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In 1967, Hurst had just 45 days to solve an impossible problem: GM had capped its intermediate cars at 400 cubic inches, but Hurst wanted a 455 in a 442. Their answer was to graft an entire Oldsmobile Toronado underneath it, creating a one-of-one front-wheel-drive muscle car nicknamed the ‘Fournado.’ It vanished for nearly 50 years before Jay Leno finally got to drive it.
The 1966 Toronado was the first front-wheel-drive American car in almost 30 years, and Oldsmobile packed it with oddities nobody else was building: a speedometer drum that rolls like a slot machine, headlights that disappear, and a completely flat floor. An 18-minute walkaround of a stunning survivor shows every one of them up close.
Oldsmobile’s 1966 Toronado paired a 425 cubic-inch V8 with front-wheel drive at a time when that combination was nearly unheard of in America. Hagerty’s Stefan Lombard heads to the Lingenfelter Collection to walk through exactly what separates a well-sorted example from a expensive mistake, and makes the case for why this overlooked personal luxury coupe deserves real collector attention. Watch for the full checklist.
The Oldsmobile Toronado’s revolutionary front-wheel-drive layout started as an unsanctioned design sketch in 1962, years before Oldsmobile’s engineers had even finished the seven-year development and 1.5 million miles of testing needed to make it real. The result was the first American front-wheel-drive car since the 1930s, wrapped in one of GM’s most dramatic body designs of the decade. Here’s the story behind the sketch that reshaped an entire division’s engineering priorities.
Nearly two decades before airbags became mandatory, General Motors quietly built and sold them, first on government fleet cars, then as a factory option across four full-size luxury nameplates. Here is the surprisingly early and short-lived story of GM’s Air Cushion Restraint System, and why the technology vanished from showrooms for almost twenty years.
This 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado paired a 425 cubic inch Rocket V8 making 385 horsepower with front-wheel drive nobody had successfully mass-produced since the 1930s. Oldsmobile’s engineers solved the torque-delivery puzzle with a chain-driven transmission layout unlike anything else on the road, and Motor Trend rewarded the gamble with its Car of the Year title. See the engineering that made this one of the boldest cars Detroit built in 1966.