Eighties Executives
Thirty years ago, they filled the executive car park: now the man who tested them first time round conducts a rematch
Re-tested by the original road tester. Have they stood the test of time?
You’re looking at a lost world of upmarket aspiration, at a category of car once full of wannabes before the premium players became the new mainstream. Back in the mid-eighties, when a Vauxhall could be in the same magazine group test as a BMW, every significant carmaker had a big saloon in its range, offering prestige, luxury and sophistication.
The ‘volume’ makers offered theirs at prices below those asked by the (mainly German) ‘premium’ brands, and many a motoring journalist
wrestled with the obvious question: was a premium car actually better, or was it just a case of the emperor’s new clothes? Clearly those clothes, whether or not they existed, were a desirable commodity because today there is no longer a full-size ‘executive’ car from Ford, Vauxhall, Peugeot, Citroën or Renault.
True, today’s largest offerings from these companies are probably as big as, or even bigger than, these Eighties/early-nineties execs, but their roots and market-positioning are in the size-class below. Meanwhile, two semi-premium
past players, Rover and Saab, have sadly vanished completely. We’ve gathered 12 examples of an almost extinct breed, be they premium or pretender. Of course, there could have been more had we only been able to find them: the first streamlined, flush-glass Audi 100 would have sat well here (just downmarket of BMW and Mercedes back then), as would the Rover 800’s Honda Legend cousin and the other two Type Four cars, the Lancia Thema and Fiat Croma. And Nissan Maxima? No, scrub that.
So, three decades on, who wins the battle of the execs? And once we know the answer, has anything really changed between then and now? I went on the press launches of many of these cars when they were new, and road tested each and every one of them. Finding out how time has treated them is going to be fascinating.
The French Confections
Why shouldn’t France make covetable executive cars? This is the country that brought us the Citroën DS and the Facel Vega, and the country whose car companies understood the secrets of ride comfort in a way others did not. France is also known for original thinking in the automotive world and for trendsetting design in the fashion world. All of this is encapsulated in the Citroën XM. It could not be more French, every design challenge solved in way no other manufacturer would. The streamlined, two-box shape (by Bertone) and oleo-pneumatic suspension are obvious Citroën attributes, but how about the solution to making the passenger compartment of a hatchback (practical, sleeker in profile) as snug as a luxury saloon’s (no draughts when the luggage compartment is opened)? Simple: you incorporate an extra layer of wind-blocking glass just behind the rear seat, easily swivelled out of the way if needed.
An expansive, very rectilinear dashboard with rows of important-looking switches, plus a retractable cover over the stereo, lend an upmarket air even if the obviously hollow steeringcolumn stalks do not. There’s an abundant airiness to the cabin thanks to all that glass, even if those front quarterlight bars seem like a pillar too many. And, of course, the seats are super-sumptuous: you sink into them, relaxing instantly, yet they hold you well on a twisty road.
On such a road you will marvel at the way the hefty XM darts joyfully into a curve, rolling but little thanks to its Hydractive suspension that automatically stiffens when g-forces are sensed. Yet it soaks up bumps in that languid Citroën way, while showing an impressive turn of effortlessly thrusting pace thanks to its 2.1-litre, 12-valve turbodiesel engine. It’s an extraordinarily capable car, and more fool the company-exec massive for not appreciating it at the time. Maybe there would just have been too much explaining to do to those who didn’t ‘get it’.
That cosseting theme dominates the Renault 25, too, a car launched five years before the XM. Our car here is the facelifted version, one of those Eighties/nineties Renault facelifts (the Renault 21’s was the other) that snuffed out the visual daring of the originals, so it has lost the first version’s multi-bar grille and striated tail-lights in favour of a more generic, less futuristic look, but the extravagantly curved glass of the rear hatch is still a startling feature.
Inside, this 2.2 GTX version’s super-soft seats electrically adjust up, down, in, out, backwards, forwards… for gadgets, this Renault out-gizmo-ed all but the priciest premium cars. The hooded dashboard looks like a mixing desk, a theme continued with the graphic equaliser for the stereo system. But those who questioned the quality of Renault’s componentry back in the day were right; in 2019 the door trims’ coverings are parting company with their backing and things in general don’t seem to be as solidly attached as they once were.
This one’s a four-speed automatic with an early example of electronic control, and it still shifts smoothly when it should. There’s enough torque for the auto not to smother the injected engine’s performance, and give or take the ageing dampers the Renault moves along with a relaxing briskness. It does show its age, though.
