The 1973 Hurst Oldsmobile had an important debut and a very strange little secret

At first I wanted to do another episode of Glorious Garbage about this car, but upon closer inspection I realized that the thing isn’t garbage at all. The car is a 1973 Hurst Oldsmobile and I have to say, considering the era the car is from, the Malaise Era, it is still a pretty strong and fast machine. Oldsmobile’s muscle cars were somewhat unique among muscle cars in that they tended to be a bit more sophisticated and higher quality than your average Camaro or Mustang, a sort of musco-luxo/gentleperson hot rod, and the Hurst Olds was one great example of this.

The 1973 edition – all of which was first brought to my attention by The Bishop, by the way – also had a really interesting premiere, something that’s ubiquitous today, but it’s interesting to see what its origins seem to be. There’s also a detail that I find absolutely confusing, so we’ll talk about that too.

The 1973 Hurst/Olds now had the new GM A-body, “Colonnade” body style, specifically the Oldsmobile Cutlass, and came to market two For the first time in Hurst/Olds history there are color schemes, the traditional black with gold stripes and now a “Cameo White” option, still with gold stripes. These cars had big chrome exhausts like a muscle car, but also had opera windows and a half-vinyl roof like luxury royalty from the 1970s required.

The front bucket seat even pannedif you were too good to get in and out of a car like all the other dirty pagans out there:

As for power, the 1973 Hurst Olds had one engine option, a 455 cubic inch/7.5 liter V8 with 270 horsepower – a bit paltry by today’s standards for the displacement, but fantastic for 1973. Oh, unless , They wanted air conditioning, then you lost 20 horses. This is what you get for being too good to sweat!

The Hurst/Olds also came with an interesting shifter, the Hurst Dual Gate Shifter, which we’ve written about before because that shifter has strangely misogynistic origins:

…of course with the Hurst/Olds it was just called “Dual Gate Shifter”, no more of this “his and hers” nonsense. Since you could pretty much shift gears yourself, a tachometer would certainly come in handy, and that’s where the remarkable Hurst/Old’s from 1973 first comes into play: It had, I believe, the first electronic digital tachometer ever.

In fact, it is probably the first electronic digital dashboard instrument for cars alwaysand that’s true even if we’re generous and call clocks instruments, chronometers I guess, but electronic digital clocks didn’t really appear on dashboards until around 1978.

And by digital I mean real digital, as in computer digital, no gears and cams and analog idiots moving drums with numbers on them behind a faceplate. This tachometer is fully digital inside and even includes a genuine Mostek integrated circuit:

Is this also the first time that an actual integrated circuit – the white “chip” you see there on the right – has been used to power a component of a car’s dashboard? I think it may also be the first use of a seven-segment digital numeric display – in this case a Sperry SP-352 neon display, not an LED or VFD display.

Now the Hurst supplied digital tachometer was bolted to the dash and was optional, but it was available from the factory, so I think this applies to the 1973 Hurst/Olds, which had the first truly digital, computer controlled instrument. It even had a small memory that stored the highest RPM recorded, and you could press one of those buttons to display it and let you know if your buddy you lent the car to also rebuilt it after you has marked told He should take it easy, Larry.

This may seem like a small thing, but considering that all cars now have huge digital displays that show and control everything, I’d say this first digital display is pretty groundbreaking. From those humble two red, blocky digits came the sea of ​​full-color, high-resolution dashboard displays. It started here.

Okay, that’s the good thing about it. Now let’s get to the confusing part.

So in the 1973 Hurst/Olds brochure there is this part about the distinctive vents on the hood of the car:

Do you see that? Nassau hood channel. What the heck is a Nassau Hood Duct? I’ve searched all over the internet but it only seems to come up in connection with these Hurst/Olds ads:

That’s it. Nobody else talks about what the hell a “Nassau” canal is. It also seems to have nothing to do with the beautiful capital of the Bahamas. And on the car it’s not even real; It’s just a few raised slats glued to the hood. If you look under the hood, as you can see in this screenshot from a YouTube video, you can see that the hood has no holes at all:

They are fakes.

The fake vents themselves look like they’re intended to be exhaust louvers for engine heat, allowing the air that goes into the radiator to easily escape through the hood, or at least that’s what they would do if they were real.

So far the only theory the Bishop and I have put forward is, perhaps, simple Perhaps Someone at Oldsmobile called these channels NACA because NACA channels (short for National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of what would become NASA) were a well-known type of channel used in racing cars and airplanes.

The problem is the appearance of the NACA channels Nothing like the “Nassau” canals. See:

They are not the same. At all! In fact, NACA ducts are designed for low drag air Recording; Whatever the hell Nassau Canals are supposed to be, the only thing we can say is that they are for air exhaustbecause they face backwards. Nassau ducts, as seen in their only example on the hood of the ’73 Hurst/Olds, really couldn’t be further from NACA ducts.

So, I’m at a loss. Did someone at Oldsmobile just make it up for marketing purposes, like Rich Corinthian Leather? That was also in 1973. Was that the exact year that automakers decided to invent strange, exotic-sounding names?

Oldsmobile is gone, and I think everyone involved with Nassau Canals is probably gone too. I’ll contact GM, but I’m not holding my breath like I would have to if my nostrils had the Nassau gears.

Still, there’s something special about having an impressive debut and a strange mystery on the same car, so let’s give it a listen for the ’73 Hurst/Olds!

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