At its heyday in the late 1990s, the Aurora was the flagship of the Oldsmobile organization. But a redesign in 2001 didn’t sell well once word got out that General Motors would soon mothball the entire division. This ’01 edition looks pretty good, considering it has been inactive since 2020. The car has low miles (40,000) and will need an unknown amount of work. Located in Hatboro, Pennsylvania, the seller has priced this Olds as a great deal at just $500 here on craigslist.
The Aurora’s arrival in 1994 was part of a product consolidation move that led to the retirement of the Olds 98 and others at the upper end of the Oldsmobile portfolio. The second generation was in production from 2001 to 2003 using GM’s G-body platform. Two engines were offered: a 3.5-liter V6 and a 4.0-liter V8, both paired with a 4-speed automatic transmission. The second-gen Aurora was slick in appearance and sold okay at 53,600 copies in 2001, but sales trickled off in 2002 and 2003, and Oldsmobile was gone in 2004.
According to the seller, this V6-powered Aurora was running when it was parked (for undisclosed reasons) after its last inspection in 2020. No attempts have been made to start it since, and the battery is either missing or deader than a doornail. It’s spent most of that time stored indoors, though it was pushed outside more recently.
It looks decent overall with only a large blemish on the driver’s side front fender. The interior seems all right, though the front seat bottoms may be a bit sunburned (that happens to leather upholstery). The seller apparently has no interest in getting it going again and has priced it on the cheap to make it go away quickly. For $500, would you take a gamble? Thanks for the tip, Mitchell G.!
Deleted by author. Too bad for five hundred bucks I would give it a shot. I always liked these. GM should have positioned Olds as an import fighter with the Aurora and a gussied up Intrigue at the top and Saturn rolled in for lower end products. Or maybe the other way around. But Olds couldn’t shake Your Father’s Oldsmobile.
“Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile” sums up how GM got Olds and Buick market positioning exactly backwards from the ’80s onward. That slogan just reinforced the existing perception of Olds as an aspirational marque for established mature adults, and along with “old” right there in the name, that made it an uphill battle to convince anyone it had youth appeal.
Meanwhile, Buick had a somewhat stale but lingering perception as a “doctor’s car”, at a time when actual doctors (of the medical and advanced-degree professional/academic sorts alike) were increasingly yuppies trending more towards a preference for advanced and sophisticated import (esp. European) marques.
Thus, Olds should have targeted the market for traditional American mid-upscale luxury, and Buick should have combined those attributes with the performance and trendy-style attributes of Pontiac, which is ultimately what it became anyway once Olds and Pontiac got the axe.
I had a 2001 Aurora 4.0. LOTS of power, and handled surprisingly well. Very comfortable car (leather, heated seats) with lots of bells and whistles. Loved the speed controled volume on the Bose stereo. Mine was driven 148,000 miles. Changing the plugs on the V8 was a bear. Oldsmobile missed a step-should have marketed the Aurora as the new Cutlass. Great car. Just sold it earlier this year. I miss that car. If I had the money to rebuild the engine, I would be driving it today!
POS then and now…
Rw: That’s wrong. They were great cars.
At 1 time i owned 2 of the same color. The power windows wouldn’t stay up and the power steering lines leaked after you got past a certain number of miles.
My Navy buddy asked me to look at something (his words), and in the garage was a brand new Aurora. He was snatched by the dark side of the force, and bought it about 10 minutes after he saw it, and after a short test drive. He still has it, said it was the only car that smacked him like that. He traded his BMW in, which surprised me.
He named it the lead sled, but it still looks new.
Go figure. This was a deal, and they do come up more often than we would think.
I was the service manager at a Oldsmobile, Volvo, BMW dealership. I really liked the Aurora abd we had minimal issues with them in the service department. One of them we sold was to our sales manager who started complaining about a vibration. I drove the car and said it was a tire issue. (we were having some vibration issues with a particular model of Goodyear at the time) He refused my diagnosis at the time and screamed loud enough to Oldsmobile that they sent out a service rep. and the district service engineer. They showed up with some really cool diagnostic equipment and attached it to the car. It measured the strength/stiffness of the chassis/body in several different locations. The test showed a tire issue which took only a few minutes to locate. And since they were there with all the equipment. We decided to load it all up on a 5 series BMW for a comparison. The Aurora chassis was 30% stiffer than the BMW! BMW prides it’s self on a stiff chassis so that incremental tweaks can be made to the suspension. And here a GM car was 30% stiffer than a BMW! The GM guys were amazed. The sales manager was embarrassed when they told him I had made the correct diagnosis. I would love to have an Aurora today.
The “Shortstar” engine (4.0) was a slug. Higher RPM than necessary and low torque. I had one for a while. I couldn’t wait to get rid of it. The car handled fairly well but was no match for a Buick Riviera.
if they had kept building your father’s Oldsmobile they most likely would have stayed afloat longer than they did. i worked for an olds dealer from 81 till the closed-up shop in the early 2000s and what they were putting out was some real s***buckets. i don’t like to say that cause i am an olds person but to lose Pontiac and Oldsmobile and keep Buick is beyond me
I agree hairyolds. The Achiva was a dismal car. And Oldsmobile was dumping them into rental fleets. (Made them “such a deal”) And any dealer that had a reasonable size airport nearby suffered greatly. I was audited by the factory because my warranty repairs were over the guideline. Luckily for me, my service rep. was a buddy and he provided me with the claim numbers that pushed me over the limit. (He knew that I wasn’t doing anything funny/wrong.) After analyzing all my claims for 90 days and the ones that pushed me over the limit. I found a “DUH” situation. Rental cars warranty claims (per vehicle) were 60% higher than a regular customer’s claim. The regular customer brought their car in as soon as it started to act up. The rental cars were driven until they stop running. And since so many of them were the trash Achievas. It made for an abnormal amount of expensive claims. I was able to find out other dealers that were going to be audited for claims over guideline and they were all close to major airports. I let them know what I found and later received several gift cards in the mail for thank yous.
A little late on this, been busy.
I, too worked at Olds dealers for many years. Agree with everything you said. There is an Achieva running around Prescott. Amazing!