Buick
In 1984, Buick was the official car of the XXIII Olympiad. A reorganization split manufacturing & engineering from sales and marketing. The first pilot Buick is produced at "Buick City", a state-of-the art assembly center built inside the walls of Buick's home plant at Flint. Buick had its best model year sales to date with 906,626 vehicles sold plus Buick worldwide sales topped one million for the first time. To close out 1984, Lloyd Reuss ended his tenure as general manager of the Buick Motor Division.
V6 engine
1962 saw the introduction of the Buick Special, which offered a new 90° V6 with uneven firing intervals, that was derived from—and shared some parts with—a small Buick V8 engine of the period. To save design time and expense, it was built much like a V8 that had two fewer cylinders. The combination of a 90° V-angle with only three crank pins—set at 120° apart, with opposing cylinders sharing a crank pin as most V8 engines do—the cylinders fired alternatively at 90 and 150° of crankshaft rotation. This uneven firing caused harmonic vibrations in the drive train that were perceived as a rough-running engine by the buyers. GM sold the engine tooling to Kaiser-Jeep in 1967; later, as a result of the 1973 oil crisis, GM repurchased the tooling in 1974. In 1977, Buick introduced a split pin crankshaft to implement an even-fire version of this engine in which cylinders fired consistently every 120°.