In 1971, when General Motors unveiled the redesigned B and C body lineup of full-size cars, the gap between the bread-and-butter Chevrolet and top-tier Cadillac narrowed even further. However, this was nothing new. Chevrolet had a history of trying to be a junior-class Cadillac.
In 1932, the Chevrolets were beautifully restyled, and a popular choice as a collector car these days. Both the Confederate Standard and DeLuxe adopted styling that looked suspiciously like that of the Cadillac V8, V12 and V16 models, including the grille shape, hood side vents and overall body proportions.
Although Chevrolets became more and more luxurious between the 1930s and 1950s, the next truly Cadillac-inspired Chevy was the 1958 model. While they didn’t sport the trademark fins, the 1958s looked a lot like contemporary Cadillacs – particularly the front end. And the new top of the line Impala was clearly a luxury vehicle, with its multi-tone interior and two-door hardtop and convertible-only body styles. It made sense to add a bit of Cadillac style to the Chevrolet. After all, both makes were part of General Motors, and it gave people with Chevrolet pocketbooks a taste of the General Motors flagship.
The problem was GM took it too far. Bel Air gave way to Impala, then Impala was superseded by the Caprice as the luxury Chevrolet. At the same time, Cadillac was slowly but surely de-contenting their vehicles in the interest of sales volume and greater profit. I’m sure the cost accountants were very happy though. In 1971, the new Chevrolets and Cadillacs, while not exactly carbon copies of each other, did look suspiciously similar.
This is the 1971 Chevrolet Caprice. As you can see in the ad above, Chevrolet was clearly marketing the Caprice as a Cadillac, or at least a luxury car, alternative.
This is a 1971 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Paul has a much more detailed analysis of Cadillac’s watering down of styling and quality in his 1972 Coupe de Ville post, but suffice it to say that the Chevrolet owners just loved their faux Caddys, while Cadillac owners continued to buy new ones, for a few more years anyway. Not all, however, as Mercedes and BMW started seeing an uptick in their North American sales during this period. Not everyone was fooled.
The 1972s were little-changed from the all-new ’71s. The grille was lowered, parking lights moved from the fender corners to the front bumper, and tail lights were integrated into the rear bumper. Engines ranged from a straight six to a 454 CID V8. As this was about a year and a half before the gas crisis, most had a V8 under the hood. Less than 3,900 full-size Chevys had the six cylinder engine. Caprices were V8-only.
As had been the case since 1966, the lineup consisted of the ultra-basic Biscayne, slightly less austere Bel Air, mid-range Impala, and luxury Caprice. In 1971 the Caprice had been available only as a two-door or four-door hardtop, but a pillared sedan was added for 1972. Oddly enough, the convertible was only available as an Impala. Strange, considering a Caprice convertible would have fit right in with the luxury image. Chevrolet must have realized that and in 1973 the convertible became a Caprice-only model.
While the Impala was the volume model, the Caprice held its own, considering its prices ran about $700 higher. 1972 Caprice production consisted of 78,768 hardtop sedans, 65,513 hardtop coupes and 34,174 pillared sedans.
Chevrolets of the 1971-76 period were as big as they were going to get. The 1973 gas crisis, increasing safety and environmental regulations and CAFE all spelled the end of the gigantic standard-size car. It would result in one of the greatest full-size six-passenger cars, the 1977 GM B-body. Huge monsters like this 1972 Caprice were soon to become an extinct breed.
Special thanks are due to TheProfessor47, who posted these excellent photos to the Cohort. Thanks Professor!
Haha! You picked up one of my great unsolved mysteries. Or why did GM destroy Cadillac? Jack Baruth wrote an interesting piece on this for SpeedSportLife, which I have on my Bookmarks. You can check it out here: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/02/avoidable-contact-how-fake-luxury-conquered-the-world/
Also check out its companion article (with which Paul vehemently disagrees): http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/02/avoidable-contact-rich-corinthian-swaybars/
Suffice to say that this trend was started by Ford with LTD, but then Ford had no high-end brand to cannibalise (Lincoln was a joke even then), while GM strangled Cadillac through this, to the delight of Mercedes-Benz, and, to a much lesser extent, BMW.
Nice to see one of these Caprice still rolling.
There was an article of Collectible Automobile about the 1971-76 B-boby Chevy (December 2005 issue) and it mentionned once a road test of Motor Trend who compared the Caprice to a Cadillac.
I like those 1971-76 B-body. I spotted some Canadian B-body oddities. The Biscayne nameplate survived in Canada until 1975, I spotted a picture of a 1973 Biscayne wagon on Oldcarbrochures.
