1995 Buick Century

At first I thought I'd seen this particular '94-'96 Buick Century running around the 'hood before, but no. That one, seen below, was Dark Cherry Metallic with faux wire wheel hubcaps and this one's Ruby Red Metallic with what look to be steel sport wheels. Looking at both cars, the front passenger door rub strip appears to be a known failure point for this model.

The Century, platform mate to snoozers like the Chevy Celebrity and Pontiac 6000, was supposed to have been discontinued in 1990, replaced by the rebooted Regal, which rode on the same new aerodynamic front wheel drive GM W-platform as the Lumina, Cutlass, and Grand Prix.

The Century still sold like gangbusters though, especially to rental fleets, and the tooling on the old A-body cars was long amortized, so they and their Olds Cutlass Ciera cousins soldiered on with only a minor facelift.

In my headcanon, some young designer got tapped to design the snout of a "potential future Buick sedan with retro cues" and so he penned a shape with a bit of an aggressive undercut reminiscent of 5- and 6-series BMWs combined with flush aero headlamps and a graceful grille that showed a trace of that classic Buick waterfall look...

And then, to his horror, management took that attractive snout and slapped it on the front end of the '91 Centuries, to "freshen them up".

From the leading edge of the hood on back, the rest of the car is the same dull, boxy, angular Century it had been since 1982. Powerplant choices for '95 consisted of the LN2 2.2L multiport injected four cylinder rated at 130hp or the optional 160hp L82 3.1L SFI V-6. Both motors were backed with either a three-speed automatic or a four-speed automatic with electronically controlled overdrive.

This other Century had what looked like a two-letter badge on the rear fender back by the taillight. I couldn't exactly make it out, but it looked like a round letter and a squiggly letter. Did that dude put "GS" badges on his boxmobile? I opened it in Photoshop and blew it up before I realized that he'd just lost the "NTURY" off the right rear fender nameplate.

The top photo was shot with a Nikon D7100 and 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR zoom lens in October of 2023, while the bottom one was taken in August of 2021, using a Hasselblad Lunar and Sony Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* E 16-70mm f/4 OSS zoom lens.