Oldsmobile Cutlass – 11 Million Sold
If the Lada is the everyman’s car of Eastern Europe, then Oldsmobile’s Cutlass is certainly America’s equivalent. The smallest, most entry-level car ever made by Oldsmobile was a sleepy sedan without much ado about… anything, really. It was a compact and eventually a mid-size sedan, built in the early sixties, all the way up until 1999. One subset of its design, the Olds 442, could be considered a proper and popular muscle car of the day – but otherwise, the Cutlass was just a pedestrian’s driver.
Relatively quaint 3.5L V8s were optioned alongside 3-speed auto or manual transmissions, with a station wagon, club coupe, convertible, and sedan available in the lineup. Acceleration was meager and suspension made the Cutless feel like somewhat of a land boat, but that didn’t matter. Over 11 million Cutlasses were sold across its entire production.
What did matter was the brilliance of the Cutlass’s simplicity. The Cutlass eventually accumulated a reputation as one of the brand’s most reliable, quality cars and, it, in turn, became Oldsmobile’s best-selling model of all time. To be fair, the Cutlass did boast some designs in the 70’s that were considered aesthetically pleasing at the time, and the coupe of the 70’s was quite fast and offered plenty of get-up-and-go. The 442’s massive 7.46L V8 and TH-400 transmission made it a strong contender in the muscle scene, and it even came with one of the first auto-manual transmissions, thanks to the Hurst Dual-Gate shifter.