Close but no cigar, I spotted a picture of a 1970 Bel Air coupe http://www.chevelles.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3189826&postcount=15
These were not bad cars at all in the sense drove and handled quite well, especially when equipped with radial tires. The F-41 suspension models were pretty good handlers, too. The thing that really killed them was the 5 mph bumpers. The cars were never designed to take them and added a huge amount of weight, in the neighbourhood of 300 lbs. Thus what was already a heavy car became obese.
That said, many, may cars new tip the scales at more than the 4300 lb, 454 CID Caprice four door hard top, the Chrysler 300 and Ford Taurus immediately coming to mind.
I may be in the minority here but I adore both of these cars. My dad had a ’72 Sedan DeVille and a friend had a 73 Caprice. Ironically, I found the Caprice with the “little” 400 2 barrel to be more fun to drive than the big 472 powered Caddy.
Dad’s Caddy was unbelievably bad on gas.
Any insight on why my earlier comment shows `Your comment is awaiting moderation.’, and what to do about it? Thanks.
OK, it just became visible. Never mind.
The blog software takes comments with more than one URL up to moderation, to keep the spamming robots at bay.
72 model year was the best selling of the 71-76 biggies, according to stats provided in Collectible Automobile . The ’71 was hampered by the big UAW strike.
Looking back, the 72 is the best of this generation. No big bumpers or gaudy trim, and the 71′s bugs are gone. My 2nd favorites are the 76′s, only since they were the last beasts.
While I’m not generally a fan of GM’s ’71-’76 full-size cars, I do like the clean nose styling of the 1972 Chevrolet with its small grille and wrap-down header panel. Huge, toothy air intakes (like on the ’71 or ’73-’74) have never been my thing.
I was brought home from the hospital in 1975 in a ’72 Impala coupe. Such a huge car. My parents nursed it along until 1983 and then sold it and bought a used Omni, talk about a change!
It’s too bad that the quality levels weren’t where they needed to be on these, because despite them being HUGE, they are great looking cars.
My Dad bought a 72 impala in 1982 for 400 bucks. At the time it was going to be the donor motor for his Indy car replica he was working on- he got as far as the frame before the project stalled out. My Mom’s 73 Monte Carlo died around 1983 or so so the Impala became the family mobile. I have fond memories of both cars- one time Dad armor alled the vinyl seats on the Impala and then took a sharp turn only to find himself sliding across the bench into the passenger seat. (regular seat belt use might have stopped this from happening) That curved rear window and sweeping decklid added alot of visual character to the car, and set it off from the other GM cars. My Uncle had a 72 Coupe deville and my god mother a 72 Buick Centurion, and my grandmother a 72 Electra- they were all pretty close in size but I remember the interiors were alot nicer(maybe it was just the brocades) in the Buicks and the Caddy.
I became a seat belt wearer during my days driving a ’71 Plymouth Scamp with a vinyl bench seat. Fear of the door flying open on right turns didn’t do it, but one too many left hand turn at high speeds leading to a visit to the passenger side convinced me of the value of belts. Just lap belts at the time though. The shoulder belts were separate and inconveniently non-retracting, so they stayed wrapped around their hanging hooks.
I Still can clearly remember the fall day when I first saw a 71 Chevy coming at me as I walked home from school.
I Thought I was seeing the New 71 Caddy, and I Thought It Was a Gorgeous front end… imagine my shock when I saw The Chevrolet Taillights as it drove past…. I Could Not Believe what an improvement from the 70.
I Never felt that way about the 71 Caddy. But I do remember cussing the strike, as it was a long time before I saw more 71 Chevy’s after that first one.
In 1972, It felt like they Purposely uglified the front of This Caprice. Who Do away with the turn signals of 1971 otherwise?
Same here; I remember confusing those ’71 Chevys for Cadillacs from the front. When the ’72 appeared, I kinda wondered if the huge bowtie was slapped up there to make sure you knew this was a Chevy, dammit!
The 76 Caprice may be the only one I like from the 71-76 period. Something about the way they set up the quad rectangle headlights on it’s face just gets me.
GM had some cool wheel covers in the early-mid 70s.
Ahhh…the last of “the good old days”! I really liked these, but they were so enormous and I remember how bad on gas these monsters were from hearing all the crabbing from those who owned these cars – Ford and Chrysler included. I don’t care if gas was 25.9/gal – with what the average guy was making, it still added up – especially for me at the time as a sergeant in the air force. It took a lot to feed my avatar, but then, I couldn’t stand still in those days and all my cash went into the tank! If only I would park it for awhile. I did that fall of 1972 – I finally got a bit wiser.
