The Oldsmobile Silhouette Was a Really Weird Luxury Minivan

This is a

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 today I go. To review this silhouette and let's remember, I borrowed this silhouette from a viewer here in San Diego who has an amazing group of General Motors vehicles from the '80s and '90s when he came up to me and asked if I wanted to check out any of them. My answer was yes, the silhouette mainly because I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to find another one again.

That's because the silhouette wasn't exactly a huge hit; It first went on sale in 1990 as a

luxury

alternative to the other. two

minivan

s from general motors, the chevy lumina apv and the pontiac transport, it was a bit risky because no one had

really

created a luxury minivan before, aside from some trim levels of the chrysler town and country, but general motors decided to give it a try. and they boldly created the silhouette, unfortunately the silhouette was terribly ugly and everyone thought it looked like a vacuum cleaner. Seriously, the unofficial nickname for General Motors minivans of this era is the vacuum cleaner vans because of this sloping windshield, and frankly, I think it's cute. good comparison, another issue was the power when this van first came out it was only 120 horsepower then it was increased to 160 then 180 but still not exactly that strong for a minivan.

Another problem was quality, meaning the fact that there

really

wasn't any. and that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to find a silhouette nowadays, most of them have completely fallen apart over the years, but never mind the bad styling, weak powertrains and poor 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'll take you on a tour of this silhouette and show you all the cool quirks and features of the first luxury minivan, then I'll take it out on the road and drive it, and then I'll give it an excellent rating.

I'll start with the quirks and features of the first luxury minivan. silhouette with enter 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 that there are three buttons that they have for locking and unlocking and then a button that looks like a truck and not just any truck, except a perfect diagram of the silhouette with its rather unusual distinctive style, which is a Nice touch, but you press the truck button anyway and the tailgate opens automatically. It is an electric sliding door.

Now this doesn't make sense to modern minivan consumers, of course it does. an electric sliding door, but it was huge when the silhouette appeared. This was the first minivan to have a power sliding door and it was like the future had finally come to real life. You could press a button and open the door of a minivan. blowing now it's worth noting that you didn't have to press the button to open the power sliding door. You could also pull the door handle like opening the door of almost any minivan, but then you let go and the door opened automatically.

You did the rest so you would have a power opening door either way. You did, an incredible feat of technology when this truck was new, but anyway, once you opened the power silhouette door and it opened automatically and elegantly, you gained access to the second row. the rear seats and probably my second favorite silhouette quirky bar feature and that would be the built in child seat check this out the back seat behind the driver opens up and there is a built in child safety seat and that means you can just open your seat and restraining your child, you don't have to worry about hooking your car seat and lifting it out of your different vehicles and dealing with all the messy things that a car seat entails because it was literally built into the seat, this It's brilliant, no car manufacturer does this anymore and I don't understand why it seems like such an obvious feature for a family vehicle.

Oldsmobile had it almost 25 years ago. Unfortunately, we came to a bit of a demerit. for the silhouette is the fact that although it has this wonderful sliding door that opens automatically it is only on one side and I don't mean the electric door 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 is nothing at all, for some reason it wasn't until the 1996 Chrysler minivan that automakers here in North America realized that you can put two sliding doors on minivans, what Such a brilliant idea, and before minivans had there was only one sliding door on one side, it was the passenger side, so your kids never had to go out into traffic, but it was still pretty inconvenient to be able to access the second one. and third row from a single entry point at this door. the passenger side, but that was standard minivan practice until the '90s, but anyway, once you've strapped your child into the built-in car seat, press the minivan button on the key fob again and the door It will automatically close again, something that a modern minivan is. people take it for granted, but it was a big problem with the silhouette, but for me, the best thing about the whole silhouette electric door situation is nothing of what I've already shown you, but it has to do with the noise the door makes when it closes, listen now, it doesn't make that noise because it squeaks, it's old or broken, they designed that noise so that children would realize when the door was closing and not get their fingers caught, that's it a security noise they put in. on the automatic door just to make sure no one gets hurt, listen again to this strange silhouette noise of the door closing and the next interesting quirk with the silhouette is of course its styling which gave the Dust minivans Buster of General Motors his nickname of Dust Buster.

