1963 was a full-throttle year at Buick; the General Motors high-end division was on a spree, releasing such icons as the Riviera, the Wildcat, or the Silver Arrow concept. It was hard to miss Buick that year, but it wasn’t easy for the other Buick models to get some attention from the motoring community. And yet, out of the total production of almost 458,606 units, the luxury Electra 225 accounted for 58,665.
Chevrolet and Ford were the undisputed automobile production champions in 1963, with the GM division comfortably securing the first spot, some 700k units above the Blue Oval’s 1.5-million cars effort. Pontiac was a distant but isolated third, with 590,000, and then it was all a fire-at-will sales war between five brands. Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Rambler, Buick, and Dodge were crammed within a 40,000-unit margin (in that order) between the Mopar’s 488,000 and its sister division’s 446,000.
Buick was the high-trim player on this list, and its Electra ‘Deuce and a Quarter‘ 225 was selling well, even with the brand-new Riviera stealing the show. And let’s not forget about the Wildcat, freshly promoted to standalone model ranks after its debut in 1962 as a sub-series of the Invicta. The Buick family feud was on the horizon.
The 225 wasn’t afraid of the two new players prowling its full-size territory on the hunt for prospects – the luxurious Electra was conceptually closer to Cadillac than it was to the sporty newcomers. After all, the biggest of the Buick bloodline came in five different guises, from two-door convertible to four-door hardtop.
The more-door ‘Deuce’ offered three choices: the classic hardtop, a standard post sedan, and a pillarless version of the latter. From a visual standpoint, it was a mix of the pillarless hardtop and the six-window sedan, resulting in the car we can admire in the video below this article. According to its current owner, the car is a survivor he had since 2000 and put over 15,325 miles (24,658 km) on its clock.
It is one of the 11,468 ‘four-door, six-window hardtop sedans’ assembled that year (the nomenclature belongs entirely to Buick; that’s how they advertised it in their sales brochures), and it is pretty enough and commanding enough to draw attention to itself from onlookers, as it drives by them.
If it is a genuine untouched example, it is probably the greatest-looking one that’s not a show car, a trailer queen, or a museum artifact. The body is straight and clean, the paint is shiny and deep, and the interior is more welcoming than Disneyland. However, the survivor-y bit is clearly visible under the hood, where the engine and its accessories fully show their cosmetic age.
But that is just patina because the mighty 401-cubic inch ‘Nailhead’ V8 can still rock the house (and the body of the Electra: play the video at 10:45). The official name of the 6.6-liter motor was the Wildcat 445. In Buick verbiage, the numerical code denoted neither the horsepower (they wished!) nor the displacement, but the torque output. 445 lb-ft (603 Nm) was a lot of crank punishment from a high-compression eight-cylinder with a four-barrel carburetor.
10.25:1 was the secret ingredient for the 325-horse firepower (330 PS). Only a Turbine Drive automatic transmission was installed in the Electra in 1963. This example is surprisingly agile and enjoyable for a 221.5-inch-long (5,626 mm) automobile that’s 61 years fresh. The standard power steering is so accurate and easy that the driver can turn the wheel with his index.
And yes, in 1963, the 225 didn’t accurately represent the car’s full length as in 1959 when the big Electra hit the market, but the nameplate was kept. It would live on to become the longest four-door hardtop General Motors product ever, at 233.4 inches (5,928 mm), in the 1975 Buick Electra 225 Limited version.