But not as much as our Peugeot 605 does. This remarkable rarity shares both its platform and its 1989 launch year with the XM, so they are now celebrating their 30th anniversaries – the last of our 12 models here to do so. The 605’s style, though, seems simply to be an enlarged version of the 405 look. Or, put another way, from the side it looks uncannily similar to the Alfa 164. This improved the relationship of neither manufacturer with Pininfarina, responsible for the shapes of all three cars.
So, the 605 lacked its own clear identity, one reason for its poor sales. Others were its early reliability and quality problems, and it’s significant that of all our 12 cars it’s the 605 that has the most loose pieces of trim and imperfectly-functioning components. Get past all that, though, and you can appreciate the Peugeot’s interior in all its beige-wipeout glory. Even the steering wheel, the gear lever and all the switches are beige.
The dashboard has a convincingly leathery texture, though, and once again this is a very comfy car with a wonderful ride. It steers nicely, and were it in optimum health that 2.2-litre turbodiesel would pull it along with verve. The 605, in essence, feels like a big 405. Funny, that.
Badging for Britain
Back in the Eighties, company fleet managers still liked the idea of ‘buying British’. They would be supporting the home team while, usefully, spending less. So, Britain’s Big Three – Ford, Vauxhall and Rover – sold the most cars in the large executive sector, and the fact that Ford’s Granada and Vauxhall’s Carlton were built in Germany mattered less than their Brit-familiar branding. In fact, it was a double win: being built in Germany gave them a touch of BMW- and Merc-like premium prestige.
The Rover 800, however, had a quality promise of a different sort. It had Honda genes, thanks to Honda’s stake in what had been Britain’s biggest home-grown car corporation, and Rover also built the Honda Legend (in tiny numbers) whose platform sired the original 800. The Honda was V6-only, but Rover’s most popular 800s used Rover’s own Mi16 four-cylinder, twin-cam, 16-valve engine. Our car here is a 2.7-litre V6 Sterling. It’s an intriguing Anglo-japanese design fusion. The low scuttle and open-plan dashboard are very Honda, giving a great view forwards, and the rows of metallised-grey buttons have the look of a contemporary Japanese music centre. The crystal-clear dial graphics also show Honda influence, but the cryptic symbols on the buttons for the electric seat adjustment – do you press the middles, the edges, the corners? – suggest some Rover input. Plus, carpeting the outsides of the door pockets just seems odd. Outside, the style is linear and wedgy, a look lost (along with the excess of feature lines) at the later return-to-trad facelift. The wheels show the fetish of Eighties designers with BBS’S cross-spoke designs, and the combination of a dark blue cabin with a bronze-grey exterior shows that the old British Leyland penchant for unexpected colour schemes had lived on. That 2.7-litre V6 feels keen and brisk, and the whole car drives as tightly as its low mileage – just 29,000 – promises. Perhaps too tightly; the steering and handling are sharp and agile, but the ride is as choppy as I remembered and noisy over sharp bumps. That’s the price paid for the low-slung looks: a lack of suspension travel. Ford’s epically roomy hatchback Granada, launched a year earlier than the Rover in 1985, had no such problem. The top-of-the-range version got its own secondary name, Scorpio; in mainland Europe that name was used for the whole range in place of Granada, but Britain preferred to stick with the tag familiar from the previous model.
‘The Rover is an intriguing Anglo Japanese design fusion’
It’s a Granada Scorpio that we have here, the oldest car in our gathering and in extraordinarily immaculate condition.
Creating a hatchback in this status-conscious part of the market was always going to be risky, and indeed Ford later launched a booted saloon version (while Rover, conversely, launched an 800 hatchback or ‘Fastback’). But if you wanted a huge holdall, this was your car. Not that it skimped on luxury as a Scorpio, as the plump seats swathed in extravagantly ruched leather demonstrate. The ‘wood’ is less real than the cowhide, but there are toys a-plenty with electric adjustment for the front seats and reclining backrests for the rears. An early trip computer, too.
Adding to the air of opulence is that this one’s an automatic, its selector lever a blatant copy of Mercedes-benz’s fitment of the time. The lever’s path from P to low-gear lock has various side-steps to navigate, designed to make selection foolproof, but while the action is solidly silken in a Merc it’s punctuated by snags and clicks here. That’s one hint of not-quite-premium-ness; too-shiny hard plastics are another.
It does ride and handle rather nicely, though, languid but never loose. The 2.8-litre V6 is no paragon of urge or refinement (the later 2.9 was better) but it does an acceptable job if you’re not in a rush. The Scorpio was never going to worry Mercedes or BMW, but it was Ford’s poshest effort yet. Its Vauxhall rival was the Senator, which didn’t have a downrange four-cylinder version to compete with regular Granadas. That was the job of the same-platform, more soberly-styled Carlton, sold as the Opel Omega everywhere except the UK. There was a touch of the Audi 100 about 1986’s new Carlton generation, all streamlining and flush glass, although its retention of an old-fashioned steering box rather than moving to a newfangled rack was a surprise. That said, it was in good company because Mercedes, too, was staying faithful to the old way.