The strangest part is, of course, this sloping front line that basically starts at the farthest point of the bumper and continues all the way to the roof as a wildly angled line all the way. This style was certainly interesting and quite eye-catching. I have a few theories as to why they decided to do this: aerodynamics. I wonder if maybe it helped them with fuel economy. Designing the truck this way only gave it a couple extra miles per gallon. Another theory I have is that they specifically intended to do so. Do something strange and unusual, you see, the Chrysler minivan had come out years before the General Motors dust vans and the Chrysler minivan had been a huge success.

General Motors was playing catch up and I've always wondered if maybe they went weird with the styling to try to draw attention away from the more popular Chryslers. The other thing worth noting about the styling of this truck is that it wasn't all that unusual at the time, there were other trucks designed like this, the Ford Aerostar had a similar crazy sloping front end. end and of course so did the toyota previa, but for me it was the General Motors silhouette and dust fans that took this weirdest design and took it to the most extreme, but regardless of the reason for the design it's safe to say Alienated customers in the early 90s who only wanted a minivan did not want to adopt such a strange and strange futuristic shape for their family vehicle and I am sure General Motors lost sales because of this strange appearance, of course I am delighted that They did it because they created one of the most outlandish minivans of all time, but the next-gen Oldsmobile silhouette was just a pretty traditional boring minivan with a much more traditional look, they ditched the crazy futuristic design concept and that's probably a good thing.

Why design the truck this way. created more challenges than just the polarizing style. One challenge is clearly seen here and that 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 nice. A lot stuck in there and trying to work on this truck was a nightmare as a result of that and another challenge was that the dash again stuck out the windshield so far to create this sloping front line that meant the dash continued about four feet behind. the steering 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, you would basically have to stand on the seat and go all the way forward to be able to get to the front of the dash, but for me The most fun challenge that comes with this design relates to the front doors, in order for the front doors to be big enough for someone to comfortably get in, they have to curve back at the top and If you look at the line on the door Upon entry, you can see that it folds back at the top to ensure it's not too narrow for you to stick your head in.

The problem is that the top of the door then comes to a point and if you are not prepared for it or used to it, you could hit your head and hurt yourself badly 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 pointy, don't hit your head, idiot, and they have placed it at the top of the door, right where you would hit your head. You can see that they have even designed the warning label to curve around this rivet. for the label to be on the most relevant part of the door, I find it funny, there were so many head knocks because of this design and the doors actually had to make a bright yellow warning label, but there were more oddities in the outside. of this truck besides the dusting front part, here's another great one, the third brake light.

Starting in the 1980s, the US government mandated that all new cars have a center-mounted third brake light, basically all cars have two brake lights on the side. and the third at the top, but not the silhouette; Instead, the two side brake lights are at the top and the third brake light is in the middle below the side brake lights. This is probably one of the only cars that has the third brake light. mounted below the two normal brake lights and then another interesting exterior quirk of the silhouette would be the stripes. This truck has seven black stripes that go around the entire truck, the sides, the back, basically everything has these black stripes, I guess because They thought without the stripes it looked like too much of a truck.

I also like these black vinyl decals next to the windows on the side. You can see that they placed them here apparently to make it look like the window is one continuous piece and never curves like they actually do it's almost like they admitted that their design wasn't that good and they are trying to solve the problem with stickers and talking about windows, it is worth noting that the rear windows of this minivan do not open in modern minivans, it is a foregone conclusion, you can roll down the windows in the second row of seats, but in this van there is a small clip, you just push it to open it and this is as far as the window basically opens enough. to allow some fresh air in, it is essentially a vent and not a window that rolls down, this was quite common on minivans from the 90s, although it is basically unthinkable by modern minivan standards and speaking of windows that They don't open.

You might be wondering how they design the windows on the side of the truck with that crazy line on the front. The answer is there are just giant triangular windows in the front and again they don't open, they are just fixed in place. These giant triangle windows that are very strange, no other car has them, but dust vans have them, but 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 air bags. This is a 1996 model. The US government required dual front airbags, but many automakers added dual airbags early to protect their customers and add some security and peace of mind to your purchase, now that This van is both a luxury vehicle and a family minivan, you'd think it would have received dual airbags by now. were created, but instead General Motors waited until they were legally required, so you had an airbag for the driver because it was mandatory in 1995, but on the passenger side you had a storage cubby that you could open and put things in it and I hope you appreciated it. that storage is more than your life because GeneralMotors certainly had it.

