1962 Buick Wildcat: Two Thousand Invictas with a Concept Car's Name

Motor Trend's Jim Wright timed his Wildcat two ways. His August 1962 test car, a fully equipped Buick hardtop, ran the quarter mile in 17.1 seconds at 87 mph as delivered. With the air conditioner's belts removed, the magazine reported, the elapsed time dropped to 16.6 seconds and the run to 60 mph improved by two-tenths of a second. It is a revealing experiment to run on a Buick. The Wildcat was a luxury car that Buick had fitted with bucket seats, a tachometer and a shorter axle, and Motor Trend published both sets of numbers.¹

The name came from the show stand. Wikipedia records that three Wildcat concept cars were designed under Harley Earl's direction during the 1950s, the 1953 Wildcat I, the 1954 Wildcat II and the 1955 Wildcat III, and that the first two survive. For 1962 Buick put the name on a production car for the first time, though not on a model of its own. The Wildcat was a sub-series of the Invicta, Buick's middle full-size line. It was the Invicta's two-door hardtop, body 4647, dressed and equipped to stand apart, and its emblem was a stylized wildcat's head on each rear roof pillar.^2,3

The equipment list read like a personal-luxury brochure. Motor Trend described a fabric-covered roof in black or white and an all-vinyl interior with bucket seats and a center console. Over-Drive's fact sheet adds that the console carried a tachometer and the transmission shifter, that Wildcat emblems sat on the roof quarters, and that the car wore Electra 225-type taillights and special side trim. It rode the Invicta's 123-inch wheelbase and stretched 214.1 inches. Over-Drive also says the Wildcat was designed to compete with the Pontiac Grand Prix and the Oldsmobile Starfire, the two sporting full-size coupes already selling at General Motors' other middle divisions.^1,3,2

Under the hood was the engine that gave the car its name's number. The 401-cubic-inch V8, rated at 325 gross horsepower at 4,400 rpm on 10.25:1 compression, was called the Wildcat 445 for its 445 lb-ft of torque at 2,800 rpm. Over-Drive notes that Buick's old 364 had been quietly retired for 1962 and that the 401 now came in 265-, 280- and 325-horsepower versions; the Wildcat got the strongest. The only transmission was the Turbine Drive automatic, shifted from the console. Motor Trend reported that Buick changed the Wildcat's axle from the standard 3.23 to 3.42, with 3.91 and 4.45 available with positive traction.^3,1

Buick charged $3,927 for the Wildcat, which made it the most expensive Invicta. Over-Drive's table prices the ordinary Invicta sport coupe, the same body 4647, at $3,733, so the Wildcat treatment cost $194 over the car it was built from. For comparison, the same fact sheet lists bucket seats with a console as a $296 option elsewhere in the full-size line. Motor Trend's test car, with radio, air conditioning, power steering, power brakes and whitewall tires, came to $5,120.78 before tax and license. That was about the price of a well-optioned Riviera a year later, and a reminder that the Wildcat buyer was spending luxury-car money.^3,2,1,4

The production count is short and suspiciously round. Over-Drive's table lists exactly 2,000 Wildcat sport coupes against 10,355 regular Invicta sport coupes and 56,017 Invictas of all bodies, so the Wildcat was about 3.6 percent of the series and less than 1 percent of the 245,683 full-size Buicks in the same table. There is a wrinkle in the accounting. The table's footnote describes the 2,000 as Invicta sport coupes branded Wildcat, but its series total is the sum of all rows including the Wildcat row, which implies the 2,000 were counted in addition to the 10,355. Read literally, the table counts two separate groups of cars, while the footnote reads as if they were one.³

Against its rivals, the Wildcat was a token. The compiled Pontiac table counts 30,195 Grand Prix hardtops for 1962 at $3,490, and Over-Drive's Oldsmobile table counts 42,762 Starfires, 34,839 of them hardtop coupes listed at $4,131. The Wildcat sat between those two on price and far below both in volume, fifteen Grand Prix for every Wildcat on those figures. At 2,000 cars it was a limited run, and the following year Buick built a whole series around the name.^5,6,3

On the road, Motor Trend's car was quicker than its size suggested and no lighter than its equipment implied. At 4,272 pounds at the curb it went from rest to 30 mph in 2.9 seconds, to 45 in 5.2 and to 60 in 8.1, covered the quarter mile in 17.1 seconds at 87 mph, and reached an observed 115 mph at 4,800 rpm, with the magazine estimating 130. It stopped from 60 mph in 168 feet, and its fuel consumption ranged from 10.5 to 16 mpg. Those figures belong to one air-conditioned test car with two aboard. They describe a fast, heavy tourer, not a drag-strip weapon.¹

The Wildcat arrived while Buick was rebuilding itself. Ate Up With Motor records that Edward Rollert had taken over the division in 1959 after its sales fell below 300,000 cars a year, and that his Buick won General Motors' internal contest for the car that became the Riviera in April 1961. The Riviera went on sale on October 4, 1962, as a 1963 model, with the same 325-horsepower 401 as its standard engine. The 1962 Wildcat, a bucket-seat Invicta with that engine and a Harley Earl show-car name, can be read as Buick's first small step in the same direction, a few months before the big one.^7,8,2

The following year the experiment became a line. From 1963 through 1970 the Wildcat was its own series, no longer an Invicta sub-series, and it added a convertible and a four-door hardtop to the coupe. Wikipedia's Standard Catalog figures count 35,725 Wildcats for 1963 and 84,245 for 1964, and the 1963 sport coupe listed at $3,849, less than the 1962 car had cost. The 2,000 cars of 1962 were the proof of concept: a name borrowed from a dream car, attached to a well-equipped Invicta, sold at a small premium and in numbers small enough to stay special.^2,3