Ever keen to exploit a niche, Vauxhall added a 2.6-litre, straight-six CDX model to the Carlton range in 1988. There’s a stab at luxury inside, with what looks like wood trim (it isn’t real in this car but was in earlier examples) and a leather covering for the rather sporting-looking four-spoke steering wheel it shares with its maverick sibling, the madly rapid Lotus Carlton.
So, it’s slightly luxurious and slightly sporting. That’s how it feels to drive, too, the straight-six with its Dual Ram two-stage intakes humming smoothly away as the automatic transmission meters the ample torque, the steering soft but accurate, the ride smooth, the rear-wheel-drive handling balance rather satisfying like the Scorpio’s. But, to paraphrase a past Vauxhall advertising slogan: having driven it, am I forever smitten? Not as such.
The grand brands
Today it’s Germany and Jaguar. So, it was in the Eighties, with Jaguar’s base-trim, 2.9-litre XJ6 tilting against BMW’S 5-series and Mercedesbenz’s W124 while more powerful, betterupholstered Jag took on the 7-series and the S-class. Our Xj40-type XJ6 is such a car, cloth seats, plastic wheel trims and all. It’s an intriguing clash of design, engineering and marketing briefs, a high-prestige car deliberately downgraded but keeping the styling and the engineering of its more glamorous siblings. Even better is that it’s an XJ6 made after the range’s first facelift, when the base 2.9-litre, single-cam engine was ditched favour of a 3.2-litre version of the proper twin-cam AJ6 motor. What was not to like?
Very little, bar a few styling details unresolved when Jaguar’s development money ran out (and fixed in the Ford-funded X300 facelift). It has presence; some say this cheaper version’s four round headlights give it more attitude than the grander models’ full-glass rectangular units. It still looks luxurious, it goes with an aristocratic vigour and it rides beautifully, Jaguar being the British leader in this attribute. The low-slung XJ feels more agile than its size suggests it would, too. A good XJ40 remains a wonderful thing, especially when all the electrics are working as they should.
But would you trust it always to work? Probably not. For that you’d want a Mercedes-benz, like the 230E here. It’s an automatic, like the Jaguar (most were, in both cases), but it’s as down-to-earth as the Jaguar is flashy. The 2.3-litre engine has four cylinders rather than six, only the left-hand door mirror is electric because the driver is perfectly able to reach the manual adjuster for the righthand one, and the steering wheel is large so you can keep control if the power steering fails, which if course it hardly ever does.
The whole car feels honed-from-solid, unbreakable, immortal. These W124 Benzes are said by some to be the last truly durable cars of the Stuttgart tradition, although that might just be a reaction to the shocking propensity to rot of its W210 successor. It’s certainly one of the last Benzes with a proper full-size radiator grille four layers high and surrounded by a chrome shell, and with wheel trims/hubcaps so pure, smooth and simple that they’re art in themselves.
This is a delightful car to drive, with plenty of torque from that big four-pot and an impeccablymannered gearbox. It steers, handles and rides well enough, and unobtrusively enough, for you not to notice what it’s doing until you realise just how capable it actually is. No wonder they made such good taxis. Just one quirk: putting controls for indicators, dip/main, flash, wipers and washers all on one stalk is a complication too far.
And so, to the E34 BMW 5-series, the bestlooking 5-series there has ever been in the breed’s 46-year career to date. (Ercole Spada, of former Zagato fame, styled it.) The E34 used to win all the magazine group tests, although not necessarily in the 520i form we have here, because it was a beautifully-built design masterpiece which made its driver feel great while pampering its passengers. It was, simply, a very desirable object.
Three decades on, it still is. That little 2.0-litre straight six needs to be worked hard to haul this hefty saloon, but the way it revs shows it loves every minute. And that dashboard brings back happy memories of when dashboards were simple but stylish, and contained all you could reasonably want. The centre stack is angled to the driver, the instruments are the definition of clarity, all the plastics are padded including the glovebox lid.
There’s the familiar slick-but-rubbery gearchange, the engine’s deep hum, a feeling of aesthetic confidence and long-lasting quality. This car is nearly 28 years old, but it barely seems older now than it did back then. Instead the world has got younger, like policemen.
