The Cutlass Salon

Oldsmobile sold the Salon as a European-style sedan, and that alone tells you it was a deliberate positioning experiment, not a trim level thrown together from leftover parts bin pieces. For the broader story of the body it rode on, the 1970s Cutlass covers the redesign and the sales record it produced.

What the Salon actually changed

The core mechanical difference was a ride and handling package built around the radial tires Oldsmobile fitted as standard equipment on the Salon when many domestic buyers were still riding on bias-ply rubber. Its tuning sat between the standard and optional Cutlass suspensions, though Road & Track, testing a 1973 car, was disappointed with how it rode and handled.

Trim followed the same logic. The package added reclining bucket seats upholstered in corduroy or vinyl and color-keyed wheelcovers, a sportier look than a standard Cutlass Supreme. The intent was a car closer in spirit to a European sedan than to the usual domestic intermediate.

Production numbers and how rare the Salon actually is

The Salon sold in a fraction of Supreme volumes. In 1977, for example, the Supreme Brougham coupe alone outsold the entire Salon lineup by more than two to one. Buyers in period consistently gravitated toward the Supreme's more familiar, plusher formula, and the Salon settled into a niche role that never became the volume seller Oldsmobile may have hoped for when it launched the concept in 1973.

That low volume is precisely why documented, correctly equipped Salon survivors matter today. A build sheet or window sticker confirming the Salon package, the correct wheel and tire package, and the Salon-specific trim separates a genuine example from a Cutlass Supreme that has since been dressed up to look like one. The parts bin overlap between Colonnade trim levels was substantial, and cosmetic Salon clones exist. The paperwork is what settles the question.

Why the Salon disappeared from the spotlight

As the Colonnade years progressed, the Cutlass Supreme's runaway sales success absorbed most of the division's marketing attention, and the Salon's road-oriented positioning became a smaller and smaller part of the story Oldsmobile told about the Cutlass line. Because the Salon began as a package on the Supreme, the line between a genuine Salon and a well-optioned Supreme is easy to blur.

That blurring is a documentation problem more than a design failure. The Salon simply never captured the sales volume needed to keep its own separate identity clear in the historical record, and that has made it one of the more misunderstood trims in the whole Cutlass family tree.

What a documented Salon is worth chasing

For a collector who wants a Colonnade Cutlass with a European flavor, a correctly documented Salon is arguably a better find than a base Supreme, and it is scarce enough that a clean, original example is not something you find every week. Confirm the Salon package on the build sheet, verify the wheel and tire specification matches factory Salon literature, and treat any Salon without supporting paperwork as a car to price carefully rather than take on faith.

The parts interchange problem cuts both ways for buyers. On one hand, a Salon that needs mechanical work draws from the same wide Colonnade parts supply as every other Cutlass, so keeping one running is not a specialist's nightmare the way some low-volume factory specials can be. On the other hand, that same interchange makes it trivially easy for a seller to graft Salon badging and a set of correct wheels onto a base car and call it original. Neither problem is insurmountable, but both point back to the same conclusion: the build sheet and the factory invoice are doing more work here than they would on a higher-volume trim, because the car itself will not always tell you the truth on sight.

The car deserves better treatment in the historical record than it has gotten, and that is worth saying plainly rather than dressing it up. If this angle on the Colonnade years interests you, a related deep-dive covers what happened once the Supreme's sales dominance reached its peak, which is the same story from the other side of the showroom floor.

"The Salon gets treated as a footnote because it never sold like the Supreme. But sales volume and engineering intent are two different measures. Oldsmobile built a genuinely different car here, and the factory paperwork proves it, even if the sales charts never did."

Tom Ramirez

Sources and notes

• Oldsmobile Cutlass, Wikipedia
• Oldsmobile Reaches Peak Cutlass: the 1977 Cutlass Supreme, Mac's Motor City Garage
• Oldsmobile Cutlass Guide, Outright Oldsmobile
• Why The Hell Did Americans Buy So Many Oldsmobile Cutlasses, Jalopnik
• Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, Wikipedia

Updated November 3, 2026: Corrected: the Cutlass Salon began in 1973 as a four-door option package on the Cutlass Supreme, with a coupe added for 1974. Details of its suspension, trim and sales comparison were clarified.