1966 Buick Riviera in Riviera Gold Paint & 425 Nailhead Engine

A gold 1966 Buick Riviera with a 425 Nailhead V8 has been in the same hands since 1991 — the same year its owner brought his newborn daughter home. Filmed at the World of Wheels show in West Allis, Wisconsin, the car’s clean fastback design and factory-correct paint draw comparisons to Buick’s best-ever styling era. What’s kept one owner holding on for three decades?

Some men buy a car to mark a milestone. Fewer buy one that ends up outliving the memory it was meant to celebrate. In 1991, a man named Jim Kolich carried his newborn daughter home from the hospital — and around that same stretch of days, he also brought home something else entirely: a gold 1966 Buick Riviera with a 425 Nailhead V8 under the hood. Thirty-some years later, both are still around, but only one of them shows up at car shows in West Allis, Wisconsin, getting circled by strangers with cameras. What makes a man hold onto a car for three decades instead of trading up, flipping it, or letting it rust in a garage? The answer says as much about the Riviera as it does about the man who bought it.

A Gold Coupe with a Story Attached

Lou Costabile caught up with this Riviera on February 23, 2017, at the World of Wheels show at Wisconsin State Fair Park in West Allis — one of the Midwest’s longest-running indoor car show circuits, where local owners bring out cars that rarely see daylight otherwise. Owner Jim Kolich has had this particular Riviera since 1991, the same year his daughter was born. He’s kept it long enough that it’s tied less to a hobby than to a specific chapter of his life, and it shows: this isn’t a car bought at auction last year and flipped for a show badge, it’s one that’s been driven, maintained, and loved through three decades of ownership. Costabile’s “My Car Story” series built its following on exactly this kind of conversation — not just specs, but the person standing next to the car and why they never let it go.

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Why the 1966 Riviera Still Turns Heads

The 1966 Riviera opened the model’s second generation — an all-new, more sculpted body Buick rolled out for 1966 after the original 1963 Riviera had already established the nameplate as a genuine personal-luxury coupe built to compete with the Ford Thunderbird. By 1966, the design had been refined into what many collectors consider its cleanest form: a low, wide stance, hidden headlamps, and a fastback roofline that avoided the ornamentation Detroit often leaned on in the mid-1960s. One commenter on the video calls it “one of the most perfect body designs in automotive history,” and the sentiment isn’t rare — the ’66 Riviera routinely gets cited by GM stylists themselves as a high point of the era’s design language. Unlike contemporaries weighed down with chrome and fins, the Riviera’s lines were meant to look sculpted rather than decorated, which is a large part of why it still photographs like a modern concept car sixty years later.

The Riviera Gold Paint Code Behind the Shine

This particular car wears its factory-correct Riviera Gold paint, a color code Buick offered specifically within the Riviera line rather than across its broader passenger-car catalog, underscoring how much the division treated this model as a standalone image car rather than just a trim variant of the LeSabre or Wildcat. Gold was a popular but not overused shade for personal-luxury coupes of the era, warm enough to set off the chrome trim without competing with it. Viewers commenting on the video specifically single out the paint, with one simply noting “why can’t they make a beautiful car like that today” — a sentiment aimed as much at the color and finish as at the shape underneath it. Combined with the Riviera’s low beltline and minimal brightwork by mid-60s standards, the gold paint reads as understated rather than flashy, very much in keeping with how Buick positioned the Riviera against flashier competitors.

The 425 Nailhead That Powers It

Under that long hood sits Buick’s 425 cubic-inch Nailhead V8, the largest engine Buick offered during the first-generation Riviera’s run and the source of the engine’s name-defining nickname — “Nailhead” refers to the unusually small, vertically oriented valves that, from above, looked like a row of nail heads driven into the block. Despite the modest-looking valvetrain, the 425 was known for prodigious low-end torque, making it well suited to a two-ton personal coupe meant for effortless highway cruising rather than stoplight racing. Buick paired the 425 with a Super Turbine automatic in most Rivieras of this vintage, reinforcing the car’s identity as a refined grand tourer rather than a stripped-down muscle car. It’s the engine most closely associated with the Riviera’s peak reputation, and hearing it run at a show like World of Wheels is part of why owners like Kolich bring these cars out instead of leaving them in storage.