These cars? Wow, they did suck the gas. The most memorable thing I have was the GM “Mark of Excellence” – the full-depth crack in the top of the padded dash from windshield to edge! That – and 80% of them were that mist green color…or tan.
Still, a beautiful ride.
The 72 Caprice is a very beautiful car. My Dad gave up on Chevy due to his 64 Biscayne 2 dr sedan rusting out. Although he kept it until March 1972, it was an ugly rustbucket since 68 or so. My mother would have made him keep it longer, but I had been drafted, and she was so upset that I would be sent to Vietnam that she didn’t care if he bought a new car.
So my Dad bought a new 72 Dodge Polara 2 dr HT. He was always extremely proud of that Dodge. Since I never went overseas, the story had a happy ending all around.
Really like the 32 Chevy roadster. It does look like a Cadillac, albeit smaller.
Interesting comparison between the ’32 Chevrolet and the contemporary Cadillac. It was probably a smart move, too, since the ’32 Ford looked awfully Lincoln-like.
One thing I think is important to understand is that really until the seventies, the decision to make Chevrolet more upscale came primarily from Chevrolet, not from GM. While the corporation did have approval over divisional decisions like new models, senior management didn’t often dictate such things — it happened occasionally, but I don’t think it started becoming standard operating procedure until the seventies. So, I think a lot of the aspirational efforts at Chevrolet, like the first Impala, were because the divisional leadership wanted to spread a wider net, rather than because it was part of some larger corporate strategy.
For what it’s worth, I think the initial target of the Impala was not so much Cadillac as Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick — an Impala hardtop was $51 cheaper than a Buick Special and within twenty bucks of a Pontiac Chieftain, so buyers who were not fanatically brand-loyal could decide if they wanted to buy a fancy Chevy or a rather basic Buick for about the same money. Of course, at that point, Buick, Olds, and Pontiac still had other offerings that were bigger, fancier, and more expensive than even the Impala, but that would change over the next few years, for the reasons you mention.
I can only imagine what GM product planners were going through at the time. I wonder if anyone stopped to think all the model overlap going on was going to hurt them somewhere down the line. I doubt it.
When the divisions were sufficiently differentiated, you had to make a conscious choice between the fancy Chevy with the Chevy engine or the less-opulent Buick with a Buick engine. When the only automatic you could get in a Chevy was a Powerglide, you might have wanted to spend a little more to get the Hydra-matic in an Oldsmobile. And if you were an Oldsmobile man since you got back from the war, no way in hell were you looking at anything else.
Even the Camaro and Firebird had their adherents who wouldn’t be caught dead in the other one. Go with the big Pontiac engines in the Firebirds or save some weight and get a Camaro with a hot 350. The 1970-81 cars were only 25 percent interchangeable.
Remember GM wouldn’t have stuck with this hodgepodge of a product lineup if they didn’t sell. And when dealers had single product lines, a Pontiac dealer could get really sore if the Chevy guy down the street had compact cars to sell and he didn’t. With everybody under a single roof as Chrysler is now, there’s no point to having all those brands.
GM’s market share in those days was 50% and above. And one out of every four cars sold was a Chevy. So I highly doubt anyone thought the overlap would hurt. Plus there was speculation that GM might be found in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and broken up, with Chevrolet being the spinoff.
Seems implausable from our current vantage point, doesn’t it?
I co-owned an ad agency a few years back. Automotive was a specialty and sure enough we heard from a well-connected multi-line GM client about Pontiac franchisees demanding their own Cobalt and Aveo to sell. And so came the G5 and G3.
I think the worst thing for Cadillac in those days was not so much that Chevy got so close (although that didn’t help!) but that Cadillac had become perceived as “common” to its original target audience. Having run in those circles during my 3 1/2 years in advertising, I came to understand the “exclusivity” factor among people of means. When Cadillac chased market share in the late 60′s, even if they had managed to maintain the quality and content level of earlier models, the mere fact that so many…well, ordinary people could now buy one was a game changer for people wanting something exclusive. This dynamic has been well-documented elsewhere.
To clarify, a G5 is not a Cobalt, its is an Epsilon car, like a Malibu, the G3 was Cobalt based and there was an Aveo based car to, but I am not sure that made it to the US, it was available in Canada.
A couple days late, I know, but you’re incorrect here. G5 was Cobalt based, G3 was Aveo based. The Epsilon car you are referring to is the G6.
I test drove a G5 back in ’07, and being in Detroit I see the Aveo-clone G3s all the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac_G5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Aveo_%28T200%29
My grandfather had a ’72 Caprice 4-door hardtop. Beautiful car. Metallic charcoal gray with a black vinyl top, black velour interior, He bought new and kept it looking and running like new until he passed away in 1991.
