Yahoo Autos The Place Where Buick Reattas Go to Keep On Living
From the November/December issue of Car and Driver.
There are few certainties in life. But if you own a 1988 or '89 Buick Reatta, one thing is assured: Its dash-mounted touchscreen, one of the first installed in a passenger vehicle, will break.
"They all fail," says Jon Morlan of the cathode-ray-tube (CRT) units. "It's just a matter of time."
Morlan is an independent electronic technician who works exclusively with East Coast Reatta Parts in Durham, North Carolina. Shop owner Marck Barker contracts Morlan to diagnose, repair, and rebuild the touchscreens, as replacement examples are otherwise nonexistent.
The ghosts in these Zenith-built machines are electrolytic capacitors. "If you've ever looked on an old circuit board, they're the bits that look like a tiny pop can," Morlan says. These capacitors contain liquid that eventually leaks out or evaporates, denying the capacitor its voltage-regulating ability, shorting it, and subsequently frying other circuits downstream. Once the image-driving chip goes, the screen's pixelated aquamarine glow goes too, making it effectively impossible to control the car's stereo, climate, trip computer, and diagnostic functions.
Barker and Morlan have a retriever's instinct for locating caches of the CRT displays. Barker currently has around 30 in stock. (He once bought an entire car just to get a working screen for his personal Reatta.) A refurbished screen costs $675. But if a customer sends in their old, busted screen, they receive a $75 refund. East Coast Reatta Parts can then rebuild the returned unit for another customer.
"Those screens are out there. Whether they're in someone's closet or on a shelf, whether they work or not, they hold value," Morlan says.
Overhauling a screen takes Morlan anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks, depending on a given example's issues. Regardless, every board he repairs receives fully upgraded new-old-stock electronics. It's also bench-tested on the very equipment GM provided Buick dealers for fixing these finicky components.
Since the touchscreen itself controls or connects to multiple vehicle systems, many of which are complex and archaic, replacing it with a contemporary LCD tablet just is not feasible. That's a bummer for Reatta drivers on a budget; however, for those faithful to these vintage two-door Buicks, it's just the price of nostalgia.
"When I drive an '88 or '89 Reatta, I'm driving it because I want to be transported to that time period," Barker says. "I can pop in a cassette, hit the button on the screen... and enjoy it for the car it was at that time."
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