View from the rear mirror

By ALASTAIR SLOANE motoring editor Alastair Sloane

In Las Vegas last week, no one was wearing a sandwich board with an ominous message, but for hundreds of Oldsmobile dealers attending their industry's annual convention, there's no denying reality: the end is near.

"It's time to get on with the burial," said Gary Wight, who has sold Oldsmobiles for 30 years.

"It's sad and it's done and it's not going to change. Oldsmobile is a wonderful memory, but there's nothing in the windshield. It's all in the rearview mirror."

General Motors announced in December 2000 that it would end production of the struggling Oldsmobile line with this year's model. The company stopped making the Intrigue, Aurora and Bravada sport-utility vehicle. Only the Alero passenger car and Silhouette mini-van remain.

Darwin Clark, GM's vice-president of industry-dealer affairs, said a final date to end production had not been set, but business likely would continue into next year.

Wight, a GM dealer in Rigby, Idaho, figures last week's gathering of Olds dealers at the National Automobile Dealers' Association annual convention will be the last.

Clark and other GM representatives have been working with Olds dealers for more than two years on separation arrangements.

When the decision was made to scrap the brand, Olds counted 2802 dealers in the United States. As of last week, all but 176 had signed settlements. Of those 176, some deals are in the works. Others are tied up in litigation, the result of dealers who aren't happy with terms of their proposed settlements.

GM has declined to discuss details of the settlements or pending lawsuits. When GM reported its earnings in January 2001, the company had set aside US$939 million for the Oldsmobile phase-out.

"This is a very tough situation, but the process seems to be working fairly well," said Bill Stacy, an Oldsmobile transition director.

He said slightly more than 1500 dealers had chosen already to exit the Olds business. Another 1300 or so remain active.

Oldsmobile or not, many of the dealers remain in the car business because 94 per cent of them sold another GM brand at the time of the 2000 announcement. That's the case for Wight, who also sells Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Buicks and Pontiacs. Sixty per cent of his business was from repeat customers.

"We sell all of those brands, so it's probably easier for us to make the transition," Wight said.

"If I were a stand-alone Oldsmobile dealer, it would have been devastating." Oldsmobile was named for its founder, Ransom E. Olds, who started the Olds Motor Vehicle Co in Lansing, Michigan, in 1897.

Olds made gasoline engines and teamed with Frank Clark, the son of a small carriage shop operator, to start the company. Their mission was "to build one carriage in a nearly perfect a manner as possible".

Their first production car was called the Curved Dash. It cost US$650 and became the most popular car in America, thanks partly to the US Postal Service's use of the Curved Dash as the country's first mail van.

Olds created the first rudimentary assembly line, where workers used wheeled carts to carry car parts from station to station during the assembly process.

It sped up production enormously. In 1901, Olds built 425 Curved Dash cars. In 1903, it built 4000.

In 1905, Olds entered a pair of Curved Dashes in a coast-to-coast race from New York to Portland, Oregon. One was called Old Scout, the other Old Steady. First prize was US$1000.

One reason for the trip was to assess roading conditions and reports soon confirmed that America's rural roads were in a sad state. The race served to convince federal and state governments to make roads a priority. America was getting ready for the horseless carriage.

Old Scout won the race, arriving in Portland 45 days after leaving New York. Old Steady chugged in several days later.

In 1910, Olds built the Limited, a huge model in those days. It had a 130-inch (3302mm) wheelbase, rode on 42-inch wheels and was powered by a 707 cubic-inch (11.5-litre) six-cylinder engine producing 60bhp. The four-cylinder model 42 roadster appeared in 1915.

Things moved rapidly going into the 1920s. GM absorbed the company and Olds soon assumed its place as the middle-class car in GM's lineup, more expensive than Chevrolet and Pontiac but a step or two below Buick and Cadillac.

In 1927, GM hired Harley Earl, a young designer from California, to work at its new design studio in Detroit.

Earl would go on to pioneer the art of automotive styling and set up the industry's first in-house design department, GM's famous "art and colour section." Earl's flair would benefit Olds and GM for the next 30 years.

In 1934, Olds introduced its "knee-action" front suspension, a coiled-spring set-up that replaced the solid axle and leaf springs, and its new hydraulic brakes.

Three years later it came up with the "automatic safety transmission." Despite its name it relied on a conventional clutch pedal which the driver pushed to select "low" or "high" range.

Once the car was rolling, the transmission shifted between first and second gears in "low" and between first, third and fourth in "high".

In 1940, Olds introduced Hydra-Matic Drive, its first fully automatic transmission. In 1946, it started its "Valiant Programme", where Olds were modified with hand throttles and the like so disabled veterans of World War II could drive them.

In 1949, it built the Rocket V8, an overhead valve engine producing 130bhp.

Ten years later it won the first Daytona 500 race. In 1997, its 100th birthday, it showed off a new logo.

Oldsmobile was among the pioneers in using chrome-plated trim and the mass production of automatic transmissions. It gave drivers the Eighty Eight series, the front-wheel-drive Toronado and the Cutlass.

The brand grew steadily over the years, and in 1977 it became the first GM division outside Chevrolet to sell more than one million cars. Its high point was 1985, when it built 1,168,982 vehicles. But sales began to fall in the past decade and GM was unable to make a profit with the brand.

In recent years, GM mailed 722,000 coupons to existing Olds customers, good for $1500 towards another Olds or $1000 off another GM model.