Interior, Grille, and the Details Fans Keep Praising

Commenters on the video zero in on details beyond the paint and the badge — the grille treatment, the hidden headlamp doors, and the interior layout all draw specific praise, along with the speedometer design, which several viewers call out by name as one of their favorite touches on the dash. That kind of attention to smaller details reflects how the Riviera was engineered as a driver’s environment first, with a cockpit-style dash and full instrumentation that stood apart from the simpler, bench-seat-and-strip-speedometer layouts common on full-size Buicks of the same year. The grille itself changed subtly across 1963-1965 before settling into the cleaner 1966 execution seen on this car, part of the gradual removal of ornamentation that defined the whole first-generation run. For fans who grew up around these cars, or who are seeing one up close for the first time at a show, it’s often these smaller design decisions — not just the silhouette — that leave the strongest impression.

Riviera and Wildcat: Buick’s Best-Looking Era

The comment section doesn’t stop at praising this car in isolation — several viewers connect it directly to Buick’s 1965 Wildcat, with one commenter naming the Riviera and Wildcat as the two best body designs Buick ever put into production, and another specifically requesting that Costabile track down and feature a ’65 Wildcat next. That comparison makes sense: both cars represented Buick’s mid-1960s push toward cleaner, lower, more sculptural bodies at a time when Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Cadillac were all competing hard for the same personal-luxury buyer. The Riviera undercut the Cadillac Eldorado on price while offering comparable style, and it outsold the Thunderbird’s more overtly sporty positioning by leaning into understated elegance instead. Within Buick’s own lineup, the Riviera sat above the Wildcat as the brand’s flagship personal coupe, but the design language connecting the two cars is obvious enough that owners and fans still cross-reference them decades later.

A Family Milestone on Four Wheels

For Kolich, the timing of the purchase wasn’t incidental — 1991 was the year his daughter was born, and the Riviera entered his life around the same window as she did. That kind of overlap tends to change how an owner relates to a car: it stops being simply a hobby purchase and becomes a marker of a specific stretch of time, which is likely part of why the car has stayed in his hands for over thirty years rather than being sold or traded as tastes changed. Long-term single-family ownership like this is increasingly rare among collectible cars from the 1960s, many of which have passed through several owners, restorers, and flippers by now. A Riviera that’s spent three decades with one owner, driven and shown rather than parked in climate-controlled storage, carries a different kind of provenance than one bought purely as an investment — and it’s the kind of story Costabile’s channel was built to surface.

What Makes a First-Gen Riviera Collectible Today

Among Buick collectors, the 1963-1965 Rivieras are often prized for introducing the body style, but many specialists point to the 1966 model specifically as the year the design reached its most resolved form, with just enough trim refinement to distinguish it from its debut year without yet adopting the more aggressive boat-tail styling that arrived with the third-generation car in 1971. Cars fitted with the 425 Nailhead, especially in unmodified, numbers-matching condition, tend to command a premium over later small-block-equipped Rivieras, since the Nailhead was phased out of the lineup shortly after. Factory colors like Riviera Gold, paired with an unmolested interior, add further value for buyers chasing originality rather than resto-mod builds. Cars that have stayed with a single long-term owner and made regular show appearances — rather than sitting in storage or changing hands repeatedly — also tend to carry better documented histories, which matters increasingly to buyers vetting authenticity in a market full of re-created and re-painted cars.

Why This Riviera Still Matters

Nearly sixty years after it left the factory, the 1966 Riviera occupies a strange place in muscle car culture — it’s not a drag strip icon or a horsepower-war headline the way a GTO or a Road Runner is, but it’s frequently cited by designers and enthusiasts alike as proof that Detroit could build something genuinely elegant during an era better remembered for brute force. The comment section under this video reflects that split appeal: viewers praising the paint and the grille sit right alongside viewers who simply wish modern manufacturers still built anything this clean. Cars like Kolich’s, still on the road and still being shown three decades into one owner’s stewardship, keep that reputation alive in a way that magazine features and auction listings can’t. As more first-generation Rivieras disappear into static collections or get parted out, unmodified, actively driven examples like this one become a more direct link to what made the model matter in the first place.

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