(first posted in 2010 at TTAC; on 9/6/2012 at CC. Undoubtedly my most controversial and least understood GM DS. The comments are even better than the post itself.)
In 1977, GM offered the above two vehicles for sale. Squint a bit; can you see a certain fundamental similarity? Yes, the exterior skins and styling are somewhat different, but beneath the vinyl top and some other superficialities, you’ll find a lot in common, as is obviated by their shared basic architecture. They both rode on essentially the same platform/suspension, although the bottom one’s rear wheels were set back three inches to provide a touch more leg room. Both were powered by versions of GM’s fine 350 (5.7-liter) V8 engines; the version in the blue car made 170 hp vs. 180 hp in the green one.
The Chevy Nova (top), with more than a hint of BMW in its styling and underpinnings shared with the Camaro, was perhaps the best handling American sedan of its time. It was priced from $3,500 ($12.5k adjusted). The Seville (bottom), which was aimed at the Mercedes S Class, went out the door for about $14k ($50k adjusted)–or four times as much. Can you tell where this is going?
Admittedly, the Seville had its charms, mainly in the eyes of affluent, middle-aged women who had been hankering for a smaller, easier-to-park Caddy for years. And lest you protest the Seville’s DS categorization, keep in mind that the Cimarron, the universally-acclaimed all-time GM DS turkey, cost less than twice as much as its donor Cavalier. Yes, the Nova-based Seville undoubtedly proved to be among the more profitable vehicles in GM history, but at what cost? It also proved to be one more milestone in Cadillac’s long decline.
The Seville owes its existence to Mercedes, whose (then) superbly crafted and relatively compact sedans were making serious inroads into the American luxury market of the late ’60s and early ’70s. In contrast, the Big Three’s luxury cars had followed a more dubious evolutionary model: cancer. Eventually, their unchecked growth (especially considering the usual one or two persons aboard) reached the inevitable, terminal limit; historically, car-pooling and flashing one’s wealth have been mutually exclusive activities.
Women, who tend to be a bit less obsessed with exaggerated length then men, had been telling Cadillac for years that they’d like a smaller edition. The 1961-1962 Park Avenue with its shortened tail was a minor concession, but women weren’t exactly the decision-makers back then, especially not at GM. Eventually came 1971 Cadillacs that were over-the-top big, and none the better for it; quality was down, and they looked and felt like a tarted up Chevy Caprice. Meanwhile, Mercedes sales boomed. The Cadillac formula was broken, but it would be decades before they actually figured out the new luxury-car paradigm. Did they ever?
The Seville represented the first step in what Cadillac thought was the right direction. And Cadillac was quite clear in that the major driver of the Seville’s existence was Mercedes. Unfortunately for GM, the Seville’s successful first few years sent the wrong signals and only accelerated Cadillac’s demise. That was the bittersweet aspect of cars like the Seville, which helped propel GM’s 1978 sales to an all-time high of 9.66 million with a 46% market share. When women are tearing overpriced Novas out of your hands, it takes a while for that flush of flattery and pride to dissipate…say, about a quarter-century. Pride goeth before the fall.
Could GM have done things differently? They could have looked to Germany, where Opel built their Kapitan-Admiral-Diplomat luxury sedans to compete against the Mercedes S-Class. It would have been a logical starting point. The latest version, which dated back to 1969, had handsome lines (that undoubtedly influenced the Seville), featured a DeDion semi-independent rear suspension, and was built with precision–a bit too much precision, as it turned out.
The inability to maintain Opel’s precise panel gap tolerances in its U.S. factories forced GM to abandon the idea of building it stateside. But who or what to blame for the Nova-based S-Class fighter that was ultimately produced? The GM bean counters, who said it would be cheap and viable to cobble something together from X-body components? Or was it just Detroit’s old and entrenched belief that they alone knew what Americans wanted or deserved?
The Seville did provide a break in GM styling, and it was a breath of fresh air–at least until it became stale. It represented the tight and boxy new design paradigm at GM, and was the standard bearer of their switch from obese-looking seventies’ bulgemobiles to a crisp and very boxy future. Unfortunately, a virtually identical look now graced the entire GM line, especially the A-body intermediates. The rather bracing effect of the Seville’s arrival, in 1975, was short-lived: Within a few years, everything from GM looked like a Seville. No wonder the gen2 Seville was so desperate, and even more toxic.
OK, so the Seville wasn’t exactly a Nova with a squared off roof and gaudy interior, although there’s a lot the two really did share, as this post on this “Noville” coupe clarifies. GM’s prodigious engineering talent had worked feverishly to give it the kind of quietness and soft ride appropriate to a Caddy. Indeed, its ride was as smooth and soft as every American luxury car of the time, so long as the pavement stayed smooth and the curves gentle. But the Chevy-to-Caddy transformation had added 1,000 pounds (!) of weight to the Seville, which naturally hampered performance. As averaged from two contemporary road tests, it ambled from 0-to-60 in a leisurely 13.2 seconds, and reached the quarter-mile in 18.3, while turning in mediocre, mid-teens fuel economy–and all against a backdrop of proud GM trumpeting of its new (Bendix) Electronic Fuel Injection! A unit that turned out to be quite troublesome too. The Nova could run rings around the Seville, but did luxury car buyers care about these details? Well, yes and no.
The buyers of Mercedes diesels didn’t; but they were after something else, which they sure as hell didn’t find in the disastrous diesel Seville that appeared in 1978. Buyers of Mercedes were looking for two things: superb quality, and/or the prestige that came along with it, even in a poky 240D. The Seville sold well enough, but just not at the expense of Mercedes. Its size and buyer affluence, especially in California, merely made it the Caddy for latecomers to the M-B/BMW party–and, most likely, to the last of their own.
That Cadillac was clueless about the rise of Mercedes and BMW was evident in the Seville’s interior design and instrument panel. Let’s not waste time analyzing them; it was obvious which one pointed to the future. Cadillac still insisted that it had something unique, or at least distinctly American, to say about the design of luxury-car interiors and instrument panels until finally caving in with a very M-B-inspired look in the gen4 Seville.
There is one good thing to be said about the gen1 Seville: It went only downhill from the start, and its wretched successors will have their own days of reckoning here soon enough. Of course, the Seville also spawned a whole generation of imitators (Lincoln Versailles, Chrysler Fifth Avenue) and custom freaks that blighted the vehicular landscape with garish and kitschy faux-luxury half-padded roofs, crests, and hood ornaments for at least a decade-and-a-half.
PS: GM’s Deadly Sins does not mean the specific cars lack redeeming features, or are “deadly” in or of themselves. It is a continuing series of the many steps GM took toward its eventual demise. The Seville may have sold well in its day, but undermined Cadillac’s former position of leadership in the luxury car field, which it soon surrendered to Mercedes and other import brands. The gen1 Seville may have been handsome and rode smoothly, but the expectations of luxury buyers were changing quickly, and the Seville failed to meet them. It was not until the CTS that Cadillac began to fully embrace the changed realities of the luxury car market; about three decades too late. Here is a further explanation of the Purpose and Nature of GM’s Deadly Sins.
The HowStuffWorks website got more about the Seville http://auto.howstuffworks.com/1976-1979-cadillac-seville2.htm
I remember also reading an old issue of Collectible Automobile then they also studied to use other names then Seville like….LaSalle. The Seville aren’t deadly as the Cimarron or the next-gen Seville with the Olds 350 diesel.
The only deadly sin is this piece of words strung together ignorantly and carelessly and passed off as an article.
I concur entirely with Carmine. Niedermeyer is quite uniformed, and picked the wrong target entirely. Niedermeyer demonstrates how anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can post misleading and misguided information. The most glaring error, which Carmine astutely pointed out, is that the 350 engine in the Seville was an Oldsmobile-sourced unit with electronic fuel injection, not a Chevrolet 350. And the fact that it is a Bendix / Bosch unit is irrelevant. What modern car manufacturer creates every component in-house?
Take one look at the photo of the first generation Seville with missing hubcaps and a broken turning lamp is used to compare with well-maintained contemporary vehicles (1975 Nova coupe, 1975 Mercedes-Benz 450SEL, and the 1982 Pontiac Bonneville Model G), and one can see that Paul Niedermeyer (brother of Greg Niedermeyer from “Animal House” fame?) is only interested in sullying the reputation of the excellent 1976 to 1979 Seville.
Notice that this over 35-year old Seville is still running as a daily driver, and has no significant corrosion. Pretty good, I would suggest. These vehicles were quite solid, well-built, and are generally well-regarded by most people who know the cars. And to include in the piece a photo of a garish, non-production customized by Grandeur Motors also unfairly besmirches the Seville’s reputation. The article from howstuffworks on the 1976 Seville on howstuffworks is superior in every way to the haphazard and factually-inaccurate hearsay critical opinion that Niedermeyer undeservedly inflicts on the Seville, and afflicts on the unfortunate reader.
Niedermeyer is very simplistic, criticizing GM for using the X-body Nova (et al) rather than the Opel Diplomat as the basis for the K-body Seville. He simply attributes the use of the X-Body over the Diplomat to “the beancounters”. There are several factors that played into the selection of the X-Body.
The car market in the early 1970’s was undoubtedly volatile. Emissions requirements placed great demand on engineering talent in a short period of time, coupled with the unexpected oil-embargo. Until price gasoline price spikes in 1973, the majority of American motorists demanded a large passenger car. Manufacturers were not only racing to meet more stringent emission standards, but suddenly, fuel consumption became a major issue. For Cadillac to chance its reputation by marketing a significantly smaller “International-size” Cadillac was extremely risky, as well as the huge costs in developing a new car.
Niedermeyer never mentions the sizeable risk that General Motors took on in developing and marketing the first generation of Seville. General Motors was congiscent of the ownsizing attempts by Chrysler in 1953 and 1961 that were absolutely disasters. As well, within GM and indeed Cadillac, the smaller 1961 / 1962 model year Park Avenue was never a sales success and quickly abandoned. Although the Seville turned out to be a financial success for General Motors, that was not guaranteed.
Granted there were aspects of the Opel Diplomat such as independent rear suspension and more exacting assembly tolerances that may have been more befitting on a luxury car, but as Cadillac Division chief engineer Robert J. Templin says in the howstuffworks article, the Diplomat was looked at, but Fisher body would be unable to handle the Opel pressings in their production system. The target launch was set at 14 months to satisfy dealers demanding a smaller Cadillac and threatening to sell Mercedes-Benz and BMW vehicles, essentially giving the two German manufacturers convenient access to Cadillac’s customer base. For Fisher to be able to accommodate an Opel-designed vehicle would undoubtedly be cost prohibitive in such a short span of time. As well, I would believe that it would be easier to enhance a car already developed for the United States market rather than redevelop a car developed solely for European consumption.
As well, Niedermeyer derides the design of the car. If anything, GM design is guilty of going to the well too often with its use of the “sheerline look”. The 1976 to 1979 Seville was quite distinctive for its time. The fact that it was entirely American is something to be proud of in my opinion. For Cadillac to copy the Europeans as Niedermeyer seems to suggest (specifically the dashboard design) would have been an utter mistake. Cadillac is supposed to be Standard of the World, and would not copy a Mercedes-Benz design. And even if Cadillac was so humble to copy a Mercedes-Benz design, it would most likely alienate existing customers. Although it has taken decades, this vehicle was a gentle shift toward the current popular and award-winning luxury cars that Cadillac is now making, but several design (boxy look alike downsized badge-engineered vehicles ) and engineering missteps (8-6-4 and the use of the Oldsmobile Diesel) in between have significantly impeded progress.
The Seville is a very good car for the time. The problem with the Seville is that it led to General Motors wholesale badge engineering with the 1982 Cimmaron, which lacked any innovation over its J-Body cousins at divisions within GM. I look at the current Elmiraj show car that was displayed in August at Pebble Beach, and say, now THAT is a Cadillac. Unique and unlike anything else on the road.
As for Niedermeyer, the car magazine journalist wannabe who will never be, stick to trolling the Internet with your inaccuracies and opinions.
Phil, your comment is fascinating to me. You seem to come to most of the same conclusions as did the author, but you excoriate him all through the process. Perhaps you skimmed through the article too quickly. Not to speak for Paul, but the point I took from his article was that while the Seville was not a bad car, it could have and should have been so much more. Also, its undeniable success just encouraged Cadillac and GM to merrily skip so much farther down the badge-engineering path with later cars. Anyone who has experience with Cadillacs of before, say, 1967 can tell you that the models from the 1970s and 1980s lost a lot of that special something that had made Cadillac the standard of the world. There are many reasons for Cadillac’s well-documented fall, but the fall itself is undeniable.
The tone of your response is distressing. We photograph the cars that we find and write what we feel moved to write on a given car. This was Paul’s take on this car. You may disagree with his conclusions (as did many other readers) but there is really no reason for pulling out the knives. This is a friendly forum to read and talk about interesting cars. Contrary opinions are always welcome. The harsh and nasty tone is not.
Niedermeyer also doesn’t mention the beautiful paint job and distinctive color array of the original Seville. As far as the styling, the look was such a hit that Cadillac used elements of the Seville styling cues on other models well into the 1980’s. It’s a shame the Cadillac all but abandoned this smaller platform for the second generation of Seville.
I found a picture of a Seville EXACTLY like the one I inherited from my mother around 1984. I still think this is a beautiful (if not chickish) car. I sent this picture to my friends and everyone thought the same. This car could of been the start of something great from Cadillac but the blew it with the 2nd generation Seville.
I will have to agree with you I had a 78 and 79 which was identical to the green one pictured but in pristine condition with the soft velvet interior I bought for a song because of problematic injection system but after replacement of the tbi with a quadrejet and olds intake this car was one of the best car’s I had ever owned and I still would love to have another I would still have it today if it hadn’t been stolen and totaled
thank you for those words, i dont understand why this car is being attacked like it is on this article. this was the right car for the right time. it was and still is one of the most beautifull cars ever produced. And people looking at this car were not interested in what mb/bmw had to offer at the time. just tired of people putting down big american cars because they have love for foreign cars. our cars were among the most stylish smooth riding cars on the planet. and caddillac is what people aspired to in those days!!!
The only deadly sin is this piece of words strung together ignorantly and carelessly and passed off as an article. And I could say the same about your comment, but maybe I have better manners than you? But one thing is certain: reading comprehension is not your strong suit. Let’s take (apart) your comment step by step:
1. Niedermeyer demonstrates how anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can post misleading and misguided information. The most glaring error, which Carmine astutely pointed out, is that the 350 engine in the Seville was an Oldsmobile-sourced unit with electronic fuel injection, not a Chevrolet 350.
I NEVER said it was a Chevrolet 350. Would you like to show me where I did? I may be pretty dumb, but not that dumb. I’ve been aware of the provenance of the Seville’s engine since I started reading about it when it came out.
Even if Cadillac had used the Chevrolet 350, what difference would it have made? They started using it soon enough, without compunction. The Chevy 350 certainly was better than many of Cadillac’s fine engines built in the 80s, and by a long shot.
2. Take one look at the photo of the first generation Seville with missing hubcaps and a broken turning lamp is used to compare with well-maintained contemporary vehicles (1975 Nova coupe, 1975 Mercedes-Benz 450SEL, and the 1982 Pontiac Bonneville Model G), and one can see that Paul Niedermeyer (brother of Greg Niedermeyer from “Animal House” fame?) is only interested in sullying the reputation of the excellent 1976 to 1979 Seville.
As I’ve pointed out ad auseum, Curbside Classic is about the cars we find on the streets, not at car shows and such. And this was the first gen1 Seville I found on the street. So its condition is irrelevant. FWIW, I love old survivor cars like this, much more than pristine garage queens. And corrosion on any cars here in the PNW is highly unusual. But I will say that there are probably several hundred old Mercedes running around Eugene still, and this was the only Seville I’ve ever seen driving on the streets here.
I’ve also pointed out repeatedly that the gen1 Seville is a handsome car.
3. Niedermeyer never mentions the sizeable risk that General Motors took on in developing and marketing the first generation of Seville. General Motors was congiscent of the ownsizing attempts by Chrysler in 1953 and 1961 that were absolutely disasters. As well, within GM and indeed Cadillac, the smaller 1961 / 1962 model year Park Avenue was never a sales success and quickly abandoned. Although the Seville turned out to be a financial success for General Motors, that was not guaranteed.
The risk of GM NOT developing a smaller Cadillac would have been even much greater. Comparing the issues surrounding the need for a smaller Cadillac in the seventies to compete against Mercedes with the downsized 1962 (not 1961, as you say) Chrysler Corp.products is irrelevant. By the mid-seventies, the movement towards smaller cars was very much well underway, and Cadillac would have been in even worse shape if they hadn’t built a smaller car. That would truly have been a Deadly Sin.
4. Granted there were aspects of the Opel Diplomat such as independent rear suspension and more exacting assembly tolerances that may have been more befitting on a luxury car, but as Cadillac Division chief engineer Robert J. Templin says in the howstuffworks article, the Diplomat was looked at, but Fisher body would be unable to handle the Opel pressings in their production system.
