is only on. one side I mean the door is only on one side you can see on the other side of this van there's nothing there for some reason it wasn't until the 1996 chrysler minivan that auto manufacturers here in north america they realized you can put two sliding doors on minivans what a brilliant idea and before that minivans had only one sliding door on one side it was the passenger side so your kids would never have to go out into traffic but it was pretty inconvenient either way to be able to access the second and third rows from just one entry point, this door on the passenger side, but that was standard minivan practice until the '90s, but still, once you've strapped your child into the integrated car seat, press the minivan button on the key fob again and the door automatically closes again, something modern minivan folks take for granted, but it was a great problem ma with the silhouette, but for me, the best of the whole situation of the electric door of the silhouette is not any of the things that I already showed you that have to do with the noise that the door makes when it closes listen now not it's making that noise because it squeaks or it's old or it's broken they designed that noise so the kids would know when the door was closing and they wouldn't get their fingers caught.

That's a security noise they put on the automatic gate just to make sure no one got hurt. Our next interesting quirk with the silhouette is, of course, its styling, which gave General Motors minivans their dust-chaser moniker. The weirdest part is of course this sloping front line that basically starts at the very forward point of the bumper and continues up to the roof like a wild angled line all the way this styling was certainly interesting and quite eye catching and I have a few theories about Why they decided to do this is aerodynamics I wonder if maybe it helped them with fuel.

Economy styling the truck this way only gave it a couple extra miles per gallon. Another theory I have is that they had the specific intention of doing something weird and unusual, as you see, the Chrysler minivan had come out years before the General Motors and Chrysler dust trucks. The minivan had been a great success. General Motors was catching up and I've always wondered if maybe they got weird with the styling to try to get attention. and of the more popular chryslers the other thing worth noting about the styling of this truck is that it wasn't that unusual for the time period there were other trucks designed like this the ford aerostar had a similar sloping front end and , of course, too. the toyota previa but for me it was the silhouette and the General Motors dust buster fans that had this weirder design and took it to the extreme but regardless of the design reason it's safe to say it turned people away of customers at the beginning.

The 90s who just wanted a minivan didn't want to adopt such a weird futuristic shape for their family vehicle and I'm sure General Motors lost sales because of this weird look of course I'm glad they did because they created one. one of the wackiest minivans ever but the next generation oldsmobile silhouette was just a pretty traditional boring minivan with a much more traditional look they ditched the crazy concept of futuristic design and that's likely and a good thing because designing the van from this way created more challenges than just the polarizing style. One challenge is clearly seen here and it was access to the engine by pulling the windshield so far forward that it blocked easy access to most of the engine so you can get to the front half maybe but the rear is pretty much stuck there and trying Working on this truck was a nightmare as a result of that and another challenge was that the dash again pulled on the windshield too much to create this sloping line at the front meant the dash continued like four feet behind the wheel so if you put something on the dash it could easily roll to the base of the windshield where you couldn't really reach it basically you would have to stand on the seat and go all the way to get to the front of the dash but for me the most fun challenge that comes with this design it is related to the front doors to make the front doors bigger e It is not enough for someone to enter comfortably, it has It does need to curve back at the top and if you look at the line at the front door you can see that it curves back at the top to make sure it's not too narrow for you to get your head into. the problem with that is the top of the door comes to a point and if you're not ready or used to it you could hit your head and really hurt yourself on the sharp top of the door.

This apparently happened and must have happened quite a bit because there is an actual warning label that specifically says the door is spiky, don't hit your head you idiot, and they put it on top of the door, right where you would hit your head. Head on, you can see that they've even designed the warning label to curve around this rivet so that the label is in the most relevant part of the door. I find it funny. There was so much head banging because of this design and the doors. I actually had to make a bright yellow warning tag t there was more quirks to the exterior of this truck than just the front end of the dust breaker here's another great one the 3rd brake light from the 1980's the us government The United States mandated that all new cars had to have a center mounted third brake light.

Basically every car has two brake lights on the side and a third on the top, but not the silhouette, instead the two. side brake lights are on top and the 3rd brake light is in the middle below the side brake lights this is probably one of the only cars to have the 3rd brake light mounted below both side brake lights normal brake and then another interesting exterior quirk of the silhouette would be the stripes this truck has seven black stripes that go all the way around the truck the sides the rear basically it all has these black stripes on it i guess because they thought without the stripes it looked too go i also like these black vinyl decals next to the windows on the side you can see they have put these up here apparently to make it look like the window is one continuous piece and never curves up like they actually do it's almost like they're admitting their design wasn't that great and are trying to fix the problem with decals and speaking of windows it's worth noting that the rear windows of this minivan they don't open in modern minivans it's a foregone conclusion you can roll down the windows on the second row of seats but on this van there is a little push clip to open it and this is as far as the window opens basically what enough to let some fresh air in its essentially a vent and not a window that rolls down again this was quite common and n minivans in the 90s although it's basically unthinkable by modern minivan standards and speaking of windows that don't open, you might be wondering how they designed the windows on the side of the truck with that crazy line in the front. , the answer is there's just a giant triangle windows in the front and again they don't open they're just fixed in place these giant window triangles which are very weird no other car has these but duster vans do but of Anyway, next we move on to the silhouette where there are quite a few more quirks and features.