In fact, I have to admit that it was pretty nice to have storage on top of the dash, where the airbag would go, because the glove box really wasn't that big and half of it was taken up with the fuse panel, so you really didn't want to extra storage space here and they gave it to you instead of an airbag, saying it was a family van, so there were more storage opportunities here, for example under the center control. In the stack you have this little container that opens up and is a fairly large storage area and on the roof there are several different storage possibilities.

The first one here has this button that was for the garage door opener in the days before Homelink, you would just put your garage door opener on there and then you would press the button and that would press the button on the garage door opener and Your garage door would open quite simply now that you have space behind it to store sunglasses, which is quite common for most cars to have nowadays and behind that. You have another little storage area, I have no idea, but it has this little nylon strap so anything you put in there won't roll around or fall out when you open it.

Now also on the driver's side roof. An important button and switch and that would be for the electric door, the switch allows you to enable or disable the electric door if you want to turn it off and then the door can be treated as a manual door for safety or other reasons, you can do it here The button here allows you to open the power door, so if you are in the driver's seat and you want to let your child in who is outside, press this button, the door opens and of course you can press that button again and the door will close so that can.

You can activate the power door from the driver's seat now also on the roof behind all these buttons in this storage area. You do have some vents, which is unusual, but yes, these vents blow at you from the rear, unlike most cars where all the climate control comes from inside. in front of you this one has vents on 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 inside the climate controls for you to do. several things, no attempt was made to make this stylish, pretty or integrated, you just have squares in a square and then other strange controls are on the sides of the gauge cluster, on the left side you have the controls of the headlights.

Two buttons protrude from this area, the top one turns on the full headlights, the bottom one turns on just the parking lights, and then inside this area you have a small switch that you can use to dim or brighten the interior lights. The same happens on the right side. from the gauge cluster, except here it's for the wipers, the button at the top you can press for the windshield washer and below that is the fog button if you just want a single wipe and you're driving in the fog, then you go to a warning. light that lets you know that the tailgate is open, you can see that it is shaped like a truck, not just any truck, but a dust truck and then we move to the back seat of this silhouette where I am already conveniently seated.

I want to talk about that. door, a couple of other interesting elements, one is the fact that it is wired and you can see the wire if you look inside the door jamb, you can see how the door opens and closes, everything is connected to that wire , the other interesting 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 that the door is actually closed when those five pins are on it. piece on the pillar now another item worth mentioning about the door there is another way to open it here there is a small electric door button on the pillar next to the door you can press it and it will open and close the door as well as the button on the remote control or the button next to the driver's seat Now, when you get up here, you'll wonder why the back seats are different colors.

This was not factory stock. The owner of this car told me when he bought it that they only had it. four seats and he actually uses it as a family car so he wanted to get the rest of the seats but he looked everywhere and couldn't find gray leather silhouette seats so this is what he has now, pretty simple despite Since the Silhouette was advertised as the ultimate luxury minivan, there really weren't that many frills back here for the back seats, which was the whole point of buying a minivan in the first place to carry passengers, it had that child seat that I showed you before. and you get leather seats, which is pretty cool, but other than that you were basically limited to these climate control vents on the roof and there was a set of climate controls on the driver's side in the rear area, but no They were complete climate controls. you could only adjust the fan speed, you couldn't change the temperature, all the temperature change was up to the front seat occupants and then we went to the third row in the silhouette and accessed the third row, which actually It's surprisingly easy, you just press this latch and the whole seat moves forward and then you have an easy path to get to the third row.

There are many modern minivans and three-row SUVs. I get in where it's not so easy to get back here, but once you When you're in the third row, you discover that there's really no luxuries back here, nothing special, nothing nice, nothing particularly luxurious at this point, it practically becomes transportation when you're in the third row and once you lift the tailgate you discover something particularly unusual back here, just the typical minivan cargo area, not very big but pretty standard for minivans of this era, probably the only thing really unusual, at least compared to modern minivans, is that this van does not have folding flat seats which the invention did not have.

