Regal hits the big 4-0

By Bill McLauchlan

If you ask me, Wordsworth said it nicely in his Intimations of Immortality on Recollections of Early Childhood when he wrote, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.”

Well, this year has been one in which a number of car makers have done their best to make sure we didn’t sleep through the birth of their famous nameplates and forget them in the mists of time. Witness the recent celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the birth of Porsche’s iconic 911, the 60th birthday of Chevrolet’s game-changing Corvette and the 100th year since Britain gave birth to the fabled Aston Martin brand.

All major milestones, to be sure, but somewhat lost in all this hoopla was another well-known nameplate’s turn to light the candles and blow its horn. Forty years ago, the Regal name was added to Buick’s family of models made for well-heeled buyers moving up in style.

Born into the automotive world in 1973, the Century Regal, as it was originally called, served as an up-market model in the Century line and one of General Motors’s first “personal luxury” cars. Designed with sporty suspension characteristics and luxuries aimed primarily at the driver, the ’73 Regal coupe sold some 91,500 units, helping Buick surpass its 1955 all-time sales record.

Swoopy body lines and opera windows were Regal fashion cues at the start of the personal luxury era.

(copyright: General Motors)

Launched with a standard V8 engine, the Regal soon carved out a niche as a powertrain innovator. Among one of the first to react to the initial OPEC oil embargo, the 1975 Regal was the only mid-size car to forego a gas-guzzling V8 in favour of a V6.

Just a few years later, beginning with the ’78 Regal, Buick was at the forefront in developing turbocharged engines for better fuel economy. This knowledge helped pave the way for iconic Buicks of the ’80s including the highly coveted Grand National and legendary GNX models.

The third generation Regal, produced from 1988 to 1996, ushered in front-wheel-drive clothed in a scaled-down X-body structure shared with the Chevrolet Citation and similar models from Oldsmobile and Pontiac.

But by 1997 the Regal had returned to its roots and again became an up-market version of the Buick Century. That year’s Regal GS debuted with the brand’s first supercharged V6, rated at 240 horsepower. This expertise would be used in creating significant Regal offerings until 2004.

Through four decades, and now in its fifth generation after a brief hiatus that ended in 2009, the present-day Regal carries on its sweeping design and a careful focus on all-passenger comfort, safety, performance and technology. A high-output GS version returned to the North American market for 2012. And, introduced in 2013, the 2014 iteration is the first Regal to offer all-wheel-drive.

(Copyright: General Motors)

With a useful combination of sport sedan handling, some of the most power-dense and technically advanced engines and a host of new radar and camera-based safety assists in Buick’s history, the current Regal (seen above in GS trim) is helping attract younger, new buyers to Buick and, in the process, dropped the average age of Buick buyers to 57. That’s down from 64 just five years ago and at a time when the “average age for the industry is going up,” according to Tony DiSalle, v.p. of marketing for GM’s Buick and GMC divisions.

It might be heading gracefully into middle age as a 40-year-old family veteran but it’s sure helped Buick take sip from the fountain of youth.