I wanted to purchase it from my grandma to replace my dying ’78 Granada, but my dad sabotaged any prospects of me getting the car. He made the half-baked excuse that seeing the car would make my grandma sad. Now, I knew my grandma well. My grams was very sentinmental about people, but NOT cars. My dad didn’t even tell me he helped my grams sell it until a week later. I was pretty mad about that.
They ended up selling it to a lady in the neighborhood for only $600!!! This particular lady was severely obese and slightly eccentric. From my dad’s description of her, I doubt that car survived for very long.
This wasn’t the first time that my dad pulled a fast one on me, and it wouldn’t be the last. I love my dad a lot, but I’ve never completely forgiven him for that stunt.
You can’t take your Caddy downmarket and your Chevy upmarket and expect it turn out well. The true collision of this was when Caddy went to tiny little FWD cars in the 80s and suddenly Caprice sales pick up and Lincoln Town Car sales take off. Somedays I think that GM wasn’t just killed by bad moves, I think it committed suicide.
Like most of the manufacturing economy we once had, GM got murdered by the Wall St. casino.
“Chevrolet owners just loved their faux Caddys, while Cadillac owners continued to buy new ones, for a few more years anyway.” A division and its dealers could always get short term gains by stepping into another division’s turf. In the old days GM corporate knew it would be poison in the long run, so they wouldn’t permit it.
The stock market got obsessed with short-term corporate earnings, excluding all else. How could corporate execs resist when Chevy promised a quick earnings boost with a Caprice? Grab the upside today, get out and let others suffer the long term cost.
Cadillac never stopped offering a RWD Brougham.
Well, yes, but it was saddled with a horrible series of engines in the 80′s (1981 V8-6-4, then the self-destructing HT4100 in 1982-85, then a few years of anemic Olds V8′s), and it got no updating to speak of, so the 1991 was hard to tell apart from the 1977. GM was so cheap that they didn’t redesign the interior to accommodate airbags until the ’93 redesign, so for 1990-92 the alleged flagship of the Cadillac line had those unfortunate door mounted seat belts. In the meantime Lincoln had totally redesigned the Town Car twice. By 1992 the Town Car had the quiet and decent-performing modular engine and S-class levels of build quality. The 1993-96 Brougham was a good effort but late, and it was killed off to use the line to build more trucks and SUV’s.
@MadHungarian, Amen and +1. Even offering the mid 1980s Corvettes 200 odd hp V8 would have been an improvement.
My dad bought his first Mercedes and ditched his last Cadillac in 1972, not because of what the Chevrolet looked like, but because the Caddy had become an unmanageable beast. His last caddy was an 8.2 liter Eldorado that was 224 inches long. So long that it took 2 passes to get it up the parking ramp where he worked. Yet the back seat would not accommodate his not very tall sons.
morning paper route in ’71, gonna get my permit next year, taking a bit to get used to the 2nd gen Camaro, and… WHOOP!
Impala coupe sitting still, mean -looking in the streetlight, and the curve of that backlite window just turned me on!
I had an elderly very-well-to-do aunt (San Mateo County) who went from Lincolns and Caddies to nothing but Caprices and Monte Carlos because you could doll up a Caprice/LTD quite nicely to comfort and driving wise it rivaled (sometimes exceeded) the high priced luxury make. Until she died around 1982, this Auntie would alternate between a Caprice Classic or Monte Carlo every few years. Her trades, I recall, always had less than 15K after 2-3 years of driving.
I’d visit Grandfolks in Missouri every summer in my youth. By the mid 70′s, every third car it seemed was a Caprice. The Farmer’s Cadillac! Why, a ’74 Caprice Classic with 400 2-bbl, vinyl top, a/c and power windows might set you back $5300.00!
My dad bought a ’73 Impala coupe new. It was probably the nicest car we ever owned…until it started to rust out after a few years. Mechanically, though, it was pretty good and the 350 2-barrel wasn’t bad on gas. It was a good car for towing, and it was also the first car I ever drove – my dad started teaching me to drive on it when I was about 14. I still wouldn’t mind taking an old one for a spin sometime. Three years ago, my wife and I drove up to the cottage in a rented 2009 Impala. I drove my dad around in it, and he really liked it. Besides the better handling and much better gas mileage, it was put together a lot better than the ’73, and he laughed when I told him you could fit the whole thing into our old ’73 with room to spare.
So these are called 71-76 GM B bodies? I never knew. As a kid, say about 1982, I remember doing an informal survey in our little town and these were the most predominant car out there. You could literally have them for the asking once they got rusty and leaky. Now I weep.