Riview Articles - "Options Not Included"

[BadgerRivFan]

This past summer, Darwin Falk contributed some very interesting articles to the Riview titled "Options Not Included." They listed some production data on how many cars were produced in each color for a certain year, what percentage of cars had certain options, etc. Kudos to Darwin for finding and publishing this information <img src="http://forums.aaca.org/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />. I'd love to see more of this - wouldn't you? Does anyone know where this type of information can be found for the first generation cars and boat tails? Perhaps it is somewhere in the Riview archives, and I just don't realize it. I think that Darwin's "series" intends to cover these years in the future, but I'm the impatient type <img src="http://forums.aaca.org/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />, and would love to know some of this information now. Maybe more in the forthcoming Riview?

[Ray_Knott]

Hi,

Years ago I wrote and published a series of articles in the Riview entitled Color and Trims and in some cases it included options. We also started the Evolution series to cover each production year. These are posted on the web site in the section that list articles from past Riviews. At that time I didn't have all the information that Darwin has collected, but what is included will be of some help.

[Guest Riviera66]

Al:

Thanks... I'm glad you enjoyed the series so far (sometimes I've wondered if anyone read them). So far I've scratched the surface on the '66, '68 and '70 model years by covering paint and other externally visible optioning on the cars in the articles published in 2006 (but which I wrote mostly in '05).

I will be resuming the Options Not Included series in the Jan/Feb Riview (now at the printers) and it'll no doubt take many many more issues to share all the data I'm deciphering (but hey, now that the Riview is going to be on time again, it gives you something to look forward to!). You'll find that I'll be starting off with one of the years you have (all the information can't be covered in one article so I'll have to do a second article on each year covered at some point in the future). Then later in '07 I expect to get to another one of your year cars. So just a little patience is needed.

This information isn't just published in 'simple' form where you can print out a table and say 'aha I get it'. The paint part is pretty easy, but once you get into optioning... it's messy. You have to know the GM codes, the logic they used back then in their computer programming, and a LOT of cross-referencing to additional Buick literature sources to get it to be fully decoded. And even with a list of the codes, it's not all there. I'm finding it takes me a month of studying to get each year's data figured out. And even at that there are still a few codes we (mostly Tom Mooney and I) can only puzzle as to what they were.

So, stay tuned, the Jan/Feb issue is soon at hand.

Darwin Falk

ROA#2077