This is coming from the company that once rightfully called itself “The Standard of the World” because it invented precision mass-production? Cadillac was admitting that its body production process was sloppier than that of Opel, GM’s mass-market German division. I see this admission by GM as very embarrassing, and very indicative of the who future of Cadillac: unwilling to match Mercedes’ (and other European cars) precision and quality. Instead, they tinkered with a Nova to compete with the S Class. No wonder Mercedes buyers never took the Seville serious.
Which is really the essence of the whole Seville Deadly Sin: GM might have been able to fool some of its loyal and older buyers to buy the Seville, but the better educated and younger buyers saw it for what it really was: a highly-tarted up Nova, with a ridiculous price tag.
Mercedes buyers were sold on its German engineering, design, material quality, ride and handling; the Seville couldn’t match it on any of those, and as such, paved the way for Cadillac to become an old man’s car. Cadillac didn’t begin to turn that reality around until it adopted the Euro-centric CTS as its vehicle to claw back against the huge market share it lost to BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Lexus and others.
5. As well, Niedermeyer derides the design of the car. If anything, GM design is guilty of going to the well too often with its use of the “sheerline look”. The 1976 to 1979 Seville was quite distinctive for its time. The fact that it was entirely American is something to be proud of in my opinion. For Cadillac to copy the Europeans as Niedermeyer seems to suggest (specifically the dashboard design) would have been an utter mistake.
I have repeatedly said that the gen1 Seville was a handsome car. But with its standard vinyl roof and fake wire wheel covers, it was not going to appeal to those attracted to cars like Mercedes and BMW.
Eventually, Cadillac figured that out; if way too late. There’s no question that the 1992 Seville imitates the Mercedes W124 in both its exterior styling as well as its interior and dashboard.
The Seville’s dashboard and the rest of its interior design was hopelessly out-of date with international design trends. At this time Cadillac’s hubris was such that it thought that the kind of clunky, fussy, tacky and cheap design and materials it used on the gen1 Seville’s dashboard could compete for the money of the more sophisticated buyers that had by then weaned themselves of that old-school American 70s design. International design, influenced mostly from Europe, was moving on, and Cadillac was embarrassingly left behind. As I said above, they had no choice but to get on the bandwagon with the gen4 Seville, which was very Euro-inspired. But by then it was way too late to capture the interest of folks who had become loyal Mercedes and BMW buyers.
6. Although it has taken decades, this vehicle was a gentle shift toward the current popular and award-winning luxury cars that Cadillac is now making
Nice try…but the only thing the Seville led to with its vinyl-roof and fake wire-wheels was the depths of design in America, all the Broughams with their ticky-tacky Seville design cues. If you think the Seville led the way to the Euro-inspired 1992 Seville, or the CTS and such, you presumably keep your fridge well stocked with GM-flavored Kool Aide.
7. As for Niedermeyer, the car magazine journalist wannabe who will never be, stick to trolling the Internet with your inaccuracies and opinions.
Except for when I was a kid, I have never aspired to be a magazine writer. I enjoy the freedom of having my own web site, where I can spew my inaccuracies and opinions and still have several hundred thousand visitors a month come and read them. Thanks for being one of them; I’m honored you came and spent so much time and energy here. Would you care to make a donation too?
No, Phil’s right. You’re as imbalanced as any cheaply made BMW after hitting a pothole at 30mph.
The 75-79 Cadillac Seville was more durable than any Mercedes or BMW made in the past twenty years. Since the “beancounters” at Mercedes released the “disposable Mercedes” breadwagon designs in 1992, no Mercedes can hold a candle to the reliability, serviceability and durability of a mid-seventies Cadillac.
The 70s BMW 530i’s, Mercedes 500sel’s and Jaguars the Seville was competing with are all rusting in junk yards or long since crushed. No one wants them or could ever waste money to restore them. Like all Mercedes and BMW their prestige lasts for a year or two and then the cars were thrown away, because the ugly styling aged like a Danish hooker in the red light district.
The suckers who bought them new were the disaffected, ne’r-do-wells to whom their anti-social streaks first appeared in their desire to buy anything foreign just to be different and make their parents wonder what shrooms they had been taking. “A BMW with a rubber interior will show my parents I hate them!”
The bought off parasites at Consumer Guide, Car & Driver, Motor Trend and Road & Track would heap praise over anything unAmerican for decades – and all the cars they praised are now dust while the full size American cars they heaped scorn upon are still daily drivers in many cities all over the US.
The corrupt, proletariat world of today with it’s endless sea of grey, white and black clone crossovers is the result of decades of mindless parasites who embraced the propaganda and whose inferiority complexes could only be satiated by buying something that the propagandists told them was “rebelling” against convention.
Now they’re all driving the equivalent of a prison suit.
PT Barnum was Nostradamus. A fool is born every second.
Remarkable! Your supply of the long-discontinued GM Kool-Aid is obviously still not depleted. You must have salted away a lifetime supply.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that the chemical preservatives in it have negative effects on cognitive function. Maybe you should ease up on your intake.
You’re right,
Of all of GM’s 70’s disasters the Seville was definitely not one of them, it was a very nice machine.
Hello, Phil? – I think Dan Fielding has a few more errands for you.
Here are two more opinions…the Seville was an unadulterated piece of s**t, and after having read your entire piece – an unabashed apologia for 1970s American-car wretchedness – my second opinion is that you are full of s**t. (Sorry! – but true.) A 1965 Rambler Ambassador was more solidly built, lasted longer and had at least the same degree of interior space usage as this Seville. Actually – having owned two, I daresay the Rambler was more sensible and a better alternative to the Mercedes than this monstrosity. The Ambassador was four inches SHORTER in overall length, with a longer wheelbase and more front and rear legroom; a larger trunk; and would produce an honest 20mpg with its old Nash 287 or 327 V8 options. This is just scratching the surface. Cadillac and GM managed to scrape through the bottom of the barrel with this Seville.
Have a great day, if you can see it through those rose-colored glasses.
The one thing I can say about the Seville – compared to the Malibu, at least the back windows rolled down – and that’s a major step forward. Now, why didn’t GM do that to all those mid-sizers in the first place?
I’ve been scratching my head over that for 30 years. Fortunately, GM eventually got over it.
BTW, the blue Nova shown above was like our wedding “limo”, only in silver, driven by my best man…yes, it was tight in the back seat, to say the least.
I believe the rational for using filp-out vent windows, rather than roll-downs was that it enabled GM to offer mid-sized, 3-abreast shoulder room in what was, by its external dimensions, a compact car. Chrysler tried the same with the early K cars, but added roll-downs when buyers complained. I could actually see some vent window designs providing better ventilation with less turbulence than roll-downs would but I never lived with a late-1970s A-body car long enough to know how well those vent windows worked; the roll-down windows often don’t roll down all the way anyway (for both safety and packaging reasons) , so the vent window design was not as much of a loss as one might think. The A-bodies, despite generous elbow room, were not comfortable with 3 in the back; the wheel and differential bulges left well-defined indentations for 2 passengers, leaving the 3rd one perched precariously and the 2 outboard passengers slightly twisted, as is often the case in RWD cars with solid axles.
One thing I like about my 4dr Mavericks. The rear windows roll all the way down.
Even relatively-long wheelbase GM RWDs have uncomfortably-curved rear seat backs toward the rear doors. Big RWD FoMoCos do not, despite similar wheelbases, or even slightly shorter. Further, GMs seats in the 80s and 90s were never as good as big Fords. Sure, GM transmissions shift smoother and maybe last longer…. but GM could have made their RWD cars so much better.. with not much effort. Laziness, I say.
I think that philosophy of this ‘blog’ needs to be re-thought. IMO, it makes little sense to compare vehicles when they were new. We’re well into the 21st century now: I say that this blog’s philosophy should be comparing such nice older cars.. to similar vintage cars… that are still around, if one searches hard enough. Also, choice of older cars today should weigh reliability higher and design & looks lower.
Plainly, the choices for relatively-large RWD American cars are less now than 25 years ago. Big, pre-’79 Chryslers are rather scarce now, for example, than 25 years ago. Thus such “candidates” for “buying alternatives” are more limited now. In other words, perceived advantages of nice old AMCs or RWD Mopars have become “theoretical”, more or less, here in 2017.
I find little alternative to 80s Town Cars for daily drivers.. other than a Cad
Fltwd Brghm, if you’re like me and want some good Detroit steel around you. Sure, it’s no guarantee.. and may not help in certain situations…. but they
surely “improve your odds” of survival. My daughter hit a pole in an old
Merc Gr. Marq.: something less might have cost her a leg. Thus, IMHO, that Merc was the best investment that I ever made.
I, like others, do not understand Paul’s negativity toward the ’76 – ’79 Seville. I have no experience with one, and thus cannot comment upon their relative reliability. But surely they have style.. that is all the more rare these days. There’s two nice ones near me for sale right now, and reasonably priced. But I can buy an ’80s TC for less money, with known reliability.
By buying them cheap, I can afford to insure them myself [not liability, of course], in a worse-case scenario. If I’m only “into” a car for a low amount,
I can’t lose more than that amount, right? Well, maybe a nebulous “life expectancy” for the vehicle if not ‘hit’ or stolen…. but no insurance company will pay you anything for ‘that’. I “buy ’em by the pound”, and never lose.
The reason why the two outboard passengers were “slightly twisted” is GM’s penchant for trying to achieve sufficient rear leg room without sufficient wheelbase.. to accommodate good seat ergonomics. Look at a RWD Cadillac upper rear seat contours versus a similar-vintage Lincoln. The Lincoln’s upper seat back is straight…. not overly-curved like the Cadillac Broughams. FoMoCo made superior seats in their large cars.. compared to the big GMs, which are just sponge rubber over two aluminum shells. Ford actually built seats with genuine, strong metal frames… with excellent cushioning that was shaped properly.
My wife was disappointed that I didn’t used my ’62 Lincoln for our daughter’s wedding. But the short wheelbase, 123″, simply made it inadvisable.
Maynard:
You consider a 123″ Wheelbase “short”???
Even by 1960s-70s standards any WB 120″ or longer was considered full-size, compared to the post-2000s, where 110″ – in a sedan anyway – is considered “large”.
Great photos showing the marked difference in the interiors!
It inspired me to Google images of a Diplomat B interior, just to see what could have been. Interestingly, the dash has a definite ’70s GM look, but the seats and door panels are undeniably Teutonic. But somehow, it all works.
I’m ready to bash GM frequently as needed (and probably won’t ever own a GM vehicle again,) but I couldn’t disagree more with naming the Seville as a deadly sin. I think that this car was one of the most successful examples of platform sharing ever.
I think you’re right. GM is certainly deserving of brickbats at nearly every turn, but the company hit their intended market quite accurately with the first-gen Seville.
It’s just that the market wasn’t very bright.
I disagree. I think the basic disconnect was that while the Seville was quite successful, it was not successful for the reasons Cadillac apparently assumed it was. As a smaller, more profitable Cadillac, the Seville worked pretty well, but I think GM actually thought it would appeal to Mercedes buyers, of which I see very little evidence.
I stopped reading after you called it an over priced Nova, if you would have bothered to check, you would see that the Seville ends sharing very little with the Nova other than a few internal structures, the Seville is longer, it uses a unique to the Seville fuel injected Olds 350, a Turbo 400, all the interior fittings are Cadillac grade, the Seville was so changed from it’s X-body brothers that it got its own internal K-body designation unique to the Seville only.
They experimented with the Diplomat, but it was not suited to Cadillac buyers, it has inadequate a/c, not enough room, not quiet enought, and it was just about as old as a platform as the X-car one, the fact that Cadillac sold more Sevilles every year that it was out until 1979, when it was a 4 year old design shows that it was hit, and not deserving of deadly sin status.
If I wasn’t so focused on the back doors, I would have said that I felt the Seville was a very nicely proportioned vehicle. Yes, it took squareness to the extreme, but it worked.
I agree completely that this was a GM hit all the way, but then again, I liked the bustle-back, too, which came later!
I always looked at these with admiration. Also, I miss formal roof lines…
GM was the master of the formal roofline! Ford and Chrysler made numerous attempts to imitate it (the Dodge Diplomat deserves special mention here), but usually ended up with clown cars. It was when GM tried to offer something a little different that things went awry. I like the 1980 Seville, but it got more than its share of hatred. And, I don’t see how anyone could like the ’78-’79 (two years says it all) Cutlass or Century coups and sedans, or, of course, the Aztek.
Good point. I can also add then if Ford had put more design differences between the Granada and the Lincoln Versailles right from the start, things could had been different and the Versailles could had been a more bigger foe to the Seville.
I agree with CARMINE and this article. How? If Cadillac would of taken the successful elements (shorter wheel base and the use of pioneer technology), and continued to perfect a smaller Cadillac back in the late 70’s and into the 80’s, they would of come up with a great product like the current CTS much sooner. The ’79 Seville was a HUGE step in the right direction; but was followed up with larger and garish (notch-back) 80’s model??? Why????
I remember seeing one for the first time and thinking how beautiful it was. The upright angle of the rear window was one of my favourite features. Cadillac also offered a two-tone silver/black paint scheme that was incredible.
Obviously GM thought the same thing regarding the rear window as they applied the design to so many other vehicles soon afterward which made this generation of Seville less unique than when it first hit the market.
As per the link below, the design of the first generation Seville could have been so much different than what we saw….
http://www.cadillacforums.com/cadillac-performance/seville/sev-maina.html
I don’t remember , did the Caddy crab-walked or dog-tracked like the Nova?
For some reason those wheels on the Caddy look huge. Almost like truck tires. Maybe it is the lack of hubcaps.
While the MB was a better car it wasn’t perfect. I noticed a lot of them back then had doors a slightly different shade than the body. The example in the photo looks like one of them where the drivers door is a bit lighter than the everything else.
Most 70s GM leaf sprung cars liked to dog track including these. The few I’ve worked on usually had a sheared locating pin for one of the springs.
X cars also liked to drop the rear of their front sub frame after the tin worms found the weak spots.
I remember following a Nova back to its owner’s driveway (the only time I ever did that), just to ask him why it was going down the road at a 15 degree angle. I was just curious about how serious that kind of problem really was. Needless to say, I had never owned a car with leaf springs.
This is no DS. If the rationale is that it’s a tarted up Nova, then the downsized 77 C bodies are nothing more than tarted up Cutlasses, right?
So what if it shared underpinnings with Novas and Camaros, that’s just a testament to how good that general platform was for its day. And, it was wrapped around some of the best looking sheet metal to come out of Detroit in my lifetime.
It was the right car for the times. Yeah, looking back on it the interior looks a little chintzy now, but that’s how it was then. And yeah, they did charge an awful lot for these things, but that helped create ths car’s mystique. That’s no different than today where GM sells tarted up Silverados with camper shells and aniline leather seats as Escalades for 3x the cost…
But lemme ask you this: how many other mid 70s cars can you name that still look this fresh with perfect proportions today? 450SL? 320i? Seville. This car was a huge trend setter, that’s why it’s look was grafted on to every GM sedan produced in the 1980s.
Look at the wheels, pushed out to the far corners and the minimal front overhang. That’s gorgeous.
This was no deadly sin, that’s for sure.
If the rationale is that it’s a tarted up Nova, then the downsized 77 C bodies are nothing more than tarted up Cutlasses, right?
Did those downsized C Bodies cost four times as much as the Cutlasses?
So this one is a DS because they were able to successfully sell a Cadillac with a high markup? Cadillacs are supposed to cost more than plebian GM offerings. I think the cost argument is a nonstarter.
What I got from this article was that they made a rather compromised vehicle, partly because of the donor platform chosen, and it’s success told GM that Cadillac buyers would accept more of the same…. which eventually led to someone green-lighting the Cimarron.
aside: The spell-checker wants to turn the word Cimarron into “Macaroni”. I thought that was funny enough to share. 🙂
You’re on the right track. Obviously, the gen1 Seville was “successful” in meeting Cadillac’s immediate goals. But you can only fool so many people so many times with leaf-sprung solid axle tarted up Novas to compete against the best car in the world at the time.
Cadillac sales started their deadly decline at about this time, as did GM’s. Mercedes (and BMW) were just starting to really take off at this time. Does anyone (except me) see the (deadly) connection?
It’s not about whether the Seville looked nice to you; it’s what was happening to the company, and where it was going. Deadly Sins can be attractive, on the surface, at least. As are candy and Big Gulps. Just be prepared for the longer-term consequences.
There’s no question that Mercedes and BMW were really gaining steam around then, especially Mercedes. I think BMW was still more of a niche player, catering to real enthusiasts (even then, these and other European cars, like Peugeots and Saabs, really appealed to me).
But I just can’t see it even being possible for Cadillac to have done anything more dramatic with the Seville than they already did. It was smaller and looked very different, but it still looked and drove like a Cadillac. I think the much bigger sin was GM not going further with the second generation Seville. THAT should have been the model that was more directly competitive with what Mercedes offered, in terms of engineering, driving feel, etc. Instead, it was more American looking and feeling than ever. The first gen was a good first step, flawed as it might have been.
The first step is always the most important one.
If you think having a leaf-sprung solid rear axle is the first step in competing with Mercedes’ forty years of experience with independent rear suspensions, I can’t agree.
I would agree with you only in the sense that the Seville may have given the bean counters added confidence that they could do this lipstick on a pig thing as much as they wanted to, resulting in FUBARs like Cimarron and the 85-86 downsized luxury cars and coupes.
