I bring this up because the year 1985 was nineteen years after the last Studebaker, a 1966 Cruiser, rolled off their Canadian assembly line. Their South Bend, Indiana plant had been shuttered a few years earlier, in December of '63.
Growing up, Studebakers were old cars. I don't really recollect seeing any around when I was in high school, but this was still the era when domestic cars had five-digit odometers and were considered a pretty well-knackered hooptie when one passed the 100k mile mark. This was also the days before galvanized body panels; it wasn't too bad down south, but north of the Ohio River, cars would often be rotting before your eyes before the note was paid off. (I vaguely remember family members exclaiming at visible rust on my uncle's fairly new Camaro during a holiday visit back north.)
Anyway, if high school student in 2022 goes to get her driver's license, nineteen years in the past is 2003.
Oldsmobile produced its last vehicle in 2004*.
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| 2001-2004 Oldsmobile Silhouette minivan |
Plymouth went under in 2001, and Eagle...the last non-Jeep vestige of AMC, by then just a division of Chrysler...in 1998.
To the Zoomer, the names "Oldsmobile" and "Plymouth" are as quaint as "Studebaker" and "Packard" are to Gen X, with the difference being that by the 1990s rust-proofing and cars that would run with some degree of reliability for a couple hundred thousand miles had become a thing.
*Which makes the 1997 book Setting the Pace: Oldsmobile's First 100 Years sort of poignant, in retrospect.
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