1978 Oldsmobile Toronado XS

Yeah, Hy-Test...hy-PITA junk. If the starter was not shimmed at all or not properly shimmed, that can make it hang up, and yes, there is a spring in the solenoid that pushes the plunger back once the power is cut. Just remove the motor power connection bolt or nut, then the two screws, and the solenoid comes right off. The spring goes around the outside of the plunger.

 

Junk or not, it lasted 22 years. There were no shims when I removed it.

 

Haha, I'm a dunce. I forgot--the FWD longitudinal drivetrain uses a starter with a different nosepiece assembly. The transverse FWD cars do use the standard GM vertical bolting to the block, whereas yours uses horizontal bolting to the trans bellhousing. I tell ya, my freaking mind is slowly turning to mush. Which now brings up the question: can the nose piece assembly be mated to the PMGR motor without modification? Likely not, but someone should at least try it.

 

It turns out that I can't take it apart if I want the "rebate" I was talking about earlier. I checked further into this "rebate," and it turns out that it's not a rebate, it's a refund of the core charge. I did think it a bit curious that Amazon was not charging a core charge for the starter I bought when every other vendor I checked (NAPA, Autozone, Rockauto) was charging $15. I thought cool. But, no, when you look at the rebate website, it says you have to return the old starter to get the "rebate." So, while everyone lists the starter's price and then mentions that you'll pay an extra $15 core charge which you'll get back if you return the old one, Amazon builds the core charge into the price of the starter and then calls the return of the core charge a "rebate." But I should be careful before I blame this sleight-of-terminology on Amazon. When I click on the link to start the rebate process, I'm taken to an ACDeclo webpage, not an Amazon webpage, so it is apparently ACDelco that's calling a core charge return a "rebate." But, regardless, this means that their price for the starter, at least when I bought it, was only $33.

 

Just remember to put it back together, they didn't say it needed all the pieces did they?
Obviously it isn't working now, giving it to them hollowed out would make them wonder.

 

Received the new starter today. Won't have a chance to put it in until Wednesday.



On a separate note, I came to know that the second generation ('71-'78) Toros were discussed in a feature article in the June 2007 issue of Collectible Automobile. I bought that issue off ebay, and I've scanned a few pages from it below. It's a nice article, as CA often does. It's 14 pages total in length. I scanned the first two pages as one scan as the photo went across the crease.

 

Now here's the fun part. In the article above, at the first mention of the XS version of the Toro, there is a reference to the October 1992 issue of CA. So I bought that one, too (how did we ever survive before ebay?). There's nothing on the front cover of this issue that mentions the Toronado, but it is covered in the "Future Collectibles" column in that issue. It's an interesting read, but what's most fun are the comments in the "From the Back Seat" section on the lower right of the second page, which are apparently from other CA writers. They universally dislike the car, which makes it all the more fun to own one.

I'm going to have to find a way to fit "Plushy box of Kleenex" on a license plate.

1977 and 1978 Toronado XS owners unite!

 

I remember that 1992 article and how the Toronado XS was universally panned at the time. What a difference 25 years makes. Maybe the 1970s were not so bad after all in retrospect? One can mock the "gaudy" styling all you like, but at least there was styling. Today, they all look alike. And I know I sound like a curmudgeon, but so be it.

 

Couldn't agree more. You have to remember the time, though. 1992 was only 14 years after 1978, the latest year of these Toros. That was too recent for anyone to really have started thinking about cars from that era as collectible. Hence the "Future Collectible" column title. What would we say today about the future collectibility of a 2003 model?

But now here we are 25 years later, these cars are 40+ years old, not 14 or 15, and what was thought were deficiencies in these cars back then (large, heavy, ponderous, poor gas mileage, under-powered) have become what make them charming today.

 

Had a thought about my car's history. As I think I said at some point earlier, I ordered the vehicle invoice for this car from the GM Heritage Center. They can provide these for Oldsmobiles of 1977 model year and later. The vehicle invoice I received shows the XS option package on it.

My car, as I think I've also noted earlier, has a very early VIN, 3Z57K8M700005. I've taken this to mean that my car was the fifth Toronado built for the 1978 model year as all Toronados were built at the Lansing plant, and the starting serial number was 700001.

