Car Spotlight- Oldsmobile Achieva (1992-1998)

A boring car in a boring color.

Oldsmobile was always remembered as being "your fathers car" or "your buddy Mike's first car after granny got thrown into the old folk's home."  And by the 1990s...it was still that way.  Just the name "Oldsmobile" can be a dead giveaway to being a boring car meant for old people.

The Achieva was no different from the rest of the Oldsmobile family at the time.  One thing that confuses me the most was where Olds got the name.  It sounds like someone sneezed as they were pitching the name to some top GM executives, and the name stuck...

Like most GM sedans at the time, the Achieva was just another half-hearted attempt to fill a void in a market segment.  Sure, one could get an Achieva with two doors and a stick-shift, but what kind of old person would buy that?  Even the commercials for it were uninspiring... I mean...who would think  that spending most of a commercial showing a bar graph and not the car itself would convince people to buy this car?

The answer to that was well...old people.  Old people who have been driving Oldsmobiles for decades. The Achieva was the car that they bought after retirement, and all the kids have moved out.   At this point, the only places these people would need to go to are the grocery store and church.  Even today, I still see Achieva's on Craigslist with under 100,000 miles.

After almost 90 years of building cars for Grandpa,  Oldsmobile finally realized that they aren't going anywhere if they continue selling such uninspiring cars like the Achieva.  So after selling most of their inventory of 1998 Achieva's to rental fleets, Oldsmobile discontinued the car along with some of it's other well-known but tired nameplates such as the Eighty-Eight, Ninety-Eight, and Cutlass.

Oldsmobile would then focus on making cars that were designed by European engineers...because THAT is what convinces people top buy cars...right?  Well, apparently not, because GM would kill the Oldsmobile brand in 2004 due to low sales and the fact that GM already had several other marques that could easily fill in the void that Olds left behind.