Who knows, but we all probably believe there’s at least some truth to that, especially with the demise of autonomous divisions. After all, back them GM had a lot of hubris; I’m sure many in the organization felt they could do no wrong. We now know otherwise, of course.
But still, the original Seville, taken in and of itself, was a mighty fine conglomeration of off the shelf parts. It’s an example of badge engineering done right.
The sin of the Cimarron was that Cadillac had almost 0 flexibility to change anything, if Cadillac would have been given a chance to make significant changes to the J-car like they did to the X-body, maybe the Cimarron wouldn’t have been such a joke, but all they were allowed to do was change the grille, headlights, tailights and add options and trim.
As I said before the Seville isn’t lipstick on a pig, far from it, Cadillac was very concerned about using a “lesser” car to underpin its new baby, so they spent time and money to hide and change all the X-car bits, they created a Seville only line at Cadillacs Clark Street plant in Detroit, so no Sevilles were made in a non-Cadillac plant, as opposed to the Cimarron which was made at GMAD in SouthGate Ca.
Agreed
Why does everyone assume that because its a smaller Cadillac, that it HAS to be some sort of S-class fighter? Cadillac was selling close to if not over 300,000 cars per year in the US at the time, more than Mercedes, BMW and et al combined, meaning that there were still plenty of people that wanted an AMERICAN style luxury car, what the Seville did was put the CADILLAC package in a smaller box, Cadillac never set out to make an S-class out of the Seville, they set out to make a smaller Cadillac.
If they would have wanted to make an S-class, they would have had to make the air conditionng worse and remove the power seats and tilt steering wheel.
What sort of “autobahn barnstormer” was the Seville supposed to be in EPA/55 MPH 1976 America? Believe it or not, inspite of the venom you spewforth about American cars and GM cars in general, people in the 70’s still bought “American Style” cars in massive numbers, to the extent that even the almighty Toyota slapped vinyl tops and big chrome grilles creating pseudo Granadas out of Coronas, or how else do you explain the woody Datsun wagon that graces the top of this page?
From ateupwithmotor’s excellent piece on the Seville: The target for the smaller Cadillac was Mercedes’ new W116 S-Class, sold in America as the 450SE and 450SEL. The W116 was bigger than its immediate predecessors, but it was still relatively small for an American car, roughly the size of a Dodge Dart.
I’d recommend reading the whole thing, as it’s well researched, but here’s his opening paragraph: The 1976 Cadillac Seville was Detroit’s first serious response to the growing popularity of luxury imports like Mercedes. Although it was an immediate hit, earning a handsome profit and inspiring numerous imitators, the Seville marked the beginning of the end of Cadillac’s credibility as “the standard of the world.” This week, we look at the history of the Seville, and the reasons for Cadillac’s subsequent decline. http://ateupwithmotor.com/luxury-and-personal-luxury-cars/210-cadillac-seville.html
Regarding your line about Americans still buying American-style luxury cars in the seventies: the key word is “still”; just not much longer. And that is the whole issue, right? Why did Americans stop buying Cadillacs? And why did GM go bankrupt?
Are the Cadillac CTS and ATS more like Cadillacs of the seventies, or more like Mercedes and BMWs? Which approach to luxury cars won out in the end? And which approach did Lexus take with their LS400?
When did Merceds outsell Cadillac in the US?
I dont feel like looking it up but, not until like the 90’s at least if not later.
I dont have to look it up, but I am pretty sure that there were no years that Cadillac sales totaled 0, so you can leave the whole, “people stopped buying Cadillacs” statement where you found it.
It was sized against the S-class, yes, but it was a Cadillac, it was pitched as a smaller CADILLAC, just because something is the size of something doesn’t mean that it has to be an exact copy of it, and again, whatever the CTS and ATS have become now, doesn’t have any bearing on what the Seville was when it was released in 1975, you seem to want to bag on Cadillac because it wasnt an ATS in 1975, when that wasn’t the type of car Cadillac was selling at the time to the majority of its customers. There are SUV’s in all luxury car manufacturers line ups today, and they dont seem strange, today, but buyers would have been just as confused by a Porsche suv in 1975 as they would have been by a Cadillac CTS-V in 1975.
I fully realize I’m 7 years late here in chiming in to this conversation but I suspect other Curbside readers are still reading as I am. Perhaps I’m an outlier, but I have a 2006 BMW 330i (6-speed manual) and a 2008 CTS4, both black on black and both lovely. I enjoy them both for exactly what they are: the Bimmer is a hard-nosed German and the Caddy is a Caddy- a bit bigger, a bit softer, and every bit a proper Cadillac. The Caddy handles as well as the Bimmer in most conditions – being AWD often better – drinks regular fuel unlike the BMW but still “feels” like a Cadillac as I understand the proposition. The Bimmer feels like a Bimmer, as it should. I bought them both because I like them both. This is not a binary proposition. I think many of us keep getting wrapped around this axle, and I generally agree with Paul’s conclusions, particularly vis-a-vis the 1992 Seville and the W124 Benz. I was a teenager at the time and desired both cars, and still do. They were both beautifully executed designs, and still are.
Carmine, you also have to look at the demograhics of the customers who buying each type of car.
There were more Cadillac customers than Mercedes customers at that time, but I’d wager that those Mercedes customers were younger, better-educated and wealthier than Cadillac buyers at that time.
In other words, they were more likely to be trendsetters and leaders. Which is exactly the type of customer a luxury brand wants and needs.
Here’s the fundamental problem: Mercedes buyers and Cadillac buyers did not really overlap. They had different demographics. And while the Cadillac demographic was much larger in the mid-seventies, they were already in their mid-50s, on average, which meant that the clock was beginning to tick. The Baby Boomers, particularly affluent, college-educated ones, did not see Cadillac as particularly prestigious or aspirational the way their parents and grandparents did. Chevrolet buyers may have aspired to Cadillacs; Rabbit/Golf and Accord buyers aspired to Mercedes and BMW. Cars like the Seville altered that equation not all. It wasn’t that the Seville was incompetent at what it was, it was that it didn’t succeed at being what it wanted to be, which was a Mercedes-fighter.
“Why does everyone assume that because its a smaller Cadillac, that it HAS to be some sort of S-class fighter?”
Why wouldn’t they? Because that’s exactly what the Cadillac marketing guys tried to sell it as. Every non-fullsize Cadillac since then has been marketed as a match for the Germans and most of them have failed spectacularly.
You’re more than entitled to your opinion and even I don’t fully agree with the Deadly Sin label this time, but this whole act where you throw a fanboy shitfit every time Paul posts something you don’t like has gotten really old.
Then dont read it.
Hachee, I’d agree. The Gen1 was a bold step for Cadillac; at the time I remember thinking it was a new breed and direction. And true, the Gen2 could/should have been the full bridge to Euro-land but alas was a huge step backward.
Paul, I don’t think at the 1973-74 stage Cadillac would ever have been in a position to be so bold as to aim directly for MB….but their followup was a complete misstep. Opportunity squandered.
GM was relying on brand loyalty to sell these cars and it worked. Unfortunately, the Seville always had a very elderly buyer demographic. Few Seville buyers bought another car. This led to the hideous gen 2 Seville, which was trying to repeat the cool factor of the gen 1. Miserable failure.
Actualy first year demographics of Seville buyers indicated that not only were Seville buyers much younger than the average Cadillac buyer, it also indicated that 30% were new to the brand and of those 30%, most said that their 2nd choice if the Seville wouldn’t have been available, would have been a car from a foreign make.
Whatever Cadillac or any reviewers said about it, a $12,500 Seville was never intended as serious competition for a $40,000 450 SL: why should it be? It was a stopgap measure to keep current Cadillac buyers from saying “Maybe, with gas at $.60 (up from $.35 a few years earlier) and my garage too small for that Sedan Deville with its 5 MPH bumpers anyway, I should take a look at some of those snooty little foreign jobs.” And probably some of the 100,000 or 200,000 buyers would have ended up with one of those “foreign jobs” if the Seville hadn’t been there. It was 4 times the price of the cheapest Nova, but if a Nova could have been bough with the same equipment, the gap would have been much smaller, with the styling and NVH differences explaining the rest. With the introduction of the downsized C-bodies for 1977, much of the Seville’s raison d’être had disappeared, but it still hung on as an oddity for people who just had to have the $2,600 “Eleganti” package (with REAL wire wheels!!). I’d say the car did a fine job as a place holder, something to keep the masses happy until better things arrived. The real problem is that they didn’t. The whole lineup was lacking in any acceptable engine choices by 1982 and the miniaturized 1985 Sevile (with that cringeworthy pile of rectangles for a dashboard) seemed almost designed to disappoint. GM made many huge mistakes during those years, but I wouldn’t count the 1976 Seville as one of them.
PCL: You’re obviously missing the boat. The Seville was designed to compete with the SE, not the SL. Anyway, in 1975, the 450SL was priced at $17, 653, which is actually less than what the 450SE was priced at ($18,333).
If you’re going to be taken seriously, get your number at least close to right.
Exactly as I see it to. Thanks for the article Paul. (I’m a bit late to the party).
Paul: Sorry, the $40,000 figure was way off; maybe I had accidentally stumbled upon the price of a 6.9. But the base price of the SE was up to $20,689 for the 1976 model year (probably somewhere between in the spring of ’75 when the Seville arrived at $12,479), there was still a significant price gap. Moreover, everything GM did to avoid alienating its Cadillac customers implies to me that they were not serious about targeting the SE; I suspect such talk was to make the buyers they were really targeting feel a little more hip than they were. Some of the Mercedes write-ups I’ve read from that era implied that the interiors of those cars would have struck the typical Caddy buyer as too austere. I’d still call the Seville a placeholder and a styling statement intended to grease skids for the acceptance of the downsized models that were on the way, and with some strong and some mediocre points, it still succeeded at both those roles.
Paul,. The emphasis SHOULD be on how these old cars TODAY versus alternative choices TODAY. It does not matter if Sevilles were multiple-tmes more expensive THEN. That’s only ancient history, relatively-speaking.
Your stated focus, Paul, is cars you find on the street NOW. Thus, the focus should be on a given older-model car.. VERSUS alternative older-model cars now, which includes current price ranges—-wbich often do not correspond to VALUE now. Anything Chevrolet is over-valued today VERSUS similar models, for example. What any car company did BACK THEN…. is pointless NOW.
Allow me to interject.
This website is not Classic Car Buyer’s Guide. It is Curbside Classic. If you take a look around, you’ll see the vast majority of our articles are historical pieces. Most of these articles cover the creation, marketing and reception of these vehicles on the marketplace.
One of our contributors could do a piece on buying a classic car and maintaining it and we have had similar content before. We are a big tent operation with a broad scope (hell, we have articles on boats and planes). But we are not changing the purpose of our website. You say the original production run of the Seville is ancient history? Well, we cover ancient automotive history here. At the end of the day, if you love a ’75 Seville, you aren’t going to avoid buying one because somebody here wrote an article outlining its flaws.
I’ve always had a soft spot for these, and not just because my parents briefly owned a 1976 model.
Compared to the Nova and the later A-bodies, it has a more muscular stance, longer hood, shorter front overhang and squarer, broader shoulders. These and the first-generation FWD big Buicks are the most successful downsized/sheer look GM designs by far. Distinctly American and nicely proportioned, both designs still hold up well today, I think, especially compared to today’s too-tall cars, with their high beltlines and tiny greenhouses.
Instead of a comparison to the profile of a ’78 A-body, let’s see a comparison to, say, a ’12 Chrysler 300 (http://www.insideline.com/chrysler/300/2012/photos/2012_chrysler_300_prf_ns_90111.html). The Seville makes the Chrysler look laughably cartoonish.
How i love american cars from the 1970s, i think the gen 1 and even the bustle back sevile were beautiful, it was just a shame that a proper engine could not be produced for these cars by GM, or I beleive they would be stars in car heaven today. I as someone in their early 20s in the 1980s i was lucky enough to purchase my dream car since i was a youth, it was a 1979 Lincoln Versailles, triple turquoise, every option and according to the sticker was around 14000 bucks when new, it even had the optional wheels, no hubcaps here, i was able to get a good deal on it because the brakes didnt work, everything else did though, i had my first job and was in college and i was mechanic taught by my father , we diagnosed and i bought a very expensive brake booster 500 dollars at the time and i had my dream car, make fun all you want but everyone who saw this car the entire 3 yrs I owned and drove it daily even on long trips no problems, either love it or wanted to buy it. and eventually i gave in because i wanted a brand new mustang and was paid a lot of money for it so i had a huge down payment and a new mustang, but i have to say i wish i would have kept and miss it to this day. Be a hater all you want but my Versailles was a lot more than just a tarted up Granada, i know because my first car was a 1976 Granada Ghia which i loved but there was no doubt these were to vastly different cars. some people can be such car snobs. my advice is ask the man who owns one…
I do like the 79 Versailles. That reworking of the roof made a difference. It’s the only year I’d consider.
I completely disagree on this whole issue.
Park a C body DeVille next to a B body Chevy and its the same thing. Even in 1959.
Park an Audi next to a same platform VW, or a Lexus next to Toyota, same thing.
The first Seville was a good attempt to change from ‘bigger is better’. Don’t like it? I dont care.
I thought the Nova was just about the perfect car for the U.S. Had one that was a 68 with the 230-6 and three speed. Even when I was trading it in for that truck I knew I was making a mistake. Should have bought a trailer.
Using it more was not a mistake in my books. If the Seville was a tarted up Nova or not isn’t that important. The fine folks that now bring you Escalade have a habit of overpricing for the name plate. I think one had to be a genuine idiot to pay that when the Nova was available.
Where I think they made the mistake for those cars was underdevelopment. They stopped the station wagon (last year 67 IIRC) and never developed the hatch beyond a couple years. Both were great functional cars that were cheap and lasted. Would also have liked to see an El Camino or Sedan Delivery based on that chassis. Since 1981 I have been obsessed with function and earning a living.
Besides the Nova that I owned I had the fun of driving a buick/olds (forget which) Nova clone that belonged to my Nephew across the country. That had the 231 and three speed. It drove even better than my 68 did and I fell in love. He wouldn’t sell. That engine could have also been done by Chevy and I think with a TH350 would have been a winner.
Losing was going to fwd for that size for a good section of the car buying public. A real adventure is driving a loaded fwd on wet pavement. So far as I can recall, however, the General al never asked me and I started a long history of Datsun/Nissan pickups for work.
I am on record as being no friend of GM in the 1970s, but I think that this car was perhaps the best executed example of platform sharing that the General ever did.
I agree with many that the styling was quite good. In fact, this car sort of set the trend for the entire 1980s. The fact that it sold for 4x the cost of a Nova, well shouldn’t a proper Cadillac sell for 4x (at least) the price of a Chevy?
My biggest gripe with the car is the engine. While I don’t think that the 472 or 500 should have been under the hood (although what a hoot to drive, I’ll bet) a smaller Cadillac-only V8 should have been part of the bargain at that price. Too bad the 425 or 368 was still a few years away. I will agree with Carmine that the interior was Cadillac grade, but by 1975 “Cadillac Grade” wasn’t what it used to be (or should have been). Cadillac power and an interior of 1960s Cadillac quality would have made this car almost perfection in 1975. Oh yes, and ditch the leaf springs.
To me, the problem was that while this car was a good start down the direction that Cadillac should have been headed, GM was not able to keep the cars (all Cadillacs, in fact) exclusive enough to keep prices up and volumes down in a way that would have made the cars genuine luxury cars and status symbols. This may have been the most thorough job of a downsized luxury car coming out of Detroit, perhaps to the present day. Certainly nothing from Lincoln or Chrysler ever matched it. But I think that there is room for some conception of luxury other than the German one. GM should have paid the gas guzzler tax and provided a proper high end car once CAFE took hold (unless to do so would put all of GM in a penalty, in which case my opinion of CAFE as worse than useless is only buttressed.).
So, while I am not sure I am all the way on board with your position, you have argued it it superbly.
^This. The Seville was actually pretty nice with the Nova lineage disguised very well. Honestly, for a long time, I thought the Seville was based not on the Nova but the radical (for GM) just-introduced, downsized 1977 Caprice.
And therin lies the problem. The boys at GM/Cadillac (undoubtedly with the ultimate bean-counter Roger Smith’s enthusiastic approval) figured, “Hey, we got away with redoing the Nova as a Cadillac, we can make even more money making a Cadillac out of a Cavalier!”.
Unfortunately, unlike the Seville, the penny-pinching on the Cimmaron went way overboard as it was all too obvious from what car the Cimmaron was derived. I don’t know if the Cimmaron shared many body panels with the Cavalier, but it sure looks like the only thing changed from the Cavalier is the grille and tailights. The Seville, OTOH, obviously shares almost no body panels with the Nova (maybe the front doors).
That’s why the Seville merits being listed as a GM deadly sin: its success gave rise to the Cimmaron.
That’s what I was just thinking and was about to post.
I still rib my friend, the Cadillac fanatic by reminding him of the Cimarron. I often link to articles on several car blogs just to get his goat. It’s fun!
