100 Cars I Love: #6 – 1988 Buick Reatta

Greetings, dear readers. Our second soft Buick coupe, the Buick Reatta holds #6 on our list. (Again, this is merely a count, not a comparison of favoritism.) I swear I’m less than eighty years old, even in light of this Buick-Jones I’ve got going on. So, onto the car.



The Reatta is a cool ride, even as unhip as a late 80’s GM anything can be. The Buick Reatta’s got a certain unique cachet to it. The vehicle was an exception to GM’s typical badge engineering modus operandi. While still sporting the near omnipresent Buick 3800 V6 (good for 165 horsepower), the Reatta was still clad in its own unique sheet metal. the coupe wasn’t built by an assembly line, but by individual teams, who signed off dates of completion in a leather-bound book that was provided to the buyer of the car. Production was undertaken at the Lansing Craft Centre, in Michigan, the same factory where GM would assemble machines as equally quirky as the EV-1 and the SSR.
Performance was nothing special, but that’s not why this car made this list. The screens are why. My god. The screens. Shared with the contemporaneous Buick Regal, the Reatta sported a full array of late 1980s technology touchscreens. These then-high-tech systems had control of the car’s audio, HVAC, and on-board diagnostics.

This unique setup was marginalized into buttons by 1990. 1988 saw a special edition Reatta: The Select Sixty, with special badging and 16 inch wheels. Seeing as the production of this Select Sixty edition numbered around fifty-five, that makes this tepid sports coupe something of an exotic.

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