On my bike ride home the other day, I took a loop through my neighborhood to enjoy the perfect weather, where I spotted this gem.
As a kid, and even as a teen, I had a thing for big luxury cars. I attribute it to the, shall we say, compelled austerity of growing up in the working classes of the hinterlands of Michigan, teetering on the brink of poverty for much of my childhood. And these Caddies, while not my favorite (the ’80s Town Cars held that honor), certainly held favor in my court.
This 1988 example still sports its dealer plate from St. Augustine, Florida. Snowbirds! Of course! These are getting pretty thin in the salt-encrusted pothole-ridden hellscape we affectionately consider a road network here in Southeast Michigan.
But wait! This one was also sporting a recent University of Florida parking pass. So, it must have been a university student that picked it up down there and brought it here. Or something. At any rate, the lack of rust is well and truly accounted for.
Aside from this little something in the door, the thing’s pretty damned clean.
Especially inside!
That interior’s not quite “right,” but it sure takes me back! My first “real” job through high school was working in the warehouse of an area beer and wine distributor preparing orders, loading trucks, and other miscellany.
One of the perks was getting to drive the bosses’ cars, and two of the three had 1993 Cadillac Sedan DeVilles. Both were a dark metallic grey, with burgundy leather interiors. The only differences were the pinstripe (Muriel’s was burgundy, Eddie’s was darker grey) and the fact that Muriel’s car was as clean as a properly upper-class older English woman could conceive of (she was how I learned that “bloody” was once a severe curse word in British English, and if we heard it come from her lips we all knew to run like there was no tomorrow!), while Eddie’s was as dirty as a working-class brute with a quick temper and a heart of gold could tolerate (the F-bomb was a frequently employed part of his vocabulary).
For a freshly minted driver running a 1986 LeBaron GTS, these Caddies felt damned good and powerful. I’d pin the gas down and swear I could hear the leather creak as I was pushed back. Of course, by ’93 the DeVilles had the 4.9, which was a fair bit more potent than the 4.5s were. Compared to my old LeBaron, with its squeaky interior and splitting corduroy seats, these were downright posh. The digital climate controller, the little digital display for the fuel to the left of the column, the cushy leather seats (my bosses both had the pillowtop leather)-fantastic stuff!
This would have been absolutely appalling to Muriel, to have her car in this state, but it’s pretty hard to argue with how good of shape that interior’s in! I’m betting someone like Muriel had it for a long time. Seriously, I would have been tasked with detailing hers if it ever got this dirty-I learned a lot about how to take care of a car doing that!
That also meant I got to pay good attention to what was inside. Probably the biggest disappointment in these, to 16-year-old Xequar, was the standard GM Delco radio; the same radio that was in our basic Chevrolet panel delivery vans, except with a fancy serif font instead of the plain san serif on the regular ones. The ’87 Town Car I rode in regularly by that point with one of my best friends and his family had a JBL-branded stereo with some extra controls on it, so I was shocked the Cadillac had the same radio as every other GM, including stripper panel vans.
Oh well, I can still say I felt… Good… driving these back then. And I bet this person, probably a young person, maybe originally from the working classes (my neighborhood is great, and a bit weird, in that it’s an upper-middle-class neighborhood, but many of us that live here clawed our way up from the working classes to be here), feels Good driving this fantastic Sedan DeVille.
And I hope them many happy and Good miles in this beaut!
Pictures taken June 25, 2018 in the suburbs of Detroit
Oh man, are these things ugly… Compare this to a European luxury car of the same era and you see the Caddy for what it really was: an anachronism.
To me, this is where Cadillac completely lost it and never recovered.
I won’t argue with the “ugly” but I will take exception to “anachronism”, because these were trimmer, lighter and more efficient than their predecessor, sized closer to European luxury sedans, while switching to a more modern FWD platform with IRS. That cushy suspension and pushrod V8 though weren’t exactly cutting edge, though.
One wonders though if GM should have just thrown caution to the wind with their 80s Cadillacs. Irv Rybicki was trying so hard not to alienate existing Cadillac buyers with his designs but imagine if management had said, “Hey, these Cadillacs are so much smaller and nimbler… Let’s give ’em some fresh styling. Firm up the suspension.” Would they have lost even more customers to Lincoln, or would they have better tapped into what luxury car buyers were after in the 1980s? Or was the “dad’s Cadillac” image too unpalatable for upwardly mobile consumers?