I'm going to start with the airbags. Now this is a 1996 model. The US government mandated dual front airbags, but many automakers added dual airbags early, both to protect their customers and to add some safety. and peace of mind to your purchase now. With this truck being both a luxury vehicle and a family minivan, you'd think it would have received dual airbags at the time they were created, but instead General Motors waited until they were legally required, so it had a driver's airbag because that was mandatory in 1995, but on the passenger side, you had a storage cubby, you could open it up and put things in it and I hope you valued that storage more than your life because General Motors certainly did, I actually have to admit that storage was really nice to have on top of the dash where the airbag would go because the glove box really wasn't thatbig and half was taken up with the fuse panel so didn't really want some extra storage. here and they gave it to you instead of an airbag with that said this was a station wagon so there were more storage opportunities here for example under the center control console you have this little bin that opens up and it's a pretty big storage area and on the roof there are several different storage possibilities the first one here you have this button that was for your garage door opener in the days before homelink you just put the garage door opener in there and then you would push the button and that would push the button on your garage door opener and your garage door would open pretty simple now behind it you have storage for sunglasses which is pretty common that most cars have today and behind it has another little storage area for i h I have no idea but it has this little nylon strap so whatever you put in there doesn't roll or fall out when you open it now also on the roof of the side or driver you have an important button and switch and it would be for the power door.

The switch allows you to enable or disable the power gate if you wish to turn it off and then the gate can be treated as a manual gate for security or other reasons. You can do it here. the button here allows you to open the power door, so if you're in the driver's seat and you want to let your child in who's outside, press this button, the door opens, and of course you can press that button again and the door will close so you can you can activate the power door from the drivers seat now also on the roof behind all of these buttons in this storage area it has some vents which is unusual but yeah these vents will they hit from behind unlike most cars where all the climate control comes from inside in front of you this one has vents in the back of your head another interesting control area on this car is the climate controls you can see it's in this little square and speaking of squares there are nine different squares within the climate control controls for it to do various things no attempt was made to make this fancy looks nice or built in it just has squares in a square and then there are other weird controls on the sides of the gauge cluster on the left hand side that has the headlight controls it has two buttons sticking out of this area the upper one turns on the full headlights the lower one turns on just the parking lights and then inside this area you have a little switch that you can use to dim or increase the interior lights same deal on the right hand side of the gauge cluster except here it's for the wipers the button at the top you can push for the window washer and below that is the fog button if you just want a single wipe and you're driving in the fog below going on to a warning light that lets you know the back door is open, you can see that it's in the shape of a truck, not just any truck, but the dusting truck, and then Next we move to the back seat of this silhouette where I'm already conveniently seated.

I want to talk about that door, a couple of other cool items, one is the fact that it's cable operated and you can actually see the cable if you look inside. from the door jamb you can see the door open and close everything is connected to that wire the other cool thing is the electrical contact you can see there are like five different pins on the door and they all line up with this electrical contact piece on the pillar and i guess that's how the car knows the door is actually closed when those are five pins on that piece on the pillar now there's another item worth mentioning about the door is there another way to open it here there's a little power button on the pillar next to the door you can press it and it will open and close the door just like the button on the key fob or the button next to the driver's seat now when you get in here it's You might be wondering why the rear seats are different colors this was not factory the owner of this car told me when he mistaken They actually only had four seats and he actually uses it as a family car so wanted to get the rest of the seats but looked everywhere and couldn't find gray leather silhouette seats so this is what you have pretty simple now despite the fact the silhouette was advertised as the luxury minivan Ultimately there really wasn't that much trim back here for the rear seats which was the whole point of buying a minivan in the first place to carry passengers you had that child seat I showed you earlier and it has leather seats which is pretty nice but other than that it was basically limited to these climate control vents on the roof and there was a set of climate controls on the drivers side in the rear area but it was At full climate controls, you could only adjust the fan speed, you couldn't change the temperature, all the temperature change was left to the front seat occupants and then we went to the third row in the silhouette and accessing the third row , which is actually surprisingly easy, you just press this latch and the whole seat moves forward and then you have an easy path to get into the third row, there are a lot of modern minivans and three-row SUVs, I get in where it is.