I seem to recall reading about the first drive of the Cimmaron in Motor Trend and the Chief Engineer for the car was interviewed for the article. The thing that stood out was the Engineer touting the special tires and wheels made especially for the Cimmaron. Not sure if they were metric wheels and tires like the Ford Mustang and it’s TRX rims on Michelin radials in the model years 79-82; I thought that this particular selling point was on odd choice to make, being a Cadillac. But then again, it wasn’t a Cadillac, was it? Just a con job headed by the biggest con man of all, Roger Smith.
I say the Roger Smith years contributed to the recent GM bankruptcy as they hadn’t recovered from the shenanigans him and his board perpetrated on a once Great American Company.
Agreed. Roger Smith’s era had far more to do to GM’s dwindling market share than any 1976-79 Seville. The 1980 version and the std 5.7 diesel was just the start.
A sidenote on the Cimarron: I had a 1984 Olds Firenza when I was in high school in 1995-6 or so. It was, of course just another J-car but at least this particular one was highly optioned, with the OHC 1.8, 5-speed manual, rally gauges and wheels, air conditioning, even a factory sunroof. Anyway, I always found it bizarre – and telling – that the Olds Firenza and Buick Skyhawk had their own (nicer) dashboards while the Cimarron had the same one as the Cavalier and the Pontiac Sunbird. Cynical indeed, and likely on purpose. 🤔
The 472, 500, 425 and 368 all shared the same block. Interestingly, Cadillac engineers designed this engine to handle displacements up to 600CI!
Unknown if it was a clearance thing or just the sheer weight of the big block that they decided to go with the modified Olds 350.
I don’t have dimensions for the 472/500 Cadillac engine, but since the Nova could and did accommodate the Chevy 396/454, they probably could have squeezed the Cadillac engine into the Seville, although not necessarily with the best results for handling, ride or (most particularly) fuel economy.
I looked it up out of curiosity and it appears the Cadillac 472/500 was about the same height and width as a 396/402/454, and about the same weight, but a bit longer, by maybe 2 or 2.5 inches. It was more than 100 lb heavier than the Olds 350, though.
I agree with Paul here…this car is a Deadly Sin for GM.
The Seville, in many ways, is a very nice car. The styling has held up well, and the size was welcome breath of fresh air in the mid-1970s. Park a 1975-79 Seville next to a 1971-76 “standard” Cadillac or Eldorado, and the Seville stands out with its nice proportions and lack of “bloat.”
The problems start when we realize what Cadillac was trying to do with this car – meet Mercedes head-on and steal back some of those customers who had been seduced by the three-pointed star. Like it or not, a tarted-up Nova, not matter how extensively disguised, is not going to get people out of a 240D, let alone an S-Class.
Remember, Cadillac has billed itself as the “Standard of the World” for decades. And in the 1970s, even after the first fuel crunch, it was still the best-selling luxury car in the country.
An extensively revised Nova, with more sound-deadening material and different styling, is NOT the Standard of the World. It is, at best, a somewhat cynical attempt by the beancounters to compete on the “cheap” with a rising star that was at the top of its game. Yes, it sold well, but the entire division was coasting on its laurels by the early 1970s, and the Seville is further proof of that. In the long run, no matter how many units it sold, the Seville did nothing to stop the growth of Mercedes or really restore Cadillac’s luster.
If this had been sold as the “Oldsmobile Holiday” or “Buick Super” for thousands less, it would not be worthy of Deadly Sin status.
“Like it or not, a tarted-up Nova, not matter how extensively disguised, is not going to get people out of a 240D, let alone an S-Class”
I think at the time, there were really different kinds of buyers. IIRC, the 240D was priced closer to the Seville, and an S Class was really quite a bit higher. Those who bought a 240D did so because they really wanted that car – it was not really a competitor to the Seville, being much less “luxurious”, These people did not want a Seville, no matter what. Those who wanted sharp styling and frills bought the Seville. I do think, however, that Cadillac at this time began losing plenty of customers to the S-Class – those who wanted the next step up, which Cadillac didn’t offer.
Rationalizing that these people didn’t want a Cadillac (or Chevrolet, or Oldsmobile), no matter what, is how GM first lost a substantial portion of the market at the top and bottom, and finally in the middle, which ultimately led to its bankruptcy.
These customers didn’t want the Cadillacs that GM was making at the time. Yes, a few wanted something “different” (meaning, something foreign), but I believe that, if GM had really made a serious effort and offered a Cadillac with the build quality and performance of the Mercedes, more than a few buyers would have stuck with the division.
The Seville was targeted specifically at the S-Class.
There were two kinds of buyers for the 240D: the hard-core Mercedes diesel freaks, often engineers. And there were those who bought it because it was the cheapest way to get a (genuine) MB star on the hood. If you lived on the West Coast in the seventies, you’d know what I mean.
Those 240s had their own problems that kept many people away, namely loud, smoky engines, high cost, a firm ride, and man these things were….sssssllllllloooooooooowwwwwwwwwww.
That Has got To be true. Eventually the able folks who paid 4x what others did for a gussied up Nova, resented GM for fooling them, Thats what I believe makes it clearly a GM deadly sin.
Those People Got a second sucker punch when The Deville turned out to be a Caprice.
If a Deville is Caprice then the Town Car is a Crown Vic and a Lexus ES is a Camry. Everybody shares platforms
It matters not that the Seville didn’t put a dent in sales of Benz or BMW then. What matters NOW.. is whether a nice first-generation Seville is a good choice in 2017 for someone that wants a stylish, older, RWD four-door car. I say, “Yes!”, especially not looking like an ’80s Town Car or Chrysler Fifth Avenue. Today’s price ranges are all reasonable for any of these, or similar. Hence, Seville is fine value.
I’d love a used Seville, too. But its failure to put a dent in German luxury car sales does matter when writing from a historical perspective, and it does matter when we are talking about the trajectory of the Cadillac brand.
Count me in with those who just don’t see this as a GM deadly sin. There were a lot of those, but I don’t think this is one of them. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but I think it was a good effort, especially at the time.
I remember when these came out – I was around 11 – and I remember them being so completely different looking than any other Caddy, that it was just hard to fathom. But I liked the looks, and the size was right. Sized like a big Mercedes, but still very American looking, and certainly more subtle than contemporary Cadillacs, although the upright window was a bit shocking.
I never knew of the Nova connection until reading about it sometime in the last few years, but even if there were a lot of common parts, they fooled me. My parents bought a new Seville in 1979, after a 77 Deville, and I drove it when necessary after I got my license a few years later. I remember it being very quiet and smooth, pretty solid, and the seats were plush, but even then, I thought the dashboard was dull and ordinary, and certainly no match for a Mercedes. (Look at that Mercedes dash above, and I’d say with a few tweaks, it could pass for contemporary today.) My friend’s parents had a 77 or 78 Nova, and while I never drove it, I was a passenger, and it was as plain as can be (although this memory is a bit hazy).
I think it still looks good, with its good proportions, clean lines, simple details. There was a custom convertible conversion of this car, called the San Remo, which really looked fantastic, and still does today.
Perhaps it would help to separate out the car itself, from the influence it had upon GM decision making, product development and marketing. I have never driven a Seville of this (or any) vintage, but my family did have a Nova hatchback from that period. Even with the 250 six and automatic, it was a very nice car to operate-all it really needed was a much better interior (Those plaid seats! The quality of the plastics! The horror! The horror!) and more back seat room. Addressing that, and making it smoother and quieter would likely have made a very nice “wife’s” Cadillac. And it surely was an attractive car for the time, even now. But to put it up against the engineering and manufacturing excellence of the Mercedes of the time, to sell it at four times the price of its the basic design, and to then rely upon the success of this approach to justify continuing the practice for decades, in a way that significantly contributed to the death of the company, that is truly a sin.
But I’d love to drive one. It still looks like it’s moving, quickly and without seeming effort, even when standing still.
Well said.
+2
The Deadly Sin status is not so much about the car, (which I have always liked, at least the 76-79’s), as its is about the decision making of GM and Ford or Chrysler for that matter.
GM/Cadillac could have used a revised IRS from the Corvette and the engine for that matter, coupled with the FI. They also could have improved the NVH without adding 1000 lbs to the car, but the bean counters would not have it.
Rather than investing in superior engineering to remain the “Standard of the World” and having that “engineering excellence” trickle down into the lower priced brands, lifting the quality of all, they chose to dilute the prestige of their standard bearer by cutting costs and having that “accounting excellence” infect their entire company.
I was very fond of this Seville. I had several, one of which I made into a real hot rod.
The extra wheelbase didn’t add to rear seat room. It went entirely to making the hood longer. Lay the Nova subframe next to the Seville subframe and you will see what I mean. Don’t ask me how I know this, it’s a sad story.
Like others, I really admired the Seville styling. The deadly sin associated with this car is that GM made all theri other, cheaper cars look just like it. So did Chrysler and Ford. The Seville was a real style leader.
There were real differences under the skin witrh the Nova. While they both had leaf springs, the attachment, shackle and sway bar arrangements were completely diffferent. Mostly done to reduce noise, I think.
The right engine for a Seville is, or would have been, a stroked Chevy, say a 383. Putting a 472 in this chassis requires changing much of the steering system. A Chevy big block would add weight to an already heavy car. An Olds 455 is an easy swap, and adds only about 40 pounds
The Firebird front sway bar and front control arm bushings, a custrom rear sway bar and urethane shackle bushings, and some urethane subframe mounts will do wonders for the handling of this heavy car. Add wider steel wheels, able to accommodate the wire wheel hubcaps, and a quick ratio Firebird steering gearbox, and you have quite a nice driving car.
That’s the way GM should have sold these cars if they wanted to compete with Mercedes.
Bob
Bob, we’ve gone over this before. Your memory is playing tricks on you. The Seville got a three-inch extension in the rear of the passenger car because the rear leg room in the Nova was so miserable. It simply wouldn’t have been acceptable. That’s not to say the Seville had generous legroom in the back, but it was acceptable.
This is not opinion, but fact, that others have corroborated. The subframes may have been different, but the wheelbase length was all in the rear. Sorry.
To support what Paul is saying, the Seville had to have new rear doors, not shared with the four-door Nova, to account for the wheelbase stretch — not something that would have been necessary if the extra length were ahead of the cowl.
That’s one of the odd things about the Nova; it had a very generous wheelbase for a compact car, longer than the Maverick or Dart, but much of the extra distance was ahead of the firewall. When my parents looked at cars in 1975, the only reason they bought a Malibu was because I didn’t fit in the Nova. I had no problem getting into the back of their 1981 Citation, but the much bigger Nova had less kneeroom. I’ll take a wild guess that the reason for this layout was so that it could accommodate a 454 without the dreaded nose-heavy handling that plagued some 1970s cars. Or maybe it was to get a smoother ride from a car with such a primitive suspension.
The answer is quite simple: the Nova shared its platform with the Camaro, hence its very long and sport nose. The Nova had a couple more inches added ti the rear, but not enough to properly compensate. The Nova is essentially a four-door Camaro, which was great for its handling, not so good for its rear seat leg room.
According to CR measurements, the 4dr Maverick had a inch more rear seat leg room than the Nova even with a 1.1 inch shorter wheelbase. But the Maverick of course had a smaller trunk and less front seat leg room.
Bob…. Your “prescription” to modify a first-generation Seville is very close to what GM did in my ’89 Caprice, equipped with the option F41 sport suspension. It handles great, the gas mileage is fantastic. Ideally it would have a 327 or 350; but with fuel injection, it performs well.
The 1976 Seville was successful in its time but, unfortunately for Cadillac, the 77 Caprice was a better car. If you’re looking for a deadly sin, try the 77 Lincoln Versailles.
The original names of Nova and her variants at Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Buick & Cadillac were a game of initialism: (Though Ventura was released in 1971 & Omega in 73)
Nova
Omega
Ventura
Apollo
Seville
even their names spelled NOVAS
Though the Apollo became Skylark (in coupe form for ’76 and sedan in ’77) the Ventura was renamed Pheonix in 1978.
My favorite ‘improvement’ the GM engineers made on ’75-80 Seville to ‘up-market’ the Nova was added leather strips in between the leaf springs to quiet the ride.
Leather strips to quiet leaf springs, that’s high-tech. For 1875.
Cadillac once called itself “The Standard of the World”. That claim was justified from 1908 until about 1960. First electric starter, ignition and lights. Leaders in mass production of modern V8s, automatic transmissions, power steering, brakes, seats, built-in air conditioning. First car using Phillips screws even. Tenth at LeMans in 1950 with a stock car.
By 1970 Mercedes and BMW were raising the standard of the world. Cadillac did not follow. GM still built and sold what Americans knew as Cadillacs, but they were no longer superior automobiles.
H.E.I Ignition was ‘high-tech’ for 1975! Leather between the leaf springs was used in high-end horse drawn carriages! It was simply an ‘old trick’ used anew! ;-j
Thought so, looked but didn’t find any evidence of that. I did learn that leaf springs were originally called carriage springs.
Reposting old articles?
As much as we all wish that we did not have day jobs, sometimes they keep us busier than we would like and cut into our CC writing time. Personally, I would rather see an occasional re-run (and they are rare) than have a day with no CC feature at all.
Yes; It’s the only way to bring them home into the archives here. Plus I’m a bit busy. Classic CC.
People don’t like to admit when they’ve been fooled. That’s why we live in the world that we do.
You know I’ve never seen one of these in person, which is odd considering I see at least 2-3 second gen Seville’s a year. I don;t understand why the first gens are so rare, considering they were better built and “engined” than the second gen cars.
I would say it’s an attractive car. The one thing that bothers me is that the rear end doesn’t say Cadillac to me. It looks more like an Oldsmobile rear end.
thunderjet wrote: “The one thing that bothers me is that the rear end doesn’t say Cadillac to me. It looks more like an Oldsmobile rear end.”
The first-gen Seville reminds me of any one of the 1978 or later downsized A-body sedans, but with a trunk that looks like King King stepped on and squashed it! lol
I noticed the first post on the Gen 1 Seville as a “Deadly Sin” around the time I started reading CC. Never got that. The 1976 Seville was and still is a gorgeous car, one of Bill Mitchell’s masterworks and the best representation of his sheer look. It drove great for the time and was a smash hit. The car plowed new ground in that it was, as Cavanaugh points out, the most successful downsize of a luxury car in history.
Significance, looks, performance and success do not equal Deadly Sin in my book. And no the fact that GM did not continue down the same path doesn’t cancel out the importance of the original, that logic just doesn’t make sense.
What surprised me was that the author Paul seemed to get it in his other posts I read that day. He wasn’t a clueless fellow, far from it in fact. Then I noticed the reaction of the readers and subsequent back-pedaling by the author to the point that there is now a “reprint” of the original post with an awkward disclaimer about how Deadly Sin cars themselves are not necessary bad. Now there is mention in the brand new W123 post about how Paul saw the green Seville in the old DS retread… today? Today?
For the record the Seville was not intended to compete with the all-new 1973 S-class. it was designed to compete with the middle Benzes the 280s, 280Es etc. Those were the volume selling MBs at the time with prices close to the Seville. The S-class was another animal entirely.
So what gives here? The only thing I can figure it that Paul really, REALLY hates expensive cars with rear leaf springs. Can’t explain the repost or comments about just seeing the green Seville today. Or why he can’t simply ask for a do-over on the original Seville article and quit with the damage control. All of us are wrong at some point.
What are you trying to say? Now there is mention in the brand new W123 post about how Paul saw the green Seville in the old DS retread… today? Today?
What does that line mean? I said The green Seville in today’s CC is the first I’ve seen on the streets in all these years. That doesn’t mean I saw it today. In the five years I’ve been shooting CCs, the green one was the first and only one I’ve seen driving on the streets, and that was over two years ago. Meanwhile, there’s a gazillion old MBZ W123 and W116s all over the West Coast still being used as daily drivers.
You’re wrong about the S-Class. The Seville was specifically designed to compete against it. Please see my comment further up, a response to Carmine. The W116 S-Class was not all that big; downright compact compared to the big cars of the time. A 1973 450SE was 195″ long, the 450SEL was 201″ long. The Seville is 204″ long.
But sure, the W123 Mercedes also competed against the Seville. Not that Cadillac had anything to compete against it any better, eh?
the seville may have been over-priced but it’s a successful design and i think it was the right direction for cadillac. what if they had continued in this direction and improved the technology over time to the point where it could compete in performance? shouldn’t the seville be a less expensive, less refined but more powerful option to the uptight german sports sedans? problem was that the initial success led the cynical gm brass to the insane conclusion that they could pull the wool over the public’s eyes and eventually came the ultimate cadillac turd: the cimarron.
I get it now the W123 post was a reprint too, sorry I thought it was new. Maybe these older articles, which are fine to recycle (I hadn’t read the W123 post before), should say “classic” or something. I’m still not clear on what Outtake means.
If that’s not the case I have no idea what this comment means in the W123 post… “The green Seville in today’s CC is the first I’ve seen on the streets in all these years”.
I guess if you really believed the marketing hype that the Seville was meant to take on the S-class (did you, really?) it would come off as an underachiever. But believe me the engineers weren’t trying to out do the S-class on a 24 month development cycle starting with the Nova platform. GM nearly made the first Seville off of an Opel platform which they were plenty familiar with and that at most would go head-to-head with the middle Benzes.