True for “trimmer, lighter and more efficient”, but the youthful flair of the Cadillacs of the 50’s and 60’s is completely gone. This styling only appeals to senior citizens.
It’s too bad that keeping the RWD Brougham hadn’t been in the plan earlier on. With it in the line to appease traditionalists, they could’ve taken more chances on the new FWD line.
It definitely looks like it was designed exclusively with the use of a T-square. And the brilliance of Mitchell’s “sheer look”—which had subtly-curved panels with sharp creases—is lost here.
Those look like 2000-05 DeVille DTS wheels.
While I can appreciate that, aesthetically, these were a huge come-down for many from their RWD predecessors, there’s a certain cleanness to their form. Unfortunately, like the ’86 Seville, GM designers managed to make the details fresh, simple and elegant – I love the grille and headlights, like I do the Seville’s – but the designers managed to bungle the overall proportions. I’ll never forget that picture Paul featured once of a downsized DeVille parked behind a Honda Civic…
The ’89 added some more visual presence but I always felt they looked a bit willowy and like stretched taffy, like a contemporary Chrysler Imperial.
I agree…I liked the 85 C and H bodies when they were first released; especially the Buick and Olds versions.
I honestly think the H-Body cars were the best things to come out of GM from that era. I’d argue the Bonneville was the sharpest of them, but they all looked really good.
+1 on the Bonneville, but I have really come to appreciate the clean, overall styling of the LeSabres – which I used to think of as *too* clean (almost antiseptic). Those ‘Sabres just look really good to me in 2018, for some reason.
The 98 and Electra should’ve received the same stretched wheelbase as Cadillac in 1989, and kept it after the 1991 redesign as well.
The LeSabre coupe is my favorite. Great roofline.
Agree. The C and H bodies were tidy distillations of what went before.
Clean old car, looks like the new driver might be trashing the poor thing. That is a really odd two-tone combination, I don’t recall seeing any factory two-tones in that era.
These made really functional hearses, with one noteworthy issue: the space between the rear strut towers was relatively narrow, so trimmed-out there was only about 36 inches space for the casket. Not generally an issue unless you had an “enhanced width” unit for a larger person, in which case we had to use one of the older RWD coaches, or in one case of an EXTREMELY large woman, used the Econoline flower van.
It was actually really well kept, save for the couple of odd receipts and the plastic. Muriel had an absurdly high standard for how things were to be kept. I’d suggest she kept her house, car, etc. in a state where if the Queen herself turned up at 3:00 a.m., Muriel’s house and car would be fit to receive her.
This car was actually really clean inside, although it’s hard to tell through the sun reflecting off the windows.
While i admit Cadillac could have done better in the styling dept. i hardly consider them “ugly”. After driving my BMW 330xi for about 4 years(still have it) i wanted something with a less harsh ride as a daily driver. I thought what rides better than a Caddy? So i set out to find one at the best site for us classic car buyers on a budget…..Craigslist! I found a 1988 Caddy Sedan Deville like the one above. one owner 63000 miles i couldnt pass it up. here are some pics of my Caddy.
It looks great! I miss seeing these around. Like you, I don’t consider these ugly at all. And I love the RWD older ones as well.
Fantastic!
interior
This one particular photo says a lot. Look at the space ahead of the seat. No stupid console and floor shifter to get in the way of your right leg. No feeling of being cocooned into your seat as is the case with pretty much every car now. This is one of the chief reasons I could see myself getting a car like this. Why does every car and truck have to have a huge console nowadays?
Since i live in Queens and work in the Bronx, i use it from time to time to go to work otherwise i use on weekends. love the ride. And although it’s not the best looking Caddy, there is lots of Cadillac in it and i have grown to really like the semi-big brute. To me it’s still a Cadillac and i enjoy being seen in it and driving it. There is a sort of magic in driving a Cadillac, wether it’s ghosts from a past gen or just because growing up, Cadillac is what people aspired to own. And i’m glad and proud to own my own!!
The tolls must be killing you…Last time I crossed into LI, I think it was $5 each way–in 2006!
