Sports Versus Sporty: 1987 Buick LeSabre T-Type

Among my legions of car colleagues, the T-Type line from Buick in the 1980s is one that generates a certain type of response: “I wouldn’t mind owning one, but I’m not going to hunt for it.” In other words, if a clean T-Type LeSabre fell into our laps, we’d be fine with it, but it’s not the sort of car you embark on a years-long hunt for. It almost follows the general theme the car had when it was new: sporty, but not a sports car. Still, they are rare to find in any form, and this 1987 LeSabre listed here on craigslist for $12,000 looks quite nice.

When Buick began giving its cars the all-black treatment, it was an indication of a few different things: for one, it wanted to stand out, like any competitive manufacturer. Two, it was interested in seeing if it could snag a few customers away from its European competitors, who seemed to have eschewed chrome trim for color matching. Three, there was likely some internal fighting within GM between Pontiac or Buick being the brand that got to be crowned “exciting”, and we all know how that turned out. It seems Buick never got further than using a conventional front-wheel drive recipe that looked killer but didn’t actually hunt. If you are an enthusiast who has been hunting for a T-Type LeSabre, however, this one looks quite clean.

But it really is a looks-only car. What I mean is GM was signaling, in some ways, they couldn’t build a better BMW 3-Series. One of the biggest complaints about cars like the LeSabre was how great it looked outside, but then you slid into an interior that was straight out of your grandfather’s Buick. Expanses of plastic dash and zero sense of a driver-oriented cockpit. For anyone cross-shopping the T-Type with an E30 BMW at the time, it was a night and day difference. Under the hood was a reliable 3.8-liter, 150 b.h.p. V6 hooked up to a 4-speed automatic. Hardly exciting, but certainly capable of getting the job done.

This vintage advertisement for the standard LeSabre (listed here on eBay if you’re curious) shows you what was sitting across the showroom floor from the sinister T-Type at the time: the LeSabre your grandfather absolutely did drive. If you were in your early 30s and considering a T-Type but saw this very car staring at it across the tile floor, how would you react? In many ways, Buick was signaling that the T-Type experiment was simply that and it was more reliant on its steady customer base than trying to steal a few import shoppers away. Regardless, these T-Types show up infrequently at best, and we thank Barn Finds reader Barney for sending this one in.