Finally buyers do not shop cars based on the OAL measurement. To everyone at the time the Seville was considered a “small” luxury car certainly within the shopping set of the slightly smaller but similarly price 280E et al.
While I believe CTS compete against the 3-series/C-classes of this world I do not think for a minute that the XTS competes against the S-class just because it is the same size. Never forget the price!
You’re still confused: I did just shoot the W123 Outtake about two hours ago this morning. Please re-read it: I just ran out for an errand, and couldn’t resist this pristine daily-driver yellow W123, having Sevilles on the brain this morning.
FWIW, what’s that got to do with the subject matter?
Please read this excellent and heavily-researched article to confirm that the Seville WAS designed to compete with the S-Class: http://ateupwithmotor.com/luxury-and-personal-luxury-cars/210-cadillac-seville.html
Again, if it also competed with the W123 Class, what difference does it make in the big picture? The W123 had all the same advanced engineering features the S-Class did, except for the V8.
Yes are right Safe. What hurt Cadillac more than not continuing in the direction of the original Seville was a series of hastily developed engine choices like the Olds 350 diesel, V864 and HT4100. Plenty of people gave Cadillac a second shot based on their hands-on or perceived impression of the Seville. What let them down were these self destructing engines. No one would ever give a brand like that (or company) another chance. The Northstar is also famous for blowing head gaskets among other things.
Thank God GM went with the tried and true Olds 350 V8 for the first Seville. The only reason there aren’t more of these around is because the Bendix FI was too hard to keep in good repair.
Paul the reason there aren’t more Sevilles on the road is because of the Bendix aka Bosch fuel injection system, not the quality of the rest of the car. The car would have been more successful with less German influence not more. How else can you explain why there are still so many Colonades and B-bodies around? Weren’t these, relative to the Benzes, just as poor quality as the Seville?
And this line from your new W123 post can’t just be confusing to me… “The green Seville in today’s CC is the first I’ve seen on the streets in all these years”. Today’s CC implies it just happened, at least to me.
Noticed you changed the “I’ve” to I’d.” That helps a lot 😉
I can assure you that there are very many more W123s around than Colonnades. And how many Colonnades were sold vs. W123s. The survival rate is greatly stacked in favor of the Benzes.
Same applies to the B-Bodies; How many millions were made in their very long run?
Anyway, if the fuel injection system in the Seville is crap, then that just proves my point further. Why put an unproved FI system in a Mercedes-fighter?? Deadly Sin indeed!
You’re misreading: “today’s CC” implies the post, the article, not the car. Do you think I see a car, shoot it and write an in-depth article all before 4AM, when the daily CC goes up? That would be quite a feat indeed. I’m not into pulling all-nighters anymore.
The reason this re-run post ran today is because I was working outside all day, physically. I started on a new CC last night at 9PM, and at 9:30 I asked myself: “Why?” I’m not getting any younger either! 🙂
Given today’s lively discussion you made the right choice.
I recall looking at the new Seville in 75. I was still a young pup, dreaming of owning a Cadillac. With the exception of the almost identical dash board of the big Caddies, my first impression was a Nova with Cadillac badging. I told a salesman something to that effect. He glared at me, and told me the car was the wave of the future.
I got a writeup on a Calais coupe, I don’t remember the price, but around $ 8,000 (?)no trade. The plaid seats were hideous, in the model I drove. The salesman kinda gave me the bum’s rush. Looking at and test driving new cars was a favorite day off pass time for me then. I can recall test driving Chrysler, Dodges, Plymouths, Buicks, Olds, and Cadillacs, all the big models. Somehow, Lincoln eluded me for a few years.
Around that time, I looked at a gently used 72 Fury III, (or Gran Fury coupe?). With my 68 in trade, $ 2,000 cash would have done the deed. What a beautiful car. A/C, power windows, and high back seats, I’d probably still have it.
Now, when you look at 25K cars, the salesman goe on at length about Bluetooth, USB, docking stations, and other worthless junk. I apologize for the digression.
Really never cared for the Seville.
Some interesting facts about the Gen 1 and Gen 2 Sevilles:
Gen 1: Nova/Camaro platform, leaf-sprung rear axle, size and proportions right on the money with respect to target competitors, praised at the time as big step in right direction for Cadillac. Technical sophistication was less of an issue when you consider that Benz was only one generation out of swing-axle independent rear suspensions, not considered all that great versus well-designed live-axle configurations, and the semi-trailing arms used by Benz, BMW and the Porsche 911 had quirks of their own in terms of lift-throttle oversteer. Modern multi-link setups were still 10 years away. Over here, Trans Ams were considered better-handling cars than independently-sprung Corvettes. Would also like to know the weight differences between a 350 Olds and any Caddy motor, which was the same basic design whether a 368 or a 500.
Gen 2: Latest development of the Toronado front-wheel drive (considered a cutting-edge luxury item at the time), fully independent suspension, latest GM electronic fuel injection on a legit Cadillac engine. Diesel was a disaster, but again considered the wave of the future when introduced and some Gen 1 cars had them as well. But the size, styling, suspension tuning, etc, were considered a collective regression back to Caddy’s old outdated ways despite the cars being very much up to date technically.
If you want to use historical hindsight, the platform to use was the Opel Senator that succeeded the Diplomat. And the Diplomat was powered by a specially manufactured Chevy 327, configured specifically for autobahn use with a block derived from endurance racing engines.
Mercedes were beautifully made and tastefully designed in a time when Caddies were becoming less of both. But they were far from perfect. Caddy lost its way when it stopped building better Cadillacs, not when it failed to follow Mercedes.
The Olds 350 was about 575 lb, the Cadillac 472 about 680 lb; the 500 may have been a few pounds heavier.
Your right about the TA. In the spring 78 Issue of Road Test magazine, in a 3 way comparison of the Corvette, TA, and Z28, the testors absolutely HATED the Corvette for it’s lack of handling in comparison to the TA. Of course two of them had been running at Riverside Raceway for 15 years ( in 78) and were your 10/10ths race drivers. Way beyond your weekend warriors. The TA won the comparison test.
Minor irony department; the only person I knew who owned one these was the wife of a Japanese salaryman on an expat assignment in New York. For some perverse reason the Japanese expats loved Cadillacs.
Before they were downsized and lost the big engines, Cadillacs were all over the middle east too, every sheik and shah had one, GM even imported knock down kits of the Seville for assembly in Iran, before the Shah fell in 1979 of course.
Yes Carmine you are right , Cadillac Seville , Buick Skylark and Chevy Nova , all Came in Iran in 1978 in CKD packages, they were basically 1975 Leftovers from GM Canada, (as we were told then) .
The price was right, the Seville was not even twice as expensive as a Nova and the Skylark was priced in-between.
The best buy was the Skylark as it had the carburated V8 and automatic, the Nova came with the inline 6 and was equipped with 3 speed manual transmission.
People were scared of Seville, the electronic ignition control module went dead frequently and the replacement was not locally available, the module was sourced from Dubai with huge cost.
The ignition nozelles of Seville engine rusted due to water in Iranian gas
The Skylark with four barrel equipped 350 was more reliable, much faster and showed tail lights to Seville, and it brought better resale price as a used car. the problem with the skylark was the rear suspension, went dizzy on potholes which where abundant on Iranian roads,
The trunk of Nova and Skylark were both cramped by the spare Tyre, I remember Seville had better trunk space,
These are found memories of good old days in Iran, when we drove American cars and drank Russian Vodka
By the way, I just noticed that that’s a 79 Seville pictured, not a 77. The steering wheel gives it away.
75-76 Cads had a 3 point “T” shaped steering wheel, 77-78s had a single bar, and 79+ had a modified single bar with ends bent downward as in the above pic. Then after that they went to airbag wheels.
Also, although its hard to see, it looks like it has the digital ETR stereo which also debuted in 79.
Why does everyone think the Seville is a Nova/X-Car? Like Carmine stated very early on these two cars share very little if nothing in common. I’ve been a GM parts dept guy since the 70’s and I will tell you the only thing a Nova shares with this Seville is the ring and pinion and maybe the U-joints. If you can’t get this out of your head and mind set than how can you say that this is a DS based on the fact that your opinion was made with misinterputed information? Sure they both have a subframe but so does the F-Body. Which does share most of its floor pan with the Noxa/X.Hey so does a Astro/Safari van. Aint nobody calling the Seville a four door Camaro,now! I don’t know if the Seville(K-Car) was designed with a subframe because it was less weight of maybe because that’s the way MB and some other imports did it but I’m thinking GM went this way for the cost aspect of it.
You know what I don’t read a lot of,even though a few people posting here seem to get it, is that there was a totally different mind set back in the 70’s. It appears the GM marketing guys(and gals) didn’t get it either. No way in Hades was your traditional European, luxury car buyer for a lack of a better description, going to step foot into a domestic showroom and buy a car. Sure all GM could do is try and build something comparable. Before the advent of the big car auction all you needed to do back in those days was browse over to the used car side of the lot and see what type of cars your average customer was trading in. Nope don’t see any MBs sitting at the Cadillac dealer. Nothing across the street at the Lincoln Mercury dealer either. Seems if you went to State U and got you a degree in basket weaving or hotel management you might have a domestic car in your crosshairs but the average MBA from the Ivy League always went the European route. How the heck do you think MB and BMW got those reputations? I’ve been in the business too long to believe that any one make is better than another.It’s a machine designed by man. It aint going to last forever. The next time you have a weekend to kill take a drive over to one of the larger self service salvage yards(i.e. U-Pull-It,Pick-ur-Part) in your area and see what type of cars are sitting in there. Take notice of the model and mileage and try to guess why it met its death.Yep plenty of Mercs along with 5 and 7 series bidding the time with the W-Bodies. Just like anything else if you take care of something the longer it will last. It doesn’t make a difference what it is. Just like the cars you saw. Your average MB was probaly traded off after the loan was paid and someone with an above average income and mentality bought it. Drove it. Than traded up again untill somebody down the food chain determined its fate and destiny. Not to many times that can be done with your average middle class cruiser. Even less with the bottom feeders.
Oh and I get a laugh every time Paul does a DS just because two different models just happen to look alike. Hey I drive a 90 Riviera. And I never thought anybody was stupid enough to mistake it for a Somerset/Skylark. Everybody does it. Everybody does parts bin engineering. What do you think a car manufacturer does. Hold an art contest at the local kindergartens and use the winners design for their next model line up? I love it. It wouldn’t be any fun if everything looked alike now,would it? Now if only everybody would get a clue and stop doing it on todays current offerings. Damn it! A Malibu isn’t supposed to look like a Camry! It should look like a Chevy. Every Chevy.
I liked the looks of the Seville then, I still like it now. Nobody I knew – no one, including their parents – could afford a Benz in the late ’70s. I have always liked these cars. So shoot me.
Paul, if you are going to blast one car vs another, use pics of cars in similar condition. Don’t follow American political party logic, that your audience consists of idiots that can be swayed by stark visual images and strong retoric.
All that said, I like CC alot.
It’s the only Seville I’ve found so far. And the 450 SEL is an original high-mileage car, not all that pampered. The difference speaks more to the cars than anything else.
Nobody at CC engages in that type of activity. This is very much a non political site, which is one of the many things that make it great. This ain’t Jalopnik…
In case you havent noticed, CC is not a site about trailer queens. The only Sevilles left in good condition are garaged car show sleds.
I see equal amounts of Sevilles vs similar vintage Mercedes in the Upstate, Ny area or in other words not many. The Sevilles often turn up at car shows in well preserved condition. It’s rare to see a 1970’s Mercedes at any car show.
Strange as it may seem there is a very tidy Seville locally I must get a pic next time it surfaces. It must have been a very expensive car to own in Aotearoa with NO parts backup if they are as bad as claimed. Cadillac has very little presence here until the CTS which sold well at half GMs projected retail price are they any good? who knows they are all V6 cars so will have the Australian built engine I hated in a Commodore, so being torque free at lower rpm is not a selling point to me.
Ive seen one Seville here aint seen it parked yet but Ill definitly keep my eyes open for it rare beast in this part of the planet coz not sold here new.
The S-class may have been a target for attributes like packaging but that doesn’t mean GM ever intended for the Seville to “compete with” the S-class for buyers. The S-class was a much more advanced and expensive car. That’s like saying Ford was trying to attract Rolls-Royce buyers with the 1965 LTD because they targeted (and beat) the Rolls for quietness. They were trying to sell more LTDs to a different group of buyers with that comparison and it worked. The Seville succeeded at the same game and is NOT a failure because it’s not as good overall as the S-class.
Survival rates have to do with many things including the affluence of owners, design changes in the series (fewer means fewer trade ins), resale value and cost to keep running. Again the Seville was very high on that last point, ironically because of a German designed competent, the FI! I see more brick Volvos around than old Mercedes but that doesn’t mean they were of higher quality. There are other factors at work like the availability and cost of parts to keep them on the road.
Of course the design and construction of a vehicle count but that’s almost always related to price. The Benzes were expensive to buy so they could be developed with a higher budget for basic quality, it’s that simple.
You will no doubt argue that the Seville wasn’t cheap and about the same price as the better built W123. Well sure it was but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a huge success. Remember this car was developed in a mere 24 months on a unique platform (see the same article you referred me to). Its run was always going to be just four years, as one model.
Compare that to the B-body platform investment which could be amortized over so many brands and models for so many years. Trust me the only way for the Gen 1 Seville to pencil was with that high price and those guys got it!
When you consider it far exceeded its volume expectation at that price, the car was a grand slam not just for GM but for influencing the entire industry for size, styling, refinement and total package. They may not have taken people out of German and British imports but they sure as hell intercepted a ton of US owners who would have made that move sooner if it wasn’t for the original Seville.
If they stuck with that successful size/styling/refinement/total package concept instead of leaping into what the wags insisted come next — FWD, IRS and other new technologies — it would be a very different Cadillac today and that’s the whole point.
Hardly a Deadly Sin unless leaf rear springs are a deal breaker for you.
The comparison with the ’65 Ford and the RR is invalid; nobody thought Ford was competing with them.
The price of the S Class and the Seville were not that far apart at all. And the reality is that GM was targeting the S-Class market with the Seville. Why else price it higher than the Fleetwood?
It was priced higher because it was a halo car. It was a test run to acclimate the Caddy buyer that a smaller car could be a real Cadillac. The size was a test run, the styling was a test run. The first Seville came out in 75, it preceded the downsized 77s by two years. The public loved the downsized Cads, in fact all the downsized Bs. The problem is that Cadillac cannot really produce a world class top of the line car using current platform sharing techniques. The car they can build cannot be sold for the price of a big Benz,Beemer or Jag. I read an article on the current big Cad, the XTS I think it’s called. It concluded that it was a nice car if you liked American style luxury cars and were moving up from a Buick or Ford Taurus or Chrysler 300. The best Caddy is just a middle priced car on the international stage. The best selling Cad is probably the CTS ( how I hate these letter car names)! Which is a good car but no standard of the world. Cadillac has to be content to sell a pretty good car that will make it money. In the pursuit of market share MBZ has been promoting their lower priced C series cars for years culminating in the awful CLA. Their deadly sin that is surely erodng their luxury image.
Blaming Germany for Bendix fuel injection is completely ridiculous. Bendix, an American company, provided Electrojector EFI, the very first commercially available electronic fuel injection, to AMC and Chrysler in 1957 and 1958. None of them worked well or for long. Bosch bought the patents and made fuel injection systems that worked, the first being D-jetronic which was soon superseded by K-jetronic and then L-jetronic in 1974. Cadillac and Bendix chose to reverse engineer the older D-jetronic system, somehow screwing it up with Detroit style production tolerances in the process. Blaming Bosch for the Seville’s Achilles flaw is like blaming Toyota for Chevy Cruze fires.
American production tolerances are the reason Japanese cars were so well made in comparism, Ive had a look inside a stripped for checking low mileage SBC350 that had 3 different main brg sizes, from new that engine only had 35k on it. Toyota would have remelted that crank GM installed it.
I have no experience with the first Seville, but it’s a wonder the name survived the dreadful second (’80-’85) and third (’86-’91) generations. Especially the third, since the Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable that launched at the same time looked much more like “luxury imports” than the stubby Seville could ever dream of. (And the Taurus/Sable were mainstream midsizers competing against the Ciera – the Seville was, presumably, still supposed to compete against the S-Class? Really?)
The fourth generation (’92-’97) was a beautiful car cursed by the Northstar; the fifth (’98-’04) withered away as Cadillac focused on the CTS.
I thought the Seville was adequately differentiated from the N-O-V-A cars. The effort put into this car was pretty commendable by Detroit standards; It was certainly no Versailles or LeBaron.
The RWD X-platform was not a bad starting point. If memory serves, the Nova, and subsequently the Seville, shared its front subframe with the Camaro. That gave it the long dash-to-axle that really makes the Seville actually look like a convincing luxury car (unlike the stubby downsized A-bodies). And Paul has praised the X-car’s handling on more than one occasion.
A couple of points made were downright unfair. The Seville and Nova did not share the same engine. The Seville used the supposedly-superior Olds 350, not the Chevy 350. Also, the copycat rooflines on other GM cars didn’t start appearing until 1980, after the Seville was restyled (and after those pointless Aeroback sedans proved to be completely sales proof).