More like $8.50, with Easy pass $5.76. i leave my house at 5:30 am and take the FDR drive in the morning so only pay on the way home through the Triboro(RFK) bridge.
It is just so . . . . short.
Thx for the pix. The luxury and name might still have been there, but somehow the look just never seemed “Cadillac” enough to be worthy of the name.
Despite the more practical size, something seems missing after the rear wheels that makes the proportions look awkward.
The ’85-’86 models were even stubbier at the rear. Cadillac actually extended the rear a bit for ’87.
I still have a gag reflex that gets tripped when I see one of these. Logic says that this was one of GM’s decent platforms of the era and the only version that gave you V8 power, and that it was a comfortable ride. So they were decent cars that were owned by older upper income drivers thus making great older cars. So it should be the kind of car I gravitate towards. But I. Just. Can’t.
These just make me want to shake somebody and scream “CADILLAC WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING!”
Oh, and that back window insert with the exposed welting to fill the seam – simply unexcusable in a car of this price class.
I completely hear you on the rear window thing. While it does give it a nice limo touch and was most likely used to distance it form it’s Buick and Olds brothers (remember that Lincoln commercial where people confuse the GM three?) It should have been done in a more seamless fashion. And it does make parking a bit more difficult as you cant see the rear mini fins to determin how close you are to the car behind you. One thing i will say is that the actually feels and looks bigger than it actually is parking it i feel like its long for a given parking, only to get out and see that there is still plenty of room to park.
JPC: Yes, yes and YES.
My native New Orleanian, upscale Gawdmother took one look at these “downsized” Cadillacs and dryly commented “I’d rather take the streetcar or even a bus rather than be seen in the back seat of one of these automotive t**ds!” (Such language!)
Like the two-tone paint on this. Two-toning was big in the ’50’s, but vinyl roofs took over in the mid ’60’s. Two-tone paint made a bit of a comeback in the ’80’s, then disappeared. I think it’s time for a return. Getting tired of the sea of grey/white/black vehicles.
“Getting tired of the sea of grey/white/black vehicles.”
And so say all of us! But is anybody listening?
I read a car-buying advice article last year where the car ‘expert’ (more of a finance guy, methinks) advised buying a grey/white/black car for better resale value. WRONG! Well, for us, anyway. How can you have any pride of ownership with a car that looks the same as anybody else’s? When we’ve bought secondhand cars, it’s so hard to find one that’s a decent colour. When I bought my ’05 Mazda 3, there were heaps of boring ones, but so few in colour; fortunately I found one that was in in the next town. Twice my daughter has had to go to the state capital (two hour trip) to get any decent colour choice on her preferred car (Honda Jazz).
End of rant.
These were objectively pretty nice cars with lovely interiors and its certainly easy to argue that they were the right car for the times and an overall improvement over the boats they were replacing.
I could just never get past the fact that the stying suffers from what I call “Mustang II syndrome”; that is, the front end and the back end of the car appear to have been designed by different teams who never talked, and only discovered that they were working in from different scales models when it was too late to fix things. Thus we end up with a long, long nose and a stubby tail on both cars. Oh, and that utilitarian square roofline. Ugh.
I would love to read a history of the debates that must have taken place over the design of this car. Not the platform, as that was a given and (theoretically) a good choice for the times, but I’d like to know what other alternates were considered, and see if things might have been different.
“Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick, a brand new Buick…..”
Frankly, yes.
Need I say more?
That was simply a brilliant ad!
That commercial says it all.
These looked less prestigious than a Ford Taurus, let alone a Lincoln Town Car.
I’ll bet that ad caused a few heads to roll at GM.
Very clever ad, though it conveniently ignores the fact that Cadillac was still offering a big RWD car.
Need I say more (Part 2)
LOL!!!! Thank you for that!!!
There’s an immaculate white ’88 DeVille for sale at a small family dealership just a mile from me. They’re looking for $1900 for it, and I have seriously considered stopping in to see if I could haggle them down to $1500, as it’s sat for a few months. The problem in my neck of the woods (Tampa Bay area) is that sometimes there are too many clean, older “fogey-mobiles” , so when in the market for an inexpensive second car the options can be overwhelming. But there is some allure to the prospect of wafting along through traffic in the blistering heat on a rolling leather sofa with that freeze-you-out GM A/C cranking and a stand-up wreath and crest to guide you. This generation of Cadillacs remains my least favorite, but that could be a blessing, as I could conceivably get a couple years of service out of it and let it go without too much drama when something too expensive goes wrong.
