COPO Olds

[w302nv]

All right I'll just comment one last time ...I agree with 442w30...my 71 Lemans Sport had the T41 option...the hood on it was RA, but there was no pan, just a regular old air cleaner..all cosmetic...Olds didn't offer just the W25 hood...as far as I know, it always was functional OAI with the OAI air cleaner....and I cant even say for sure if it was even offered on anything but the "A" bodies....this is like the W35 option on convertibles..it wasn't available, but there are a number of people who swear it was, and their car came that way...not sure if you were joking, but 64 was the only year a 4 door 4-4-2 was available otherwise its..

4-4bbl Carb
4-4spd trans (or 400/455 ci depending on year)
2-Dual Exhaust

so yes, it **could** just be a Cutlass wagon with OAI...

no more....really...I promise

[Xplantdad]

Good stuff Josh!

[retengw31]

Just saw this thread or would have thrown in my 2 cents earlier. COPO as stated earlier was a Chevrolet thing and had to do with how the cars were ordered from the factory. Olds, Buick, Pontiac, and Cadillac all had their own sales and marketing teams as well as their own engineering release systems for Production. Central Office at that time was only for Chevrolet as far as the car divisons go. So the COPO would naturally only apply to Chevrolet.

The 4 divisions all ran like separate businesses and the only commonality was at the BOP plants where more than one brand was assembled. That later became GMAD when the gov't was looking to bust up GM. At that time half of the new cars sold was a GM, half of those were Chevrolets. Chevrolet Engineering was in the GM Tech Center, whereas the other divisions were not located there and ran independently of that.


Olds had two ways to get a car built on the assembly lines. Either a production release or an engineering release. Engineering releases were never for salable cars. They were for preproduction units or experimental purposes only. A good example would be the 2 swiss cheese frame W31's that were built there in 1970. At least partially built. They wee pulled off the line at Body drop and pushed out the back door into an enclosed trailer and never heard of again.

Engineering garage did a lot of the modifications to production cars after they were built. If these cars were built to the production release process initially, they could be converted back to production level and resold. Not all got totally converted back if you had the right connections. It would have to be something really invisible, though and the modifications that were put on the car while technically an engineering test car would and could never be on a window sticker.

No W30 wagons built on line. Indy pace cars (actual ones at Indy) had all kinds of tweaks done at Exprerimental garage. And if Dale Smith had anything to do with it, all bets are off. They did everything imaginable out there through his "back door" connection.

[StealthBird]

[ QUOTE ]
A good example would be the 2 swiss cheese frame W31's that were built there in 1970. At least partially built. They wee pulled off the line at Body drop and pushed out the back door into an enclosed trailer and never heard of again.

[/ QUOTE ]

Dave, where the heck did that come from? Would love to hear more about those W-31's.

As this hobby has grown, and with the internet, I find it amazing how many one-off or lightweight GM cars have surfaced. Just a couple years ago, the story broke about the 6 lightweight 65 GTO's that were shuttled out the back door with thinner than stock sheet metal. And quite a few years ago, another story was printed on a 69 Firebird that was built by PMD Engineering, where they installed a (new) 455 with round port heads, and cruised the streets "testing" the combo.