Automotif CLXI...

Parked out in front of The Jazz Kitchen on Sunday afternoon was this super-straight '77-'81 Pontiac Bonneville coupe. It's a boat of a car by modern standards, but it's actually downsized from the Peak Boat era of GM B-bodies, 1971-'76, when the Bonneville would have stretched most of nineteen feet from stem to stern and sported a wheelbase long enough to park a pair of Smart ForTwos side-by-side between the axles with inches to spare.

I think this one's a '78 or '79, which would mean the base engine was Pontiac's 301 c.i.d. V-8 smog motor, putting out 135 net hp, with optional 350-, 400-, and 403-cubic inch motors. The latter was a 4-bbl Oldsmobile engine rated at 185 horsepower. Not a ton of grunt by the standards of the '60s-'70s muscle car years, to say nothing of the modern era, but it'd still get out of its own way.

In 1980, the increasingly strict CAFE regs caused GM to downgrade the base motor to Buick's 231 cubic inch V-6. The optional V-8s shrunk to 265- and 301-c.i.d. motors, and the dire Olds 350 diesel V-8, which helped put an entire generation of Americans off the very idea of diesel power.
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