Never liked these things back in the day, but time has softened my attitude and I am warming to them a bit more. This one looks nice with the 2-tone paint. However, I still think they had a rear end that was too short and stubby, not enough visual weight in the C-pillar and tried to hard to put traditional Caddly styling on a too-small platform. They need a completely new styling direction for this platform to really be a winner.
At least they’re not as bad as the shrunken ’86-91 Sevilles, now that was a real abomination.
There are quite few ’86’-’91 SeVilles close to where the DeVille is. Every time I see them, I remind myself for every single car, someone would like it regardless
Personally I liked the ’86-’91 Sevilles; certainly a huge improvement style-wise over the 2nd gen, but still not as nice as Gen 1. I always thought of them as low-slung carriage designs…demur luxury….
My grandfather owned 38 Cadillacs in his lifetime. His second-to-last was a Dark Sapphire Blue ’88 Sedan deVille he purchased off-lease in 1991 with around 60,000 miles on it, on which he then proceeded to spend an insane amount of money to restore to better-than-new condition. I was honored when he told me I could take it to my junior prom.
His last Caddy was a ’92 SdV he bought new, Light Beige over Medium Taupe cladding and taupe padded roof. It definitely lacked the presence (and quality) of the older car.
That last line should read, “Despite the longer and more balanced body on the ’92, it definitely lacked the presence…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR4rFao1tZM
You guys should enjoy this. I know I did watching it during my lunch break yesterday. Motorweek has always been so “positive” I love catching the more subtle digs they take at a vehicle.
We can debate the styling limitations/failures of this series of the Cadillac DeVille. Most CC discussions center on the pluses or minuses of styling without having had the opportunity to actually drive the subject car in question. In actuality, for me, the space utilization of this design was an improvement compared to previous Cadillacs wrapped in a subjectively bland package–another Irv Rybicki fail.
The real failing of this series of the Cadillac DeVille was in the apparently rushed engine engineering and development prior to its release for production.
In 1987, upon their retirement two of my close relatives bought identical dark brown Cadillac DeVille Sedans from Delorean Cadillac in Lakewood, Ohio (owned by Charlie Delorean, the brother of John Z. DeLorean–an interesting story in itself).
I had opportunity to drive both cars from time to time and was able to appreciate their build quality (surprisingly not bad, even good), appreciate their capable front wheel drive automatic transaxles in wintertime snow (again surprisingly good), but be dismayed by their dismally under powered aluminum block-cast iron head 4.1 liter V8’s. They defined the word slow, being especially slow, painfully slow, for a V8 powered car.
Ummm, an aluminum block/cast iron head combination, now where have we heard of that combination before. Oh, now I remember, the not so brilliant, Vega 2300 engine–GM was apparently slow to learn from the Vega engine fiasco. Apparently the die cast V8 blocks were reportedly marginal in strength requiring shoring up with cast iron heads–a not so brilliant solution resulting in chronic head/block/cylinder head thermal instability with block/head shuffling resulting in chronic coolant leakages contaminating engine oil with resulting common, too frequent, engine failures. Cadillac/GM was forced to have a firstly quiet ongoing engine replacement program for what became a chronic tsunami of failed engines with equally unhappy owners.
At Delorean Cadillac, behind the service department was an ever enlarging stack of failed engines awaiting early initial return shipment to Detroit for engineering analysis, but then as the number of engine failures replacements increased the failed engines went directly to salvage yards. The internal, never publicly stated joke at the DeLorean service department was, “Do you want an engine change with that oil change?” This was an epic corporate disaster for Cadillac.
Each of the previously mentioned 1987 4.1 liter V8 Cadillac Deville sedans had their engines replaced, one at 41,000 miles and the other at about 45,000 miles. This experience soured my relatives on the Cadillac experience, and when the Lexus LS entered production for sale, both Cadillac’s were replaced by the exemplary, trouble free LS400’s. They never bought Cadillac’s again.