The first Seville was a step in the right direction, and even the 2nd-generation car was a good effort (although the styling gimmick certainly fell flat and the powertrains were absolute garbage). It was the third generation car where they really screwed up, along with the rest of the ’85-’86 downsizing. They put a transverse motor in their flagship car and made it look like an Olds Calais. Stupid, but I don’t think the ’75 model predicted that future.
I never said they shared the same engine, although I see now that my copy editor changed the text to make it look that way.
What I originally wrote (and have returned to the text) was: Both were powered by versions of GM’s fine 350 (5.7-liter) V8 engines The Editor took out “versions of”. That is a key point, to the extent it really matters.
Which, when you think about it, it doesn’t really at all. The Seville’s engine problems were its unreliable Bendix fuel injection, which wore out long before the basic engine, and is a pain to try to fix. Many were converted to carbs. The basic Chevy or Olds 350 engines were both just fine and dandy. You think anyone would have notice a difference if they had used the Chevy? Not.
Regarding handling: all these X-based cars, from Camaro to Seville had excellent smooth road handling potential, depending on the specific suspension calibration. But hit a rough patch on a windy road, or just a rough straight road, and the difference between them and the Merc immediately becomes painfully evident. Handling is a mufti-faceted concept; the ability to “handle” rough and variable roads without getting flustered is more important for a luxury car than high skid pad numbers.
Case in point: this evening, on my way home in my Acura TL, I was on a rough road with a curve and a railway track in the apex. The Acura sailed over it at 80 km/h with absolutely no variation in line, bobbing or weaving.
Any solid axle RWD American car ever built would have been crashing and bounding over a road like that.
Stiff bodies and four wheel independent suspension have totally transformed how cars handle.
Deadly Sin or not, I’ve never been able to think badly of these Sevilles. It’s partly the styling, and perhaps part nostalgia. My grandmother drove Cadillacs for at least 30 years, from the mid-60s until 1995, and her late-70s Seville was her favorite of all of them, and the only one that didn’t get replaced after 5 years. It was the quality of the last two (’86 Seville, ’91 DeVille) that drove her to Lexus.
All these comments and no one mentions the Elegante package…
…or the ultra-rare 1979 Gucci package (non-factory)…
Why else would they price it higher than the Fleetwood? Because they needed to recoup their investment in a low volume model run. You don’t tool up for a new platform and make just 200K copies without premium pricing. The higher pricing was also intended to position the Seville as Cadillac’s flagship (not an S-class copy) and avoid a cheap car image from the smaller size. Worked brilliantly.
The Fleetwood was targeted to loyal Cadillac buyers, the Seville to the ones who were getting ready to leave for W123s and XJs, not S-classes. The Seville was around $13K in 1976 while the average S-class was over $20K. Good grief that’s 50% higher! Even the article you referred to states the price difference negated a head-to-head comparison between the two cars.
You may be confusing your S-classes. The Seville was developed in response to the 1965-1973 108/109 series which was really not an S-class. This was the car that began eating into the Big 3’s share of the luxury market and was later replaced by the mid-sized W123 and flagship W116.
No, I’m not confused about my S Classes. First off, the W108/109 very much was a “really” an S Class. You’re the first to say they’re not. Are you in S-Class denial? Why would you say that?
The W116 began production in 1972. If the Seville was developed in 24 months, then that started in the spring of 1973. The W116 would have been out for some time before the Seville’s development started.
The W116 was a logical evolution of the W108/109. It wasn’t that radically different. A few inches longer and wider, but it wasn’t some quantum leap. And it was still a fairly compact car, under 200″ for a 1973 450SE, shorter than the Seville.
Yes it all worked brilliantly didn’t it, right to the steady and deadly decline of Cadillac sales starting within a few years later. Brilliant indeed!
I dunno, I think the W116 was a pretty big step away from the W108/109, and big enough to be considered more than just an evolution.
I’m going from memory here (correct me if I’m wrong) but that change went from a kingpin front end and swing axles to ball-jointed front end and semi-trailing arms, and while the W108/109 sedans weren’t hand-built like the coupes and convertibles were, th W116 has, if nothing else, much more of a mass-market look to it compared to the W108/109 with the unusual wood trim and plenty of chrome. Less charming, but of its time and much more modern-looking. Stylistically, it was a big leap forward and the first sedan (the R107 was a little earlier, no?) that had the modern M-B aesthetic, inside and out, that lasted all the way through the 80s. And were they not the first big sedans to actually be referred to as the S-class?
I didn’t realize a SWB W116 was the size of a Seville, though.
Even the 1973 LWB W116 was several inches shorter than the Seville.
OK, let’s not keep this pissing match going. Yes, the W116 was a significant step forward in the continuing evolution of Mercedes’ cars. My response was to not blow it out of proportion; especially in calling the W108/109 “not a real S Class”.
I’m going to bed now…..the debate has gone on long enough.
The W116, especially the European models, is the best car I have ever driven, bar none. Superlative quality and driving experience in a car that was the perfect size and weight.
You sound like you’re saying Cadillac would have been better off if they didn’t do the Gen 1 Seville. Really Paul?
The V864, HT4100, 1985 DeVille and 1986 Seville are what totally killed the owner loyalty and conquests, which started suffering when the W108 hit its stride around 1972.
The first Seville stabilized that situation for a brief moment and the rest as they say is history. GM should have stuck with that formula for Cadillac instead of rushing all of the new CAFE-driven technology to market and at the same time trying to support so many model variations. The were no resources left to do a Seville right. Mercedes had, what, three basic models in their line up?
Obviously the solid axle -> IRS wasn’t such a big deal because all of those failed products had it. What they didn’t have was the panache and reliability of the original Seville.
As for the W108 not being an S-class that’s what I remembered reading when the W116 came out. I double checked Wiki to be sure. From the opening paragraph on the 108…
The Mercedes-Benz W116 was a series of flagship vehicles produced from September 1972[1] through 1979. The W116 automobiles were the first Mercedes-Benz models to be officially called S-Class, although earlier sedan models had already unofficially been designated with the letter ‘S’ – for Sonderklasse or “special class.”
First, I think my memory is correct here – my dad’s 1979 Seville had a price of around $17,000, and I had a friend whose parents traded a ’76 Mark IV for a ’78 450SEL, and I remember it cost about $28K, a tremendous leap.
I said something yesterday about what FOLLOWED this gen Seville really being the bigger problem. By 1980 (and forgetting all the various engine issues before and after this year), Cadillac brought out the gen 2 Seville, which was a step backward in terms of it’s look and feel (if you’re trying to compete with European cars), the big Caddies were even more conservatively styled, and now Mercedes came out with the new W126, which IMO, was a big leap foward compared to anything before it. Cadillac just did not take the addtional steps necessary to provide a more Mercedes-like experience that many evidently desired. They were too afraid to lose their old customer base, and this continued for decades.
The 116 was most definitely a quantum leap over the 108. The swing axles were finally gone for one thing. Have you ever compared the interiors of the two? I sure did, many times, as we had a 108 280SE and a 116 300SD in the family. Night and day.
Surprising comment from someone who likes to bash the first Seville for no valid reason other than it had rear leaf springs!
Lets see..Seville/Nova or Versailles/Granada/Monarch? GM pulled it off better than Ford in this case (and didn’t try to pull off the bogus Benz advertising, either).
DB, was just re-reading all of this because it popped up on the ‘random’ CC’s
Anyhow, yep, Ford had the audacity AND the balls to advertise what you mentioned with just the fair and basic Granada, not even the Versaille, Check out these ads I have in my files….
another…
and yet another… (the balls of FORD in those days) sheeesh!
and the last one i have, what an insult to a Cadillac, especially a Gen1 Seville….
The Granada was more a deadly sin because of this than any gen I Seville.
Wtf? The top ad is especially ridiculous! The only similarities are the paint color and number of doors. Even as a car-loving child in the ’70’s I used to scoff at these kind of ads. Cars should be marketed on their own merits, not as some kind of wannabe.
Considering the number of new Fords that have Aston grills stuck on them, or that have Land Rover Styling cues, or that have Mercedes-Benz rooflines; it seems that this is still the mentality at the Ford Motor Company.
Just a comment. The high survival rates for the big domestic luxury barges in the 70’s was largely in part to the more affluent lifestyles of the lower middle class. I grew up in an era when a Cadillac in the garage and a 25″ Zenith color console TV meant you had arrived.
I worked in a steel mill for 10 years and it was the dream of every middle age guy I knew to own a Cadillac, even my Dad. Many workers owned a Cadillac in those years, but absolutely never, never drove them to work or much anywhere else. The guys either drove a junker or a cheap newer car. The Caddy sat in the garage. Sevilles would never have been considered, too small and unimportant.
I personally owned 75 and 78 Eldorados (still have the 78), bought in superb low mileage condition from elderly owners. These men cherished their cars. The guy I bought the 78 from wanted to buy it back after the title work had been completed. I thought he was joking, but I told him that after paying for all the title and tax work, I’d lose money if I sold it back to him. (I didn’t want to gouge him.) He asked if he could drive it for the last time, I agreed.
The former owner of the 75 saw my Dad in a parking lot one day, and told him he used to have a car like that. He did not recognize my Dad, and my Dad asked if his name was John. The guy affirmed, and my Dad told him this is your car. The guy was overjoyed that the car was still around 5 years or so later.
Too bad that car got totalled a year or so later, a guy skidded head on into my Dad during a snowstorm. My Dad cried, but walked away unharmed.
Sevilles were not bought by the guys I describe. They were bought by people who drove them, not looked at them, hence the low survival rate. Times change and people change. Cars now are utilitarian, people in my modest neighborhood don’t garage their cars. Garages are storage units for junk. The ultimate is a neighbor down the street built a beautiful huge 3 stall garage in the back yard. The last time I went passed, it was filled with everything but cars.
I would add one more demographic. By the late 70s, someone with a big Cadillac or Lincoln knew that those cars were going extinct. There was a tendency to keep the big 70s barge “because it’s going to be a collector’s item.” The folks who could afford to do so often kept a Town Car or a Mark V for this reason, as a spare car to enjoy as an occasionally guilty pleasure in the coming age of scarcity. We all knew at the time that we would never see cars like these again. I think that with 70s Town Cars, particularly, the survival rate is extremely high. Add the basic durability of the mechanicals and even as beaters, these could stay on the road for a long time, if you could afford the gas.
Absolutely correct. I can recall in the early 80’s, Bicentennial Eldos were advertised for ridiculous amounts 20K, 30K and more. When I bought a 2 year old Deville in 1995, the dealer had a 76 convertible in the showroom, brand new condition with 20 miles on it, for sale at $ 35,000. I can’t understand why some overpaid athlete or fat cat capitalist didn’t grab it up. Peanuts for someone like that.
Only thing I can figure out, no rich guy wanted it. The same dealer sold a 93 Coupe Deville to a pro football player. The guy had all kind of junk added to it, gold grille, continental kit, etc. The salesman told me the guy bought it to use as a beater for the winter.
Oh well.
There was a dealership in Ft Lauderdale that closed a while back that specialized in cars just like that, they had 20 76 Eldorado convertibles, the highest mile one had 14K on it, they had several with 4, 5 and 6 miles on the odometer, with window stickers and plastic on the seats, the same with the last of the giant Mark V Collectors Series, 78 Eldorado Biarritz, some last of the biggie deuce and quarters, etc, I used to go there every couple of months to just browse, it was an amazing time warp.
Sevilles have a pretty high survival rate, I think. Especially in Europe.
One last thing: I just saw a tv commercial for the new (FWD) XTS. The voiceover mentioned safety technology you won’t find in a Mercedes E-Class. Hahahaha, 35 years later and theyre making the same comparisons. Granada ESS anyone?
some things never change.
There is nothing wrong with advertising your car as having something a more expensive competitor does not. Does the Ad say the XTS is a better car than the Mercedes XYZ or whatever they call them these days? Probably not.
In my neck of the woods, every pimp, drug dealer and mack-daddy wannabe had either a Seville or a Versailles. They were also amongst the first to eschew them in favor of the German, and later, Japanese imports.
At least Caddy made a serious attempt to disguise the Seville’s humble econocompact origins. The Versailles had no real exterior differences from the Granada/Monarch, until the 1979 updated formal roofline, and that was kind of ugly…
The GM RWD 1967-81 F/X/K-Bodied Family Tree collectively known as the:
A) 1975-79 RWD K-Bodied Cadillac Seville (1976 Model Shown)
B) 1968-79 RWD X-Bodied GM Canada Acadian, Chevrolet Chevy II/Nova/Concours (1975 Model Shown), Pontiac Ventura II/Ventura/Phoenix, Oldsmobile Omega and Buick Apollo/Skylark.
C) 1967-81 RWD F-Bodied Chevrolet Camaro (1975 Model Shown) and Pontiac Firebird.
The main reasons why I have included 1968 on the RWD X-Body & 1967 on the RWD F-Bodies its because those were practically the same carryover chassis used for the last versions of the Chevrolet Nova, Chevrolet Camaro and the Cadillac Seville. In some South American countries, the 1968 Chevrolet Chevy II/Nova were known as the Chevrolet Chevy and that same body style from the 1968 era carried on through 1978. Later redesigns and the “Nova” name were never used there due to cultural misinterpretations.
I may also add that GM Iran also received a CKD (Complete Knock Down – Unassembled) export of the 1979 vintage Chevrolet Nova, Buick Skylark & Cadillac Seville in which the Nova and the Skylark were available as Four Door models only prior to the Iranian Revolution almost a year later on November, 1979. The CKD units may have been imported from Detroit in the latter part of 1978, but the models were actually assembled from 1980 through at least 1987. While the Chevrolet Citation and Corsica/Beretta and the Eldorado based 1980 Bustle Back Seville and Downsized 1986 Seville were being produced here, the old Nova/Skylark based Seville were still being produced in small numbers from 1980-81 and the Nova through at least 1987 even though these models were technically 1979s. Pictured here is the GM Iran production of the Chevrolet Nova. Even though they have the 1979 US based version, this other variation was very unique because the grille very much was a fusion of the 1976-78 Nova and the 1975-79 Buick Skylark. In addition the fuel tank was also located just behind the rear curbside door whereas most other Novas have their fuel tanks on the rear license plate area of the car just above the rear bumpers.
You are right Pedro, I was in Iran at that time, we were told that they are sourced from GM Canada, this might justify the grill anomaly and gas tank trap relocation.
Very Interesting Mead. Those were probably very rare variations of the Nova Sedan body with a modified grille ala Buick Skylark and gas tank relocation from its usual arrangement underneath the trunk lid and behind the rear license plate area much rarer than the identical standard 1979 Novas there which were as common as ours here and elsewhere.
Bingo to Carmine on the demos.
Would love me a 1st gen Seville and looking at that interior shot of the CC the leather in those cars must have been pretty high quality.
Dan, trust me that Gen1 leather IS high quality, because I own a 35yo Seville and the seats look like the car just rolled off of the assembly line. Trust me, the 1st owner was NOT out there Lexol-ing the seats annually. Yet, never-the less…
Disclaimer: more pics available if proff needed for non-believers
Here’s a real pic today, in Fall 2013
Disclaimer: more pics available if proof needed for non-believers I KNOW that Carmine and Richard B will back me up on this!
CC website is not allowing me to attach the pic…. try again,
Third time’s the charm! Picture came
through crystal clear.
What I consider Seville’s first Major Misstep was GEN 2 LOoked Like The Outgoing Century and Olds Cutlass Salon Fastbacks From 78, 79…? a lessor unpopular model that had just majorly flopped.
Which is Double-Odd Because The Cutlass sedan then looked very much like the 76-79 Seville from 1980 forward.
“Regarding handling: all these X-based cars, from Camaro to Seville had excellent smooth road handling potential, depending on the specific suspension calibration. But hit a rough patch on a windy road, or just a rough straight road, and the difference between them and the Merc immediately becomes painfully evident. Handling is a mufti-faceted concept; the ability to “handle” rough and variable roads without getting flustered is more important for a luxury car than high skid pad numbers.”
“Case in point: this evening, on my way home in my Acura TL, I was on a rough road with a curve and a railway track in the apex. The Acura sailed over it at 80 km/h with absolutely no variation in line, bobbing or weaving.
Any solid axle RWD American car ever built would have been crashing and bounding over a road like that.
Stiff bodies and four wheel independent suspension have totally transformed how cars handle”
Now the BS is really getting deep! You do know that you’re comparing apples to oranges. First off why include the Nova and Camaro in your comment? Those cars aren’t even in the same classification of the two models we are arguing about. We are talking “percieved Luxury cars” aren’t we? OK I’m not familiar with what models of cars that you have actually owned over the years Paul but I’m guessing the Seville wasn’t one of them. To assume a car handles crappy(which the Seville doesn’t) because it has leaf springs is absurd. I see you been drinking that “German Engineering” kool aid again. I never understand why somebody makes a comment about throwing a car into a winding part of the road especially if it wasn’t meant to be driven that way. You mean to say you drive like an idiot on ocassion? I own several cars. Everything from muscle/sports cars to station wagons. Why in the heck would I want to attempt something that is beyound a cars capabilty? I have no doubt that you could probably drive a Seville at 9/10ths and it would be comparable to your MB but why? The only reason the MB is more composed in those conditions is the fact that those cars were built in Germany where you can drive like an idiot on certain parts of the autobahn. You darn well know if we had unlimited speeds here in the USA that GM would have turned up the screws a notch too.
