GM: All Buttons, All the Time
This series has touched on today’s subject in the past - but more as a general commentary about how far vehicle interiors have progressed since the ‘80s and ‘90s when Detroit automakers were plastering dashboards with as many buttons as humanly possible. Our focus today is on General Motors, arguably the biggest sinner of the era, but we’ll leave the door open for tomes about the other two Detroit denizens, as well.
More than one pundit blamed this button-itis on a dawning realization that Japan was starting to eat Detroit’s lunch, at least on dealership lots. Japanese home audio equipment, for example, was peppered with rows upon rows of tightly packed buttons, so such a visage came to signify good quality in many quarters. Adding buttons, then, became shorthand for “the good stuff”.
[Images: Murilee Martin]
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Which is why we ended up with stuff like the Cadillac Allante. Entire screeds could be written about the Allante, from its engine under the hood to the ignominy of having to lower its top by hand. That’s right; a car meant to do battle with machines like the mighty Mercedes-Benz SL didn’t even have a power latching system until 1991, about five years into its life and only two before its cancellation. Its march towards a high Button Stack score can be exemplified by the Allante, with a towering bank of buttons on the center stack, most of the same shape and all of identical feel. Early models had a vertical cassette player to consume a bit of extra space, a design altered in later years to make room for a CD Player (which was not vertical, sadly). We’ll give it a 8-of-10 BS score
Few could do proper ‘80s button-itis better (or worse, depending on yer point of view) than Pontiac. GM’s excitement division has no shortage of entrants into this particular game, none of which are confined to the 1980s or 1990s. The almighty Pontiac 6000 STE, a car once drowned by Car & Driver and left to the elements on an ill-fated trip to La Paz, absolutely mastered the craft early on, especially when paired with a set of digital gauges crammed into a space designed for an old-school ribbon speedometer.
Little chicklets migrated from audio controls to the ventilation system, meaning drivers need fingertips like cocktail sticks to operate anything. They even packed the steering wheel full of buttons. A BS score reading 9.5 of 10 seems appropriate.
As the ‘80s waned, The General got slightly less manic about such things, though old habits are hard to break. Shown here are a brace of cars from just three years apart: a 1990 Grand Prix and 1993 Bonneville, the latter of which was a top of the line SSEi trim. Note that all of today's images are from Murilee’s junkyard exploits; you can draw your own conclusions about this if you wish.
The snazzy Grand Prix deployed a modular system for its layout, a look which was spreading across the GM empire at the time (witness vehicles so diverse as the C/K pickups and little Sunfire all sharing similar design trends for pods of buttons). At least some of these buttons were now large enough to see without bifocals, while the new-for-’92 Bonny introduced the spectre of nine buttons for seat adjustment - but neither one to recall the last setting. Oy. BS scores of 6/10 and 7/10 are hereby given to the Bonneville and Grand Prix.