To talk about the mid to late 1980’s Cadillac’s, the styling merits or demerits can be discussed, but the “deadly sin” of Cadillac, the HT 4100 V8 engine with its failure prone aluminum block and OHV cast iron heads really needs to be discussed as much as the styling. These engines were Cadillac killers!
The later versions of.this engine, the 4.5 and 4.9 liter were much more reliable, but the HT4100 was the actual destroyer of the Cadillac reputation, as I believe, much more so than the styling.
Lets hope that this written about CC Cadillac DeVille already has a later 4.5 or 4,9 engine replacement. If it has the original 4.1 engine, then run away because it’s doomed to eventually fail.
People like to decry the V8-6-4 boondoggle in Cadillac’s history but those HT4100s went into far more vehicles by sheer volume.
Precisely why i bought the 88, i knew the 4.5 was a reliable engine with little to no problems. Great point Geelongvic!
An elderly neighbor owned one of the later ones, probably an 89 or so. Although he did not go into detail, he told me that he had owned Cadillacs for quite a few years, but that he had “quite a bit of trouble with this one.” He was in his 90s and it would turn out to be his last car. But he was not particularly pleased with it. I would imagine that a younger man would have traded it away and bought a Lexus, just as your relatives did. Or at the very least a Lincoln, just as three or four older people in my circle of friends did.
Amen!
And for those that hung in there with Cadillac long enough, there was the Northstar to look forward to!
Ah, the DOHC Northstar, another example of the failure of Cadillac Engineering to fully develop and to do long term testing of an engine prior to release resulting in future needless failures Oil pump issues, chronic oil burning, cylinder head gasket leaks due to single use torque to yield cylinder head bolts, were issues for years with associated engine failures in the hands of paying customers.
Lest you think that only Cadillac/GM engineering was faulty, then understand that starting in the mid-nineties with the introduction and production of the water cooled six cylinder Boxer engines, Porsche had many in service, in customer hands engine failures with cylinder failures, coolant leaks, rear main crankshaft seal failures, and the dreaded Intermediate Shaft (IMS) bearing failures resulting in notoriously common catastrophic engine failures which went on for many years leading to a customer class action lawsuit and then a corporate settlement.
Cadillac had it’s engine stinkers, and so did, inexcusably, Porsche. Then later we can begin to discuss MB, BMW, and VW/Audi engine stinkers, their engineering deadly sins released on the buying public. Another story for another time reflecting how the worldwide automotive world had changed from decades earlier.
There’s still a special punishment reserved for the moronic numbskull who made the decision to have single use torque to yield head bolts be part of an aluminum block engine with aluminum heads. I’ve still got the bill to prove just how “brilliant” that decision was.
A shame too, because, when it works, it’s a pretty good engine. Maybe not the best Cadillac engine, or the best GM engine, but it does its job in a serviceable manner. But it needed more time in the oven, and when it came to the mentality of GM at the time, there was a snowball’s chance in hell that more time for anything was going to happen, regardless if it was fully baked or not.
Note that Ford modular engines used torque to yield bolts on their 32 valve all aluminum V8s too. Ever hear of headgasket issues with those? Nope. Or even any issue the similar in concept Northstar has a reputation for? Not really.
That would seem to underline that the concept was fine, but GM’s execution of it was faulty. For generations brought up knowing that Cadillac was the best, that must have been a real slap in the face. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a Cadillac dealer in the HT4100 and Northstar days. The 4-6-8 could be forgiven as one misstep, but being followed up by these? Ouch.
Never driven one of these but I did ride in an ’87 or ’88 Olds 88 FWD and was quite impressed by the interior space and comfort level.
One of the things that always bugged me about these cars was the low-back design of the front seats. I drove behind many of these C & H-body cars back in the day and remember always being amazed at low low the front seat backs were, and that the head restraints were never adjusted to the proper height. Invariably I would follow some fat old guy down the road whose head was well above the head rest and think if he was ever rear-ended, his neck would snap like a pretzel. How could GM allow such a big design flaw to pass?
For me my Favorite Deville’s must be 77 to 79 model years I always liked them.
Budget Rent a Car International had fleets of these Cadillacs through a GM deal. So we all had a chance to drive both these Cadillacs and the regular Lincoln fleet.