And spoken in true knuckleheadedness too. Again comparing apples to oranges. Comparing a new car to an 37 year old car! Stiff bodies? OK lets compare peaches to peaches. That Seville is 20 times more stiffer than anything coming to these shores from Japan. Real American steel that was pressed into panels at least 100% thicker than any import.The only drawback was the front subframe isolated by rubber cushions. After a few years of agressive driving it might have felt like there was a hinge down there. Now go out and compare your TL to something new.I think that would be Impala/Malibu? and Fusion. Yep same independent suspensions. You just got to love it when somebody can state an opinion on their own misinformed biased information.
I try to make my observations from the eyes of those other than me or in other words the less experienced. I’m a regional SCCA Solo2 champion. Strap me into either one of the cars in our discussion and I’d drive circles around all if not most of you. So my view on these arguments is a little obtuse.
Hey. Anybody remember a story Car&Driver did back around 1978 give or take a year? Don Sherman took a 1st gen Seville and upgraded the suspension. Straped on some prototype(later production) TransAm WS6 parts on it. IIRC did some Euro mods to the exterior and created what was most likely the very first Seville STS.
I can only respond to the first part, since I didn’t write the other comment.
The Seville, like many GM cars, was capable of handling very well indeed, but like all of them, those qualities tended to diminish quickly depending on road surface and conditions. That’s not just my opinion, but has been reflected pretty commonly in the press and others’ experience over the years.
Admittedly, a very large percentage of Sevilles were not driven in circumstances that would test the limits of its suspension capabilities. And I never said the Seville didn’t or wouldn’t adequately meet the needs of those that bought it back then.
Nevertheless, there’s no doubt in my mind that Meredes’ superior suspension technology afforded greater ability to deal with a wider range of possible circumstances, and furthermore, as proof of that, every luxury car adopted a variation of its suspension sooner or later. As other aspects of its advanced engineering.
And there were some of us who did demand or expect a greater capability than the Seville’s suspension afforded. And bring specially modified suspensions into the discussion is utterly irrelevant. Any car can be modified to be successful on the track, and undoubtedly, the Seville, being based on the Camaro/Nova’s suspension, had a head start in that. I’m sure the Mercedes’ suspension could jave been softened a bit to make it ride as smooth as a Seville on a boulevard too.
Got a chuckle out of the Acura TL reference. Isn’t that “just” an Accord with a different engine, different styling and much higher price? Sound familiar?
The last one I drove had a TON of torque steer from its FWD layout and 270HP V6. I’m sure Paul would tell you real luxury cars don’t have torque steer because they are all RWD.
I’m being facetious here. The 04-08 TL was a very nice car and the FWD didn’t matter one bit to most of the folks who bought it, because most people don’t drive like they are on a racetrack. It handily outsold its competitors and made boat loads of money for Honda.
Then they made the next gen too big and ugly and it bombed. Now there’s a deadly sin!
Acura is a brand that doesnt exist its simply a rebadged Honda they drive ok for a Jappa but thats all, not really an apex clipping back road rocket.
My ex traded in our 1980 Porsche 928 for one of these sleds, served her right.
To underline Paul Niedermeyer’s original point a bit, I was very impressed with the look of the Seville in the late 70’s, but was not in the financial position to even think about visiting a Caddy dealer’s premises at that time. However, one day, as I passed our local Chevy dealership, I saw a car that looked like it was targeted specifically at imitating the M-B status cars of that era: silver gray metallic paint, gorgeous wine-colored interior in a rich fabric with (fake) leather trim, 350 V8, along with every option that Chevy had ever thought of putting in a car, and… it was a Nova! It looked very much like the “Elegante” Caddy model, mentioned by Michael above. It was also a low-mileage “demonstrator” that the owner’s wife had used very sparingly for a year. I closed the deal within a couple of hours on a great hardly-broken-in car, complete with new car warrantee, at a price in the low $3K range that made it hard to fathom what extra value an additional $11K would have been been garnered by visiting a Caddy dealership. That Nova gave me great pleasure for several years. The handling and power lent itself to the “stab and steer” style of motoring technique, which was relatively un-demanding while being a lot of fun! It was just as rewarding to drive as were my subsequent two vehicle acquisitions, M-B 280SL and M-B 450SLC.
I’m living in Norway, but I’ll have a 67 Riviera and a 77 Coupe Deville as a daily driver. My family though has a 1976 Mercedes S280 who only has traveled around 50.000 km or 30.000 miles. The car looks like new and has been in the family since it was bought new in 1976.
But, you american think that MB from the 70s are so great? Really? Your american cars was a lot better in fact. The MB was very well manufactured and a solid car, but i lacks almost every feature an american car had. My 67 Riviera rides better, has more equipment, its faster, rides alot quieter at highway speeds, and has a much better automatic transmission than the Mercedes. The Riviera odometer reads 172.000 miles. It don’t really use so much more gas than the Mercedes straight six either.
The 77 Coupe deville has 244.000 miles on its odometer and rides just fine. It’s better to drive than the Mercedes, it’s faster, the TH400 is a lot better than the harsh shifting MB’s automatic, it has a lot more equipment, and it’s a lot more comfortable.
The MB is better in braking and handling though, but not very much, and the Riviera has almost as good handling as the MB. The Cadillac is to soft.
American cars was very cheap in the US in 60s and 70s, So people didn’t care about maintenance, MB was an expensive car so people would have to maintenance it.
In Norway we’ve a different story. American cars are extremely costly because of the Norwegian taxes on horespower, cubic inches and weights. So in Norway you’ll still find Caprices from the 70s in great condition, and remember, Caprices are not Cadillacs…
If the car is over 30 years old we can import it without taxes, so in the last 20 years Norwegians have importet a lot of old Cadillacs and Lincolns!
If you take care of a car like the american cars from 60s and 70s it will last forever.
You are right Bill; Americans criticize too much American cars, As you consider Quality/Price ratio , no other car manufacturers in the world could compete with US car makers, I am talking about the 1946-1990 period.
they are not perfect cars, but overall you get more car on your money , there have been some exceptionally under-engineered cars like Vega that should be put aside, those are exceptions.
I hand you 4000$ in 1970, you could buy a fully optioned Nova V8 or a bare bone Peugeot 404, Opel Rekord, or BMW1600 with no options at all,
US manufacturer put powerful quality cars at the reach of middle class, that was not the case in Europe.
I was puzzled when I saw more than a few Sevilles in Switzerland while on a student tour of Europe, ca. ’78. Was it exclusivity + exchange rates?
It always amazes me how the grass is always greener on the other side with many Americans.
I agree with all the negative comments on a first generation Seville. I still love them. Always have and always will. There’s just something about that styling that moves me.
I just wish the author, Mr. Niedermeyer, had not used the worst case photos to make his point. The most beautifully crafted and engineered automobile in the world, if treated like the owner of that green seville, would look just as awful.
Who knows why I love this seville so much? Perhaps it has something to do with lost virginity in the back seat.
We all can’t afford the true classics but it is essential that someone maintains the minor classics. I constantly get comments and attention when I drive mine, all positive.
thanks
So, the Seville is a tarted-up Nova? *snicker* That’s about as far-fetched as someone saying that… that, a Rolls Royce is, I don’t know, a Volkswagen… Oh, wait!
I agree with Mr. Buehler on the choice of photos. There are better examples of the ’79 Seville, like Mr. Buehler’s and my own…
You’re close: If you had said a RR is a tarted up BMW, you would have been right, in the case of the RR Ghost, which is a “tarted up” BMW 7 Series.
I’m sorry the truth is painful, but the well-known reality is that the Seville started out as a Nova, and received a number of changes that turned it into the Seville. Nothing wrong with that in principle, except maybe for the very aggressive pricing, but I wouldn’t feel ashamed about it. Nice Seville, BTW.
Thank you, don’t be surprised if a few Rollers out there built between 1998-2003 can trace their DNA back to VW
My first car hand-me-down 1979 Cadillac Seville that I got in 1985. That car was a chick magnet and attracted allot of positive attention. I don’t agree that re-badging is always a bad thing. In fact, it’s alive and well today. The Porsche Cayenne is really a upscale VW Touareg, the Infinity G series’ DNA comes from the Nissian 370Z and the Bentley Continental is really an Audi/Volkswagen Phaeton. Re-badging in itself not a bad thing. It depends how much is added to differentiate the various models that is key.
Since too much focus and debates were an issue which makes the Seville related to the Nova or different and going nowhere at all, how about trying something different. How about comparing the Downsized 1977 RWD B & C Bodies with the 1977 RWD A-Bodies and the Downsized 1978 RWD A (becoming RWD G-Bodies in 1982) Bodies vs. the 1975-79 RWD X Bodies much like the 1976-78 Chevrolet Nova vs. the 1981 Chevrolet Malibu shown here for future CC Stories and you can even use the attached photo here for future articles. I have selected the redesigned 1981 Chevrolet Malibu 4 Door Sedan on top of the 1976-78 Chevrolet Nova 4 Door Sedan because the “mini” Seville look of the 1981 Malibu 4 Door Sedan was much more similar to the Nova 4 Door Sedan in outward appearance at least compared to the 1978-80 Malibu 4 Door Sedan. Lastly the 1979 Cadillac Seville shown at this story photo does not really do any justice regarding this car in which the appearance had already been disheveled. Even the Nova shown here looked 1000% better than the photo used for that Seville.
Another photo here for future CC Article: A 1979 Buick Skylark 4 Door Sedan vs. A 1980 Buick Century 4 Door Sedan.
Last but not least, a 1978 Oldsmobile Omega 4 Door Sedan vs. a 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass Salon 4 Door Sedan.
One more, a 1983 Pontiac Bonneville 4 Door Sedan vs. a 1979 Pontiac Phoenix 4 Door Sedan.
Hi,
would you firstly excuse my bad english, 1 am french (frog eater) and I own a 1978 Seville in showroom condition.I’ll try to put some pics.
I strongly disagree about bad comments about this car, especially vs the MB which is not a challenger.
It’s true than the handling and rear axle are much efficient on MB butspirit is not the same, buyers are different too and the same for roads !
You don’t have narrow roads and free of limits freeway so why would you spent that difference of money for something you’ll never use ?
But in contrary, the Cadillac spirit is obviously present in the Seville.
I mean from 75 to 79…..
It’s a nonsense battle between two different continent, two different spirit, two different prices.
I own a lot of cars and the Seville has something special.
American standard in european size, elegant, reliable and different of other contemporary products.
What else ?
Serge’, your Seville is exactly the same color as the on that I inherited from my mother when I was in high school in the middle 1980’s. It got me lots of attention from the girls.
1978 Cadillac Seville
Inside
Nardi steering wheel is the only no original part
78000 actual miles and frame off meticulous restoration.
License plate US style with french numbers with original us stickers
1 agree 100% with Mead comments, 70’s Mercedes and Bmw were pretty much expensive and they aren’t so reliable you think. My Seville has been restored from the frame because I wanted it like new, but it was in good condition the vinyl roof material was just in perfect shape and no perforating rust anywhere. Try to restore a MB, I did it and my wallet still suffers of the operation!
About pics posted, don’t hesitate to focus, you’ll appeciate and maybe comment the restoration accuracy. And it was almost easy and not so costly, I bought all parts in USA and I founded almost everithing in NOS.
Parts are common with several GM products except EFI but it works perfectly. The car looks really like it was 6 month old and it’s really amazing, especially here in France.
Another thing, nobody would even pay attention here about a MB 70’s sedan but the Cady is a real eyes catcher !
I love it and won’t trade even for several MB !
And if I want to drive fast on narrow secondary roads, I have others european cars.
You drive an MB but you cruise in a Cadillac !
GM’s grave sin was not building the Seville on the Nova X chassis; it was an excellent platform. Strong, almost indestructable, & powered by bulletproof drivetrains. No, the grievous sin was in 1980 when the X chassis went into the history books, replaced by the dreadful N chassis that was the basis for such wobbly garbage as the Citation, the Phoenix, Skylark & Omega. Try finding one of these turds still in use today; you can’t. But, there are plenty of Novas & Sevilles still plying the highways, some even as daily drivers.
Just realized glaring error in my above post. I inadvertently mixed up the x and n chassis of GM. The x chassis was the platform the dreadful-turd Citation was built upon; the n chassis was the good platform the Nova & such were built upon. Please forgive this mix-up!
The Gen 4 Seville inspired by Mercedes? A good laugh on that one. Put them together and really compare them. The Mercedes is like a tool box in comparison.
The Deville to follow is a little different, Mercedes had a 1994 Deville in their studios to evaluate the design and figure out how Cadillac contented and identified different models. Something else rubbed off however, look at the following Mercedes and notice the character of the body side and belt line.
They leaned a lot from that Cadillac.
Clearly this one is quite controversial, but FWIW I can’t get behind the DS nomination for this one.
I love the 1st Gen Seville, and as a 10 year old car nut I can distinctly recall how hotly anticipated and nearly universally well received this car was. Having ridden in several of them back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, I never got the impression that the car was any less a Cadillac than the big ones. As a matter of fact the Seville had a solid, well screwed together feel to it that the big Cadillacs of that time lacked, even after the ’77 downsizing. It may not have competed with the Mercedes technologically, but in the marketplace of the time it was clearly viewed as a more traditional American alternative to one, and it appealed to much of the same buyer demographic. It’s just an opinion, but I think this was a very well executed model. It was a game changer, and it paved the way for the successful downsizing of the later 70’s as well as setting a styling trend that lasted for at least a decade after it went out of production. Far from sinful in my book.
I haven’t seen a Seville on the road in years! I remember when these came out, they looked okay, but no one I knew could afford them, not at $14,000. I haven’t even ridden in one.
I’m still driving my Seville since 1994. I have always loved the ride and the handling. I call it my 4 door Trans Am. A triple black classy Caddy.
Here it is.
In my opinion, this still is one of the best looking Cars GM made.
Perhaps so, but also one of the worst values for money ever. True, this was nothing really new for US carmakers, who had perfected the game of selling a little more car for a lot more money. They still do it with luxury SUVs today, because while much else has changed since then, human vanity hasn’t.
“One rather embarrassing study of Seville buyers discovered that they were popular with senior citizens who wanted a Cadillac in a smaller, more maneuverable package.“ — Wikipedia
So if a person of a specific demographic likes a particular car…. That’s automatically wrong? Ok, The highly vaunted “muscle cars” are desired by High School drop outs who drool and make “vrooom,vrooom” noises with their mouths – Jimipedia.
Wrong, no: in fact I strongly believe that folks have a right to make foolish choices, so long as they harm no one else & suffer any consequences. But neither would I recommend it if anyone asked me.
Pete z.
Could it be, you are prejudice because your father owned one of them!
i dont understand why this car is being attacked like it is on this article. this was the right car for the right time. it was and still is one of the most beautifull cars ever produced. And people looking at this car were not interested in what mb/bmw had to offer at the time. just tired of people putting down big american cars because they have love for foreign cars. our cars were among the most stylish smooth riding cars on the planet. and caddillac is what people aspired to in those days!!!
I have no idea what Cadillac thought the Seville was relative to the Mercedes line. I do know that the Cimarron was supposed to compare with the BMW 3-series.
I think that the Seville probably gave Cadillac owners an alternative to look at before buying a smaller European car (Mercedes E-class or ???).
I do see that the Seville goes downhill from the first generation to the awkward styling of the second generation, and then the overly downsized third generation with too much of a Pontiac Grand Am style. Then Cadillac tries to make the FWD Seville into a sport sedan with little success.
The Opel Diplomat was not a very successful line.
The Seville is an atypical DS in that it was an attractive car with no major engineering/mechanical flaws that sold well in its market segment. So why does it get a DS? It goes back to that same GM malady that affects all DS: missed opportunity. It was one of the first really badly fumbled, successful new GM cars in that the successor, instead of gaining serious Euro-style features like an IRS and/or fuel injection, got that funky bustle-back trunk.
But, worse, as many others have pointed out, it seemed to pave the way for cars like the Cimarron. GM viewed the Seville not as an opportunity to give the car even more European sporting touches, but to cynically exploit the market by thinking that if they added a leather interior and a few Cadillac emblems to a Cavalier, they could get away with charging nearly three times the price for it.
So, the Seville is a unique DS in that it’s ‘badness’ has nothing to do with the car itself, but the attitude GM seems to have gotten from its success for future products.
The Lincoln Versailles was really what paved the way for the Cimmaron, the Seville at it took some substantial investment to hide the Nova underneath, every bit as much(or more) as it did to make a B body Impala a C body DeVille. Lincoln’s approach literally dressed up a Granada, sheetmetal and all, just as GM later would do for the Cimmaron. The Lincoln never sold well compared to the Seville but it cost about as much to buy and no doubt it’s meager development cost made it at the very least profitable. I’m sure GM took note of that
As for the comment that the nova is looking like a bmw,,,,,,,,,,i remind you that bmw as well as many others got their styling from both generations of the chevy corvair.
