Oldsmobile Mini-Toro

This Toronado may look as though it escaped from the crusher in the nick of time, but in actual fact it was made to look this way for a very practical purpose at its home in the Lansing plant parking lot…

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By any logical rationale, this wasn’t the sort of car that manufacturers would want to promote. It was a means to an end, after all; a works hack that was built for a singular purpose that was anything but glamorous. Nevertheless, the decidedly left-field Oldsmobile Mini-Toro was well-publicised in period, with GM’s marketing department putting out a press release and photographs to the world’s media. It read: ‘Lansing, Michigan: People stare when the one-of-a-kind Mini-Toro drives by on the street here…’ And with good reason. Functional didn’t even begin to describe the appearance of this wacky device.