Buick Riviera

The Buick Riviera is a personal luxury car produced by Buick from 1963 to 1999. GM's first entry into

that prestige niche, the Riviera was highly praised by automotive journalists upon its high-profile debut. While early models stayed close to the original form, eight subsequent generations varied substantially over the Riviera's thirty-year lifespan. In all, 1,127,261 were produced. The Riviera name had been used by Buick since the early 1950s for various prestige versions of existing models, right through a large top-of-the-line six-window 1962 Electra 225 hardtop. The crisply styled, ground-up design that debuted 1963 was Buick's first unique Riviera model, and pioneered the GM E platform. The Riviera name was resurrected for concept cars displayed at auto shows in 2007 and 2013 in hopes of reintroducing the marque, but no plans to do so are currently in place.

Unlike its subsequent GM E platform stablemates, the Oldsmobile Toronado and Cadillac Eldorado, the Riviera was initially a standard front engine/rear-wheel drive platform, only becoming front wheel drive starting in 1979 as part of a sweeping move in that direction by the American automobile industry.