It's that simple back here, but once you're in the third row, you find there's really no frills back here, nothing fancy, nothing nice, nothing particularly fancy at this point, it pretty much turns into transportation when you're in the third row and once you lift the tailgate you'll find there's something particularly unusual here, just your typical not very large but pretty standard minivan cargo area with minivans of this era, probably the only thing really unusual, at least compared to the modern minivans, it's just that this van didn't have flat folding seats, that invention didn't come out until the 2000s and that meant if you wanted a bigger cargo area you had to physically remove the seats one at a time so that both in the back and then three more in the middle if you wanted the cargo area open for a larger item, naturally this wasn't very practical, especially since once z that the seats were outside you had to have a place to put them so if you were taking the seats out unless you were at home or in your garage you would just leave your seats behind the full flat seats which were quite an innovation when They finally came out years after this truck went off the market and the next engine was the General Motors 3400 V6 when the Silhouette first came out in 1990 it actually used the 3100 V6 which made only 120 horsepower which was just abysmal.

Over the years they added more power and eventually put the 3800 v6 in this truck with about 150 horsepower and then this 3400 is about 170 to go. A couple of model years but still not enough for a vehicle this size and really pathetic by modern standards. Our last interesting silhouette item is this silhouette brochure from 1996, nothing particularly u. It's unusual here, but I love the color on the back. Take a look at this 1996 Oldsmobile lineup. When was the last time you saw any of these cars on the road in good shape? They are pretty much gone but its interesting to look at and remember and so those are the quirks and features of the original oldsmobile silhouette now its time to take it out on the road and see how it handles well driving the silhouette always wanted to film a video of this car as ridiculous as it sounds um just because these gm dust breaker vans were kind of iconic looking at this windshield design i mean it's so weird the windshield is four feet in front of me here it's absolutely crazy right now on the road it actually drives reasonably well um there's nothing unusual about this and this car wasn't meant to be really unusual it was supposed to be a pretty rational normal people mover that just had weird styling to maybe make the minivan It looks a little less dated but unfortunately behind the wheel it's still a minivan which isn't great it still drives so not great Like minivans do, and basically what that means is not much acceleration, the 3.4-liter V6 was totally outclassed for the size of this vehicle.

Other than that, there's not much interesting. From the things I've already shown you with a lot of weird placements of things and buttons and switches, there's nothing exciting about the experience of driving this vehicle or even really sitting in this vehicle except you know you're in a strange car at last. For instance, it's pretty much just a pickup, but it was a pickup that would have felt sleek and luxurious back in 1996. Actually, that's not entirely true, the 1996 model year is when Chrysler introduced its next generation of pickups with dual sliding doors and a lot more comfort and convenience features and this thing would have been completely surpassed in 1996 but it was a bit innovative with the power sliding door which is of course now standard fare on minivans and it's certainly interesting to shoot a video with this weird and unusual relic from the 1990s. everyone remembers the toyota previa because it had an unusual powertrain, was supercharged and had four wheel drive on four wheels but to me this truck was always a little bit weird it was weirder it was fancy for some reason it had some weird features and then of course the styling and I always thought the styling of this fan was quite frankly weirder than the one above and that's the 1996 oldsmobile silhouette this is a fantastic vehicle unless of course you like it no I'm just kidding these were weird and controversial but that was the point in the By the time they came out general motors was so far behind the chrysler minivan that they had to do something interesting and crazy to stand out and as you can clearly see they certainly stood out for better or worse anyway now is the time to hit the original silhouette a score from doug starting with the weekend category flowers and style the silhouette is pretty unappealing and gets a three out of ten acceleration is very slow and gets a one out of ten handling is bad nothing fun or sporty or fast or connected and it gets a 2 out of 10. the fun factor is unbelievably low there really is nothing fun here and it gets a 1 out of 10.

Finally the factor is great and I have to admit these vans are Starting to be great, it scores a 4 out of 10 for an overall weekend score of 11 out of 50. Next up are the daily categories and features. This van doesn't have any modern technology, but the power door and built-in child seat are great deals and it scores a reasonably strong 4 out of 10. comfort is average and gets a 5 out of 10. quality is poor interior is not very nice and reliability is mediocre and gets a 4 out of 10. practicality is great and gets a 9 out of 10. finally value and these are cheap and I mean really cheap and they're a great thing to have for a couple grand but they're not very good either, it gets a 6 out of 10 for an overall daily score of 28 out of 50.

Added up in the dug score it's 39 out of 100, Which puts it up here against a few other trucks I've tested. The rival that I have tested is the Toyota Previa. The older one looks better, is better built, and is a bit more attractive to drive, but it can't match the Silhouette's power sliding door and built-in child seat. After all, the silhouette is the cadillac of minivans.