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For a legacy brand that ruled for more than a century, Oldsmobile certainly died an ignoble death. But Friday was your chance to snag the sum total of 106 years of history, knowledge, and innovation: A 2004 Oldsmobile Alero GLS, otherwise known as the last Olds ever made.
As highlighted by Auto Remarketing, the General Motors Heritage Center has evidently decided to part with this flawless piece of mid-aughts engineering for reasons we can’t understand. The car was being auctioned off by State Line Auto Auction in western New York today, more than 13 years after it came off the assembly line in 2004 at the Lansing Car Assembly plant in Michigan, which itself shut down a year later. The engine bay and trunk bear the signatures of every worker in the plant at the time, and the front-wheel-drive sedan has spent its entire life as a museum piece. A final sale price hasn’t been disclosed.
This particular Alero is the last of a 500-car production run to celebrate the end of the company’s reign, and has a whopping 29 miles on the odometer. So why is General Motors selling it off? We think you know the answer to that.
“Every year a group of several interested employees including executives go over the Heritage collection inventory,” GM Heritage Center manager Greg Wallace told Auto Remarketing. “The intent is to keep only the crown jewels and sell selected properties at auction. We then take the proceeds and improve our collection by acquiring historically significant properties we need.”
The Alero was certainly not a great car, but there’s no point in being cruel to a dead brand like Oldsmobile. We posited before that the company really keeled over back in 1996 when it discontinued the boat-like 98, and the Alero, which rode on GM’s N-body platform with the Chevy Malibu and the also-dead Pontiac Grand Prix, is hardly connected to what Oldsmobile used to represent. Still, it’s not every day that you get the chance to own the last car that one of the oldest automakers in the world ever built, and that alone makes it worth preserving.
But its time as a company “crown jewel” appears to be at and end, and even if you didn’t get a chance to save it yourself, they’ve also got the last Cutlass and Ciera built up for sale as well.