It didn't come out until the 2000s and that meant that if you wanted a larger cargo area you had to physically remove the seats one at a time, so the two in the back and then three more in the middle if you wanted the area full charge will open for a while. A larger item, naturally this wasn't very practical especially because once the seats were out you had to have somewhere to put them so if you took the seats out unless you were at home or in your garage you would just You left them completely flat.

The seats were a pretty big innovation when they finally came out years after this truck came off the market, and after the engine, this was the General Motors 3400 V6. When the Silhouette first appeared in 1990, it actually used the 3100 V6, which only made a simply abysmal 120 horsepower over the years they added more power. They eventually put the 3800 v6 in this truck with about 150 horsepower and then this one, the 3400, has about 170 for the later model years, but it still wasn't enough for a vehicle. this size and it really is pathetic by modern standards our last interesting silhouette item is this 1996 silhouette brochure, there is nothing particularly unusual here but I love the background color, take a look at this 1996

oldsmobile

line, When was the last time you saw any of these? cars on the road in good condition, practically all of them have disappeared, but they are interesting to see and remember, and those are the peculiarities and characteristics of the original Oldsmobile silhouette, now it's time to take it out on the road and see how it drives.

Okay, driving the silhouette. I've always wanted to shoot a video in this car, as ridiculous as it sounds. Just because these GM dust trucks were kind of iconic when you look at this windshield design, I mean, it's so weird that the windshield is. four feet in front of me here it's absolutely crazy 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 It just had a little bit of weird styling to maybe make the minivan look a little less unfashionable, but unfortunately behind the wheel it's still an unattractive minivan, it still drives as unstylish as minivans get and basically what that means is that there is not much acceleration.

That 3.4 liter v6 engine was totally outmatched by the size of this vehicle. There's not much interesting here, other than the stuff I already showed you with a lot of strange placements of things, buttons and switches. There is nothing exciting about the driving experience of this vehicle. or even really about sitting in this vehicle, except you know you're in a strange car, ultimately it's pretty much a truck, but it was a truck that would have felt sleek and luxurious in 1996. Actually, that's not it. totally true, the 1996 model. This year is when Chrysler introduced their next generation of trucks with double sliding doors and many more comfort and convenience features, and this would have been completely surpassed in 1996, but they were a little innovative with the door electric slider which of course is now standard. fare in minivans and it is certainly interesting to film a video with this strange and unusual relic from the 1990s, everyone remembers the Toyota Previa because it had an unusual powertrain, it was supercharged and all-wheel drive, but for me this van was always a bit strange. it was weirder it was luxury for some reason it had some weird features and then of course the styling and I always thought the styling of this fan, frankly, was weirder than the last one and that's the silhouette of the 1996 Oldsmobile, this one It's a fantastic vehicle unless of course you have taste, no I'm just kidding these were rare and controversial but that was the point when they came out general motors was so far behind the chrysler minivan that they had to do something interesting and crazy to be able to stand out and as you can clearly see they certainly stood out for better or worse, now it's time to give the original silhouette a score from Doug starting with the weekend categories and the style of the silhouette is quite unattractive and gets an acceleration of three out of ten. very slow and it gets a 1 out of 10 the handling is bad, it's not at all fun or sporty or fast or connected and it gets a 2 out of 10.

The fun factor is incredibly low, there's really nothing fun to have here and it gets a 1 out of 10. Finally, a cool factor and I must admit these dust trucks are starting to get cool. It earns a 4 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 11 out of 50. The following are the everyday categories and features this truck does not have. It doesn't have any modern technology, but the power door and built-in child seat are great deals and it gets a reasonably strong 4 out of 10. Comfort is average and gets a 5 out of 10. Quality is bad, interior is bad. It's very nice and the reliability is mediocre and gets a 4 out of 10.

The practicality is great and gets a 9 out of 10. Finally, it's good value for money and these are cheap and I mean really cheap and it's a great thing to own . for a couple grand, but they're not very good either, it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total daily score of 28 out of 50. Added to the excavated score is 39 out of 100, which puts it here against other trucks. The closest rival to the Silhouette that I have tested is the Toyota Previa. The old one looks better, is better built, and is a little more engaging to drive, but it can't match the Silhouette's power sliding door and built-in child seat. after all the cadillac of minivans