American car buyers looking for a large hardtop coupe in 1962 couldn’t go wrong with offers from The General. Chevrolet will sell to you a stylish new Bel Air sports coupe for only $2,561 (about $23,800 today), but those Joneses next door will not feel ashamed if you put a new proletariat Chevy on your driveway. No, to really stand tall in the times Alfred Sloan’s ladder of successyou have to go higher on GM food chains. For 1962 B-platform full-size cars, that means Pontiac Catalina / Bonneville beat Chevy, the Oldsmobile 88 is the next step up the ladder, and at the top is Buick: Invicta hot bar and its flashy LeSabre cousin. To go beyond that, you have to switch to the C platform Buick Electra or Cadillac. Junkyard Gem today is a once chic ’62 LeSabreis now much dimmed in a vineyard in northeastern Colorado.
Why GM Shoppers Are Unbalanced in terms of “Chevymobile” episodes in the late 1970s, in which some GM vehicles received engines made by “smaller” GM parts, i.e. each part had its own line of V8s during the 1950s and 1960s, and they were not mixing with each other. ’62 LeSabre has a 401-inch cubicle (6.5 liters) Nail head motor (so called because of the unusually small valves), rated at 265, 280 or 325 (depending on what kind of compression ratio and carburetor you want). Those aren’t crazy horses for a large, two-ton luxury coupe for its day, but small valves that allow the combustion chamber to be optimized for one thing: low rpm. torque. This 401 has a twin-barreled carburetor, so it makes 412 or 425 pound-feet of torque. That’s just a little less than the mighty man Cadillac’s engine of that year, and certainly enough to make this car move very fast.
You paid a high premium for a Chevrolet, Pontiacand Oldsmobile B-body to get automatic transmission (a three-speed column shifter manual is the basic equipment in those cars), but a Turbine-Drive (formerly known as Dyna-Flow) auto is standard issue on LeSabre 1962. This is an interesting transmission design trace its origin back M18 Hellcat 1942 . anti-tank gun and uses torque variable multiplication to provide a CVT-like experience with no discernible shift (the driver can manually select a separate set of lows, so the gear shift looks like the set of numbers above true two-speed Powerglide transmission). Dynaflow / Turbine Drive Wastes Power, But It Was cute. After 1963, Buick switched to the same Turbo-Hydramatic automatics used by other GM divisions.
This car sits outdoors for many years without glass, sometimes decades. GM’s B-body coupes of the period might be worth restoring, but this one would require an entirely new interior from the ground up.
The MSRP of this one-time primer is $3,293, or about $30,605 in 2022 dollars.
While an automatic transmission is standard on the ’62 LeSabre (as well as a heater/defrost machine), the buyer paid $116 (about $1,080 today) for this AM station. Hey, if you wanna hear number 1 song of 1962 while driving your new Buick you are not cheap at all! Note the triangle symbols in a Civil Defense circle at 640 and 1240 kHz; those indicate the frequency of CONELRAD system, broadcast announcement in case of Soviet nuclear attack. All US market car radio sold from 1953 to 1963 was required by federal law to have CONELRAD frequencies marked.
The original buyer of this car even paid an extra $17 ($158 today) for the optional rear speaker, and I bet that watch isn’t free.
Buick introduced “VentiPorts” on fenders in 1949and they have come and gone several times since then.
What does it take to become a Buick?
