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Most automatic transmissions ask for one lever and very little of your attention. In 1984, Hurst and Oldsmobile decided a Cutlass should ask for three. A silver-and-black 1984 Hurst/Olds with just 11k miles is live on Bring a Trailer, where bidding stood at $7,442 as of this writing. The auction ends Tuesday, October 27.
The reason to care is not the stripes or the cowl hood. It is the cluster of three chrome rods rising from the console, a shifter setup Hurst called Lightning Rods, and the strange idea behind it.
Three Levers, One Transmission
The Lightning Rods replaced the usual single shifter with three chrome levers of unequal length, standing side by side. Underneath, the car carried an ordinary GM TH200-4R four-speed automatic. The levers simply worked the stock shift cable, which is why Jalopnik notes you could not skip gears or bolt together a true sequential gearbox out of them.
The lever closest to the driver is the main shifter, with the familiar Park through Overdrive positions. For normal driving, you push the other two levers forward and leave them there, and the Cutlass behaves like any other automatic. To launch hard, you pull all three levers back to select first gear. Pushing the farthest lever forward gives you second, the middle lever gives you third, and dropping the main lever into Overdrive gives you fourth. Downshifts run the same steps in reverse.
It was a drag-strip shift gate, translated for a Calais coupe.
Why Hurst and Oldsmobile Built It
The idea had a long lineage. George Hurst’s company made its name on shifters, and the original Hurst/Olds 442 of 1969 carried a Hurst Dual-Gate shifter that let drivers hold the first three gears of an automatic. The collaboration later became a pace car story of its own, which we covered in Hurst/Olds Is the Surprising Savior of the Pace Car Program, and in the 1972 Hurst/Olds pace car convertible.
By the early 1980s, the muscle era was a memory and Hurst needed a hook for the G-body Cutlass. The 1983 and 1984 cars, based on the top-trim Cutlass Calais and converted by Cars & Concepts of Brighton, Michigan, per Curbside Classic, were not fast by any standard. A 5.0-liter 307 V8 made about 180 horsepower and 245 lb-ft of torque, with 3.73 gears doing much of the work. What the car could offer was theater, and a way for the driver to feel involved. We looked at an earlier example in our own Lightning Rods: 1984 Hurst/Olds feature.
Why It Disappeared
The Lightning Rods lasted two model years. Drag racers, the audience the setup winked at, tended to prefer simpler ratchet-style shifters, and as the decade went on, computer-controlled automatics made the whole exercise feel quaint. Hurst offered conversion kits for other GM performance cars with four-speed automatics, including Camaros and Firebirds, but the setup never became a mainstream feature. About 3,000 Hurst/Olds cars were sold for 1983 and roughly 3,500 for 1984, according to Curbside Classic. The three-lever shifter became a footnote that collectors now remember with a grin.
The Car on Bring a Trailer
This one is a 1984 Hurst/Olds finished the way all of them were: Silver Metallic with black-finished lower accents, red side stripes, Hurst/Olds graphics, a cowl hood and a rear wing. It rides on 15-inch Super Stock wheels, and the interior is Dark Maple cloth and vinyl with woodgrain trim and Hurst/Olds floor mats. The listing says it shows 11k miles, with the original owner keeping it until 2002 and the second owner holding it for 24 years after that.
Equipment includes air conditioning, cruise control, the Convenience Group and the Popular Option Package. The seller, a dealer in Morgan Hill, California, lists a window sticker and a clean Carfax report with a clean California title, which is the paperwork that ties the Hurst/Olds equipment to this particular car.
What to Know Before You Bid
The listing discloses that portions of the silver bodywork have been resprayed because of damage from a car cover, and the gallery photographs some blemishes. Read the comments, which already number in the dozens, study the photos and ask the seller about the shifter linkage before the clock runs down. The three levers are the whole point of this car, so you want to know that all of them feel right.
Check the Bring a Trailer listing for the current bid. The auction ends Tuesday, October 27.