I got to wondering if my car might be the first XS built for 1978. What are the odds of that, do you think? I figure I could find out by ordering the invoices for the Toros with the preceding four VINs, 3Z57K8M700001, 3Z57K8M700002, 3Z57K8M700003, and 3Z57K8M700004. Unless the Heritage Center gives me a break on the price, it would cost me $50 per VIN for each invoice. Is it worth $200 to find this out? I do think it would be pretty cool to know that my car was the very first Toronado XS to come off the line for '78 and be able to prove it, at least by VIN sequence. If it turns one or more of the first four VINs were also XSs, then I would at least know what number mine was as it would be the first, second, third, fourth, or fifth, depending on how many of the preceding four were also XS's, if any.

I sent a question about this to the Heritage Center as their order form also asks for the body plate information, and I don't have that for the other cars with those VINs as I don't actually have access to any of these cars, if they even exist any more. But I don't think this type of information is needed to locate the vehicle invoice as that's stored by VIN. But the order form does not way one or the other about the body plate info being optional, so that's why I sent the question. We'll see what they say. If they say it's not necessary, I may go ahead and do it.

 

The Heritage Center answered my question without me having to spend any money. They wrote back and said that their archives do not contain invoices for cars with the first two VINs, 3Z57K8M700001 and 3Z57K8M700002. As far as the second two, 3Z57K8M700003 and 3Z57K8M700004, BOTH invoices show option code Y73, the XS option package. So, at best, my car was the third XS built for 1978. This assumes, of course, that cars came off the line in VIN order, and I keep hearing that that wasn't true as special ordered cars would get a VIN assigned as soon as the order was received by the factory, even if the car wasn't built until several days later.

Now why are are there no invoices for the first two VINs? I asked the Center why that might happen, and he said they had no idea. He said "every car produced had a VIN." But that brings up the question, did every VIN have a car? Could a VIN have been skipped along the way for one reason or another? Or could the car have never made it to a dealer's lot because it was kept back for some reason, such as damaged in production, sent to the test track, given to an executive to drive, crash-tested, or who knows what. I think the Heritage Center would have records only for vehicles that were delivered to a dealer as their invoices are "dealer invoices" and show the dealer to whom the car was sent. If a car was never shipped to a dealer for whatever reason, no invoice would have been created. Just guessing here. It's fun to speculate. We'll likely never know for sure.

 

That would depend on where the VIN was applied and if federal law requires a VIN for every vehicle leaving the line or if federal law states exact details on VIN application. I would assume, crash vehicles don't count, if they weren't given a number. They simply didn't exist, for all practical purposes. Just because executives became vehicles doesen't mean they could roguely drive them around on public roads without proper licensing, insurance coverage and identification. I'd start with researching federal requirements first. Once that's solved, that should answer many of the remaining questions

 

I would assume that ALL vehicles to come off the line, even if they were destined right from the start to be headed to the crash-test grounds, had a VIN assigned. The only reason that the Heritage Center would have no record of a dealer invoice for such a car is because the car was never meant to be sold, so it never was shipped to a dealer, so no dealer invoice was ever generated for it.

Approximately the same would be true for a car that came off the line and was sent directly to an executive for his personal use. Such a car would not have gone through the originally-sold-by-a-dealer process. That car might one day have turned up on a used car lot and sold to the general public, but it wouldn't have had a dealer invoice generated for it originally. I wonder if the Heritage Center has ever come across such a situation. Someone inquires about a car he owns, and the Center doesn't have an invoice for it even though they would have been expected to because the car is within the range of model years for which the Center claims to have invoice records.

It actually wouldn't surprise me to learn that the first vehicle of any series (first Cutlass, first Delta 88, whatever) that came off the line wasn't sold to the public but was kept by the factory or the company for one reason or another. So there might not be any X00001 vehicles out there.

 

Across the Big Three, there are. A friend of mine worked for a radiator shop just NE of me, and in one bay, the owner had the first '64 Falcon Sprint, a convertible, with all the documentation you could obtain before Marti came along. The car looked like it had been to Hell and back, needed a full resto, but the bonafides to its first place in the 1964 VIN sequence were all there.

 

For the record, when a sequence is set, no matter what the digits are, it's set so that the last three digits are '001.' So even without dealer invoices, there are cars built with '001,' '002,' etc.