No contest. The Cadillac was a lightweight with a terrible engine. It looked like it was designed by a bunch of ladies. No heft. No luxury presence. The Cadillacs looked like pretty Kleenex boxes and drove like them.
The Town Cars were dated, but they were what our customers thought of when they plunked down extra loot for a luxury car. These cars wrecked Cadillac’s image.
I remember when these came out and at the time I was favorably impressed by how roomy they were in spite of their exterior size. They were truly amazing in that regard. They didn’t handle as well as the rear-wheel drive cars they replaced, though and traditional Cadillac customers still bought the rear-wheel drive Cadillac Brougham or moved on to the Lincoln Town Car.
The demographic for buyers of the downsized front-wheel drive Cadillacs was different from that of the older rear-wheel drive Cadillacs. The people who bought the front-wheel drive models were even older than buyers of the rear-wheel drive models. They were also much wealthier. Kind of like the demographic of people who bought the original Cadillac Seville. Go figure.
Re “more European Styling,” Yah, how’s that working out for you in 2018, Cadillac?
Cadillac has completely lost its way, a subject which has been endlessly decried in all media. Chasing BMW is not the way to be successful and renaming your cars after what sound like diseases (I’m very sorry, you have a bad case of ATS,) is not working. The current cars outperform BMWs but . . . no one buys them and they aren’t aspirational.
This car for all its faults and somewhat peculiar styling was still aspirational, and not just to people who had been involuntary tourists on French and Japanese beaches. Even though it wasn’t “cool,” a fair number of youngish people still liked these cars. BMWs at the time handled great and had a precision driving feel that was inimitable. However, they were also very expensive, cramped, spartan, noisy, and not very powerful.
Cadillac in those days offered a genuine American alternative; the acres of space, plush, quiet, roomy, ice cold air, fancy stereo, everything power assisted, American sedan, which is ideally adapted to the sort of driving Americans do; sitting in traffic for 45 minutes each way on a commute or 6 hour road trips. One finger pinky steering, cosseted in plush seats, with plenty of room for luggage and 3 passengers, 5 in a pinch.
The Sales figures belie the claim that people didn’t like them.
These cars and the companion Electra and Ninety Eight probably hit the pinnacle of space efficiency. They were much smaller than the gunboats they replaced, lighter, yet ENORMOUS inside and still felt luxurious and a vast step up from a Celebrity or Ciera.
As many people have pointed out, the downfall was the engine. The 4.1 was no more powerful than the Buick 3.8, and had hideous reliability issues. Plus, if you didn’t have engine problems, you had other electrical/quality problems and were generally met by GM dealer indifference. The 8-6-4 was fundamentally a good engine and the cylinder shut off was easily disabled.
For Cadillac lovers, it must have all seemed like a bad dream – only GM wasn’t waking up.
Cadillac must have figured out right away that they had a problem with the stumpy ’85 DeVille. Not only did they lengthen the rear for 1987, they also offered a pricey Fleetwood Sixty Special that year with a 5-inch wheelbase stretch in the rear compartment. These remained until 1989, when the longer wheelbase was used on all FWD DeVille/Fleetwood sedans (but not the coupes).
I do have to say, the 1989 refresh that lengthened these and smoothed out some of the lines did these a lot of favors. The chunky taillights on this one and stubbier rear don’t work as well, as far as I’m concerned.
After the ’89 refresh, though, I seriously think these were the best-looking Caddies since the 1960s. Let me state, though, I am polarized, strongly, away from the Arts and Science language.
My only defense against these Cadillacs being called ugly is that the car has to be designed to begin with. These things are devoid of styling, they look like they are made out of cardboard, they’re not ugly, they’re inert. It’s the couch on wheels Cadillacs were know for on a dynamic level, but in the name of efficiency (irrelevant in the luxury segment), the aspirational, imposing styling Cadillacs were equally known for was completely shed away.
Thank god these flopped. Cadillac, Irv Rybicki’s design studio, and GM as a whole deserved a firm kick in the behind for rolling out these abominations, under their dillusional, pessimistic and negative world outlook that buyers formerly wooed by pesky Mercedes Benz, BMW and even Lincoln will flock to these dystopian Cadillacs when the shit inevitably hit the fan. Perhaps it’s a form of schadenfreude, but nothing makes me more satisfied than when a major sure thing turns out to be bunk.
