Chevy Volt price cut!

Rover kept their old ex-Buick V-8 in production into the mid 00's. It was an all aluminum V-8 designed in the 1960's but in the 1970's GM descided they wanted to position Buick differently and that a V-8 didn't fit into the market segment they wanted to target so British Leland bought the engine and it become the Rover V-8. I remember a guy who had a Land Rover Defender 90 with the old Rover V-8 in it when I was in college but I didn't hang out with him much as he was kind of a douche bag.

The only reason Buick didn't go the way of Pontiac and Oldsmobile was because the Chinese can't get enough of them. As strange as it might sound the Chinese consider Buicks to be luxury cars and it is the best selling luxury car brand in China. It seems every local CCP official simply must have a Buick with a driver so he can sit in the back with lots of leg room and plush leather seats.

That's because Buick is the shit.

Growing up one of our neighbors had a ratty old Rover SD1 (in the US it was called the Rover 3500, produced from 1976 to 1986) which used a 3.5 liter Rover V-8. It could lay down an impressive patch of burned rubber though you always had to worry about mechanical issues and the sheet metal used wasn't anodized so rust was a major issue. I recall him (he was in his early 20's still living with his parents and I was ~15-16) saying he eventually junked the thing when one of the doors fell of as the part which held the door hinge had rusted out. This is in San Diego where is almost never rains btw.

The main issue with that old Buick aluminum V8 was its small displacement. Later Rover added extra tall heads so they could really increase the stroke and thus increase the displacement but they could only go so far with the bore before they hit the water jacket. As memory serves 5 liters was about as big as you could get it but most of the copies were much smaller, many being as small as 3.5 liters.

One thing GM did really well in China is they played up a little known historical fact that the last Emperor of China exclusively used Buick cars to be chauffeured around in. They advertised the shit out of that when they started selling cars in China proclaiming Buicks to be so rare and special that they were the choice of China's emperors. GM then set up a joint venture factory making Buicks using older models which wouldn't sell in the west yet Chinese loved them. They were assembled in China and so met the CCP's requirements that official cars be Chinese made yet they still had western brand appeal which virtually all aspirational Chinese consumers want.

Before you knew it Buick was King of the Chinese Road with the best selling cars in China and even newly middle class Chinese would spend more than they had to just to get a car with the Buick name on it. Even if it was just a Korean designed Daewoo rebadged with a Buick grill.

Gas thirsty dinosaur? Maybe by current model standards, but for it's time they were pretty efficient.

Also, Buick owners represent.

Hawaii has "island cars." Put briefly, if you live on the Islands and you're going back to the Mainland, you don't want to drop $4,000 to bring a $5,000 car with you. So you wind up selling it for $2,000 or something. You can get a decent used car for not a lot of money.

Initially I'd planned on getting a decent mid '80s BMW but after looking at a couple terrible ones and facing the prospect of being car-less (I'd sold the car I was using) I freaked and bought the first non-terrible car I looked at. It was a '96 Monte Carlo Z38. In retrospect I paid too much for it, but my bigger regret was that in my anxiety I'd forgotten about a '98 Buick Riviera that was also up for sale (albeit for more money).

As much as I besmirch GM, I really liked those Rivieras that they had out at the end of the 20th century and always wished I could own one.

Beware the saltwater. My dad bought a used YJ that had been a rental in Hawaii. Almost immediately had to replace a rusted-out radiator.

That's about what my 2001 Taurus gets. Incidentally, it also has a V6.

It's "WestPac" you nincompoop. As in western pacific.

Not everyone makes a hobby of memorizing the lingo, Anc.