The British, German and French marques didn’t have it all their own way in the Eighties and Nineties. UK buyers were also keen on the two Swedish brands, Volvo and Saab. To have one of these cars was to tell the world that you were a free thinker, a nonconformist, that your values weren’t those of the corporate rat-race. You admired logic and rationality in design, and you felt both snug and smug as winter approached because you knew your car would be up to the job with its heated seats and quick warm-up.
Volvos were widely thought of as unbreakable, an impression helped by solid-looking design and big bumpers. The company wasn’t technically adventurous, apart from some dalliance with turbos. It was a late adopter of independent rear suspension in its large cars, even later with front-wheel drive. The 740 Turbo we have here has neither.
Nor does it have any detectable elegance. Instead it’s almost a cartoon parody of Volvo’s perceived squareness, all angles and edges with a near-vertical rear window intended to appeal to US buyers whose home-market cars had temporarily embraced that look. It feels a bit vintage to drive, its giant viscous cooling fan whirring away asthmatically, its live rear axle joggling along over bumps. And the gloomy interior is just as squarely functional as the outside, its cranked column stalks particularly intriguing.
But, goodness me, what a hoot it is. I remember opposite-locking around a frozen lake in an estate version of this car back in the day, an event organised to show how easy a Volvo was to drive in the snow and how predictable its handling was. All true, although nowadays the excessive width of tyres has destroyed modern rear-drive cars’ snow credentials. The 740 Turbo is the oldest-fashioned car here, but that’s what makes it charming.
The Saab is altogether more modern and sophisticated. Trollhattan’s new executive hatchback was the result of a collaboration with Fiat, the resulting Type Four project creating, to begin with, the Fiat Croma, the Lancia Thema and the 9000. All shared the same basic platform and, superficially, the same four doors, but Saab went its
own way with the rear suspension and, of course, the engines. Here’s another original car – the 2.0-litre, normally-aspirated example here – looking more modern for longer than the facelifted version launched shortly after our car was made. Its crisp lines still look great, the best of the Type Four trio, while the interior is a temple to Saab-ness with its multi-layer, joystick-controlled air vents, its broad sweep of rounded instrument panel, its ‘Scandi’ simplicity and its super-comfortable seats.
It drives as it looks – crisply, give or take the odd worn suspension bush, and with relaxed pace – but like the Renault it illustrates what can happen to interior trim over the decades in a way we can’t possibly predict. Blame a life of intensive and much-enjoyed use.
Three years after the first three Type Four cars appeared in 1984, there was a fourth: Alfa Romeo’s 164, with Fiat/lancia-type rear suspension, its own front suspension geometry to allow a lower nose, and its own doors. Motoring writers were blown away by its elegance: its sleek nose, the narrow strips of rear light, a dashboard whose horizontal ridges of vents and switch-rows gave it the look of a giant electrical heat-sink. The most exciting versions had Alfa Romeo’s much-admired V6 engine in 3.0-litre form, and to petrolheads this was the most exciting executive express of all. Even better was the Quadrifoglio Verde model launched in 1990 and here with us today. Early problems of steering tug under acceleration had been tamed a little by then, but the QV’S extra 8bhp, making 200, helped to keep it in the picture.
It’s certainly present in our example, perhaps exacerbated by a power-boosting engine chip and larger 17in alloy wheels shod with 45-profile tyres. Add stiffer anti-roll bars and the fact that the standard-fit variable dampers are stuck in their firm setting, and it’s no surprise that the ride is the firmest among all the cars here. A damper fix is in hand, and besides there’s the delicious growl and quickfire response of that handsome V6 to distract you. This bright red Alfa is the quickest car here, and when it arrived at our photoshoot I was just itching to drive it. How could I not be?
Who’s coming home with me?
After all the cars had arrived but before I drove any of them, I thought it would be the Alfa Romeo. Things turned out differently. I didn’t expect the Mercedes-benz, of all cars, to tug at my heart but I’d forgotten how quietly pleasing a good W124 can be. As pleasing as the BMW? In some ways it is, and it’s certainly a more relaxing drive with its torquier engine, but the BMW still has the fizz of magic that it first showed us in 1988.
But leaping in from stage left(field) comes the amazing Citroën XM, a car daringly different for a whole lot of good reasons. The BMW is terrific, and its group test victories three decades ago still seem the right decision today given the essentially consumerist nature of those tests. In today’s world of classics, though, different and much more heart-centred rules apply.
A car you might have hesitated to recommend to new-car buyers or company fleet managers back then can make an enthusiast very happy today, so I’ll take the magnificent Citroen XM, thank you very much. And if you would do the same, best of luck with finding one. As with all of these now-rare cars, it certainly won’t be easy.