Wow! I was going to chime in with my take on the styling, but it’s all been said.
Rybicki’s problem was that he was designing cars as though GM still held 53% market share. Once upon a time, where GM styling led the world seemed sure to follow. Us foreigners may have though their cars looked futuristic (’40s), over the top (’50s), huge but stylish (’60s), or increasingly odd (’70s), but their stylistic themes were reprised by other manufacturers worldwide. The Italians largely seemed to agree. All was right with the world. There was a general consensus that this was how a car should look; we could see where styling was going. But in the Rybicki era, GM seemed to be stylistically marching to a different drum, one which nobody overseas could hear – except maybe Volvo with the 760.
This car has good elements, true, but the whole just doesn’t quite seem to make it. The more I look at it the passenger compartment is fine, just the front and rear don’t quite seem to belong somehow. It’s as though it was designed in a hurry, to get something out for the production guys without the time being taken to finesse the details – something Rybicki’s predecessors excelled at.
Well put Old Pete. To those of us outside of the USA, American car design was something to look up to over the years. Cadillac in particular was known worldwide as a brand to be revered, offering (perceived) prestige and with so much more of everything (except efficiency and handling) than non-US brands…until the likes of these Caddies with their odd proportions and lack of presence, let alone flair or panache.
Outside of the USA, if you arrived somewhere in a ’40s-’70s Cadillac and you’d be guaranteed attention; the presence etc far outweighing the cars’ negative points to allow the (perceived) prestige factor to win through. But turn up in an 80s Caddie like the pictured de Ville and if you did get any attention, chances are it would be negative as the odd poorly-proportioned looks overwhelmed the positive factors and suffocated any prestige with immense mediocity.
I know that’s probably not how it is in the States, but it’s certainly how it felt for many car fans in the rest of the world. And it’s nothing to do with the (down)sizing of the cars or which end has the driving wheels; the likes of Mercedes and BMW proved it was perfectly possible to design elegant cars of all sizes with presence and prestige in the 1980s. That Cadillac failed is one thing, but that it didn’t even seem interested in trying is arguably even worse. Cadillac, and perhaps GM, completely lost their way through the 1980s, and the de Ville is a great posterchild for why. Just my 10c worth.
This is a hideous car with a terrible engine. Thoroughly outclassed by a Chevy Caprice. This is the car that killed Cadillac.. only good thing about it is it helpped sell lots of town cars and fifth avenues. How anyone thought a celebrity lookalike with a crappy little engine was a real Cadillac is beyond me.
They should have kept the big cars and sold this with the 89 updates and buick 3.8 as a replacement for the cimmaron and cimmarons price as an entry car.
Compare this car with those featured in the Driving Miss Daisy post and you can see how Cadillac lost it’s mojo over time. Those ’50’s and ’60’s Cadillacs were dream machines. The buying public dreamed of owning one, and the actual owner’s felt that they were living the American Dream. Maybe it was just the times. Maybe it was just a societal loss of innocence and nothing could ever recapture those feelings. Maybe. But the formula was revived by both Mercedes Benz and BMW and propelled those marques to the forefront. Perhaps we are now living in a post automotive desire apocalypse. Sometimes it feels that way.
It looks like this car belongs to a wealthy neighborhood, but not ultra rich ( Bloomfield, Grosse Pointe ) so I would guess it’s Pleasant Ridge, Huntington Woods or Lathrup Village, somewhere within Oakland county between 9 Mi and 14 Mi.
And the owner shouldn’t be too young ( teenager ), as he has to be legal driving age by early 2014 at least, as the most beautiful car license plate voted in 2013 was changed to black letters in mid-2014, and the original 2013 version is getting pretty rare nowadays ( and I have one myself too ) and this DeVille has the 2013 version.
A close colleague had an 85 Coupe de Ville from new and it was a truly terrible car. I recall the transmission had to be replaced twice and many more problems. Traded for a new Lexus ES in 1992. I do think these Cadillacs helped to destroy the brand as aspirational for so many – this person never bought another GM car period, and her family had been buying high end GM cars going back to the 40’s (around early 90’s she inherited her auntie’s perfectly preserved Olds 98 from the early 50’s!).
Looks like I found my brother.
greetings from Austria