Many European cars designs were inspired by the Corvair. And the “kink”, ”crook” or whatever its called of the rear window of the Nova, It’s lineage long predates BMW’s usage. GM’s own “A” body fastbacks featured it in the early 1950s!
Photograph #8 is just a (slightly)larger repost
of photo #7 – the one with G-Bonnie on top and
1G Seville on bottom. Just FYI! 🙂
I don’t think the first-gen Seville is a deadly sin, and certainly not compared with the bustleback abomination that was the second-gen. It was a reasoned and well-executed design appropriate for its time and a huge gamble for GM. Remember, they had tried smaller luxury Caddys (short-deck versions in the early ’60s) that flopped big time, so there was no guarantee a dozen years later that this would work. It’s not the Seville’s fault that the sheer styling and upright backlight was copied ad naseum throughout the GM lineup.
GM had the chance to follow up a successful design in 1980 with a true world class compact luxury car, and they botched it big time. Now THAT’S a deadly sin.
“GM had the chance to follow up a successful design in 1980 with a true world class compact luxury car, and they botched it big time. Now THAT’S a deadly sin.”
^This. In fact, I might recommend that Paul change this DS to the 2nd generation Seville. I doubt there’d be but a fraction of the dissent from the B&B that was generated towards the selection of the first generation car and all of the DS rationale would still apply.
The bottom line is that it’s hard to call, what is by most accounts, a pretty decent car a Deadly Sin, even if it came from GM and there were definite Deadly Sin-worthy actions afterwards that could be indirectly related to it.
The “How Stuff Works” Seville feature is a good read giving an inside look at GM bureaucracy and the hurdles designers and engineers had to go through to put out a smaller Cadillac in under two years.
I think the end result is commendable, the Seville is a real looker now as it was back then and sales took off so clearly GM got this car right. Were there shortcomings? Of course, what seventies automobile didn’t have issues. I wouldn’t call the first gen a deadly sin however.
I’ve read the entire thread going back over 4 years, I still don’t think most people are getting why this is a GM DS. Has nothing to do with how the Seville was received by the market at the time.
The Seville was a hit for Cadillac, no doubt. It was not only a good, but a great first iteration. Gen 1 total sales of about 215K, let’s say average of $13K sales price, looking at about $2.8B over 5 years. The question is what did GM do with that vs. say Merc?
Mercedes invested in engineering, while GM bet on styling. As good as the original Seville was, no one can honestly say that GM upped their engineering game on this model vs. what Mercedes did. What was the result? Mercedes defined what the luxury sedan was for the 80’s and onward, to this day. GM continued on a down-slide, eventually ending in BK and taxpayer bailout.
It’s not just the obvious GM failures (looking at you, Vega), but just as much the way that GM handled successes. The Seville is a symptom not a cause, of the long decline and eventual failure of GM.
GM died a death of 1000 cuts, virtually all of their own making.
I have commented elsewhere that by the early 1960’s that Mercedes was building safety cage bodies while the Big Three were not.
pebird and Johnster, you GET IT!!!!!
And thanks, Johnster, (see below) for posting the link to Aaron Severson’s must-read Seville history over on Ate Up With Motor.
Aaron outlines how GM learned all the WRONG lessons BECAUSE the 1st-gen Seville WAS a quite-competent upgrade of the X-body that sold well. He explains how the 1st-gen Seville led to the Cimarron. Which dovetails perfectly back to Paul’s “On The Purpose And Nature Of GM’s Deadly Sins”, linked at the end of the original article.
The 1980 Seville was packed with technical sophistication.
Love re-reading this again. Anyhow, here’s a few pics of my ’79 and yeah… these cars weren’t cheap (like 3x avg car price) mine isn’t even loaded and it was $18,500 I do still love this car, alot. based on reactions every time it hits the streets, people of all ages would still agree.
Monroney sticker
One thing of interest I forgot to mention regarding GM and the window stickers. Blow up/magnify the sticker above and you can read the detailed explanation/disclaimer about Cadillac using the Oldsmobile 350 block & heads for the Seville. Start phase of the era of engine sharing, lawsuits and disclaimers when people were so used to each Division designing & building their own motors.
For the ’76 MY Cadillac only had the 472 & 500, then for ’77, they now had the rock solid , but too large 425 so they chose Olds for the smaller 350 for Gen1 Seville run which sold from Spring of 1975, as MY 1976, thru fall of 1979.
I’m thrilled with the choice of Oldsmobile V8 because its been such a great motor and so easy to work on too. After fully restoring the Bosch/Bendix system MPFI system myself, given the 350, 400TH trans and solid GM under-pinnings, I almost never have a worry with mechanical reliability. I use it every summer as a DD on clear weather days.
interior
rear
About the only thing you don’t have is a sunroof. The Seville did come with a lot standard and limited options, which is why its price tag was high.
Bob Templin Cadillac’s chief engineer during the development of the Seville said that initially marketing thought that as smaller Cadillac had to be priced cheaper then a DeVille if it were to sell. He stated:
“Well, by the time we put in all the engineering effort, even though we got the Nova body shell, but after we reskinned it and spent all that money on the exterior tools and stuff, the numbers were adding up. It was not going to be an inexpensive car. We said, ‘Okay, let’s throw the book at this car, put on every goody we can think of … let’s doll it up and make an absolute slick thing out of it, and price it above the DeVille.’ So that’s where we ended up.”
true she’s well equipped, but you have that moonroof was about $800, then in ’78/’79, there was also the Elegante’ package that added approx another $2500. Along with those, the optional digital readout/trip computer adds another G, so you’re in the low $20K range fully equipped. yowza
at a local show setup
Did they ZIG or ZAG ?
One of the worst auto commericials ever purpatrated on car buyers !
Can’t remember the model name, but I do recall it was imported from Germany.
I have not seen one in several years.
They might become a collectors item 50 years from now ?
“Catera”, and it will unlikely be a collectible. In fact I believe that the “Cimmaron” is more likely to be “collectible” as it’s a more famous “fail”, Think Edsel.
While this 1st Gen Seville was a good seller, I do agree it wasn’t the hit that it may have initially seemed by the sales numbers. That said, I think a big problem with Cadillac of this era was that it had already moved down market to catch more sales. This hurt it’s prestige in the eyes of the really affluent buyers. By the time the Seville was released in April 1975, how many of the Mercedes buyers would have considered it even if it were more technically advanced and a closer competitor? Having that three pointed star on the hood really represented something quite a bit different than the wreath and crest and that was established well before the Seville was released.
I think we also must take into consideration that Cadillac and GM was pretty conservative at this time. For them to do the small Cadillac was a risk and it was unknown how it would survive in the market. I do think they did a pretty good job on the car they did produce, and it did have more technical innovations, better handling, better fuel economy and far more standard luxuries than the other traditional Cadillac’s. Where I see the major problem occurring was in the second generation car. General Motors and Cadillac had the resources to see that while the first car was a success it wasn’t stealing import buyers nor winning over a much younger demographic. They had proof of concept that a small Cadillac would be accepted in the market and they had the resources to see who was buying them, but they failed to use this to build a better car. They needed to make the second generation car much closer to the German competition, as at this point it was much less of a risk. Instead, the 1980 Seville was one of the Cadillac’s biggest misses. The car was released with the neoclassic styling that was just so far out of step with the German cars that even a blind person could see that and it certainly made no major improvements in driving dynamics.
As time has shown, it took Cadillac a LONG time to change their reputation from building puffy land yachts to modern luxury performance cars, but I believe it would have occurred much quicker if the Gen 2 car would have continued to follow the German formula.
When I look at the Opel Diplomat that Cadillac considered using as a small Cadillac, I see a strong family resemblance to the 1966-1967 Chevy II.
I think that Aaron Severson best summed up the original Cadillac Seville on his “Ate Up With Motor” website story on the Seville:
“Considering its unpromising foundation, the original 1976–1979 Cadillac Seville turned out much better than it had any right to considering the unpromising foundation, hasty development schedule, and the deep-seated corporate ambivalence toward the whole project.”
You can read his excellent history of the original Seville and its bustle-back successor at the following link:
http://ateupwithmotor.com/model-histories/cadillac-seville/
Aaron’s story is an excellent follow-up to Paul’s.
I don’t think it was mentioned amongst the many comments on this site, but there were two competing designs for the Seville before the final design was decided. One was by Stan Parker and one was by Wayne Kady. Kady’s design had a semi-fast back almost bustle back look, similar to the 1980 Seville. Parker’s design initially had a sloping rear roof line like Nova, but the formal back light came about because of Bill Mitchell. Apparently when Bill Mitchell saw one of Parker’s cars in clay after a trip from England he stated:
“Goddamit, Parker, make that backlight damn near vertical. Make it look like a Rolls-Royce!’ I said to myself, ‘Well, maybe the guy’s gone bananas,’ but we tried it, and it worked.”
Here is a early concept drawn proposal for the Opel based car. Once they decided to use the X-body the design theme continued. It was determined that these early concepts looked too Chevrolet like.
Here is the Kady Concept. Parker’s design with the formal backlight was ultimately chosen after a competition at a California consumer clinic.
If one wants a great read the history of the Seville, get a copy of Collectible Automobile June 2000 which includes numerous interviews with key members of the car’s development.
hey, thanks much for the info. i just grabbed a copy of the mag on ebay. can’t wait to read it.
No problem. It’s is the best article I have read on the development of the Seville. Your car is very nice too BTW.
For those interested in this article, I think the above-referenced HowStuffWorks article is actually substantially the same thing.
HowStuffWorks and Consumer Guide have been under the same corporate umbrella since the mid-oughts, and HowStuffWorks repackaged a lot of Collectible Automobile and other “Auto Editors of Consumer Guide” material for the web between 2007 and 2009. Some of the original photos are omitted (as are the bylines, which would vex me as an author), and the layout is somewhat different, but the text is usually about the same.
Was this a concept for the 1976 Seville or
for the 1979 bustleback?
That’s for the 76 car.
The ’80 Seville was derived from a bustleback proposal for the 79 Eldorado.
Wow. Very progressive design for
mid-70s American roads.
That concept I posted was a proposal for the 1976 Seville, by Wayne Kady. He had several bustle back designs that dated until the 1960’s around the time of the ’67 Eldorado. It wasn’t until the 1980 Seville one actually made it into production. Hubba is correct that it was initially proposed that the ’79 Eldorado be a bustle back but Cadillac’s general manager refused the idea. So the idea was then suggested for the Seville. Kady stated that it was Bill Mitchell selling the idea to upper management that got the proposal through.
I always liked this generation of GM “compacts” the best of all their lines in the 70’s. They’re about the size of a 1950’s Ford or Chevrolet, in the 3,500 lbs. range, rear drive with a 350 available and not the ponderous boats that the full-size and intermediates were–intermediates were the size of full-size 60’s cars. While the Cadillac Sevlle is built on the same chassis, it’s not the almost complete look-alike that the Monarch and Versailles were–practically a rebadged version of the former and indistinguishable. I know you don’t like it, but I feel like you could have found an example that wasn’t trashed out, which doesn’t help its perception any.
The Versailles didn’t even try to hide the fact that it was a Granada with a tire hump grafted on to the rear and a Lincoln grille affixed to the front. It even used the same carbureted 302 as the cheaper Ford. That car was more of a deadly sin than the first gen Seville ever thought of being.
What a fascinating thread! I don’t think that anyone really hates the gen 1 Seville. It was as American as could be, (absurdly so) and the right Cadillac for the era. It could have been better for sure and even world class, if they would have fitted it with the 500 ci. engine and the WS/6 suspension from the Trans Am. Now that would have been “The Standard of the World”.
That would have been too much to ask. It could have at least had the 403, but it wasn’t available until 1977. It was an era of being short changed on everything.
The great, practical advantage of the rear window(s) becoming almost vertical… Is greatly reducing sun damage to the interior (particularly the top of the rear seat upholstery), to say little of reducing car interior temperatures. Engineering-wise, the near-vertical rear window allows shorter overall car length, yet still providing sufficient, cubic-feet of room within the trunk.. and passenger rear compartment area (though I prefer a bit more leg room via a slightly-longer wheelbase—-like Ford did with 80s Town Cars versus Crown Vic’s & Gr Mrqs)
“Under-achieving”??? I dare say that as boomers were aging, reliability became increasingly important. Hello, Cad hurt themselves much more via their engine diaster, such as the 4100, 8-6-4, the Diesels… and the “doggy” Olds V-8s….. and displacements that were too small… weak on torque…. premature Olds 307 engine failures due to being over-worked for the job at hand…….. Self-inflicted, suicidal-to-Cadillac’s historical, earned reputation for high-quality engines that were second-to-none… contributed greatly to their massive fall (maybe more than anything else) from which Cadillac has never recovered, and probably never will.. especially from a historical perspective. The only, temporary help came in the 1990s, via using the proven SBC in the flagship RWD Brougham. Such, by then, was “too little, too late”, IMO. Yes, GM “got fat and lazy” many decades ago.. by failing to adequately PLAN for it’s long-term future. Thus, the Japs “ate their lunch”.
Can’t believe that the basic profile for the ’81 Buick Century I drove in college was over fifteen years old by the time I was driving one, used. Dated back to ’74.
Bad to the bone.
Had Cadillac produced an Opel Diplomat based Seville, when and what would they have likely replaced it with?
Could the 1978 Opel Senator or Holden Commodore have served as a suitable replacement for a Diplomat-based Cadillac Seville replacement?
Nice idea, but I couldn’t see that working without a total reskin. I think it was too radical.
The old Diplomat looked sort of Cadillacish, true, but the airy Senator/Commodore with their ultra-low beltlines and all that glass would have sent typical late-seventies (year, not age) Cadillac buyers into cardiac arrest. No privacy! No dignity! No…
Yet fifty years earlier Cadillac had been at the forefront of automotive style. Somehow they had become ossified. That is a deadly sin.
Was indeed envisioning a less radical reskin for a Senator/Commodore based Seville successor to replace a Diplomat Seville, like on the following stretched VX prototype that would in turn be succeeded by Senator/Commodore replacements that carry over the 1992 and 1997 Seville styling.
Thinking about it Cadillac could have easily fielded a trio of models on the same platform as recall the 1974-1980 Torana being in essence a short-wheelbase V-based model of almost similar size as an Ascona B (length aside due to the V8s), which could have also carried over the styling of the prototype above with an Cimarron-like engine range and be followed by a Zeta/Sigma type trio (including a BLS styled Torana TT36).
I’m glad I didn’t read this article when it was originally written (evil grin). I’m going to go out on a limb and say the ’75 Seville, the ’77 DeVille/Fleetwood, and the ’79 Eldorado were the last wise marketing moves Cadillac made for almost two decades.
Where Cadillac went horribly wrong had nothing to do with these cars. Cadillac owners were a pretty broad-minded group, and put up with a lot. What they wouldn’t tolerate was an unreliable car, or an underpowered car. In 1981, Cadillac introduced an unreliable 8-6-4 across the board. In ’82, they followed up with the 4.1, which was both unreliable and underpowered.
Meanwhile, over at Buick City, the ’85 Park Avenue was a good hit, and the ’91 was a home run. I’d like to know how many old Cadillac buyers wound up in those cars by virtue of both styling and solid mechanicals. GM, of course, could never leave well enough alone. The restyled Park Avenue looked like the prior model that had spent far too much time in a donut shop. Then came the Lucerne- hy build pretty cars, when anonymous would do?
Yep… GM committed more errors than I can count, but the Seville wasn’t one of them. BTW- a metal roof was available from ’77 on, and was a fairly popular option.
This Seville could only be a four-door replica for the 1963 Hawk GT (Gran Turismo), hidden behind the badge and mask of GM. And no thing else.
This is how it depicted in my thought.
The Cadillac Seville was not a deadly sin. You american tend to way to harsh at your own car industry. in the 70s, almost any american car was a better car than the usual cars we drove in Europe at the time.
In my family we have a 1976 Mercedes 280S, owned it since new, about 30.000 miles.The car looks great, handle ok, and the fit and finish is great.
But, the car is noisy, harsh riding, the automatic change gear quite harsh and the I6 engine sounds rather noisy at idle. Even the automatic choke is problematic on the MB.
The Cadillac Seville can not match the fit and finish of the Mercedes. But, the Seville was quiet, smooth riding, well equipped with a good AC/Heating system. Everything the Mercedes is not.
I have a 1967 Buick. In almost every way, that is a better car than the MB.
Why did the american yuppies wanted a Mercedes? The same reason we wanted an american Chevrolet Caprice over here: it was exotic, rare, something special.
I love these comparison articles where you can see similar styling or use of the same basic body, as we see above in the Nova and in the Pontiac comparisons. Keep ’em coming.
While ready to acknowledge GM once did build some great cars, I too am ready to bash the General for their sins. I owned Chebbies in the 80s and 90s and the reliability that I thought I was getting was quite absent.
Very much enjoying these pieces.
I find the attacks on Paul utterly disgusting
If you don’t like what he has to say move on
Those of us who enjoy his writings and thoughts will not miss you
Paul certainly made me think of the fist gen Seville in a different way. I had regular rides in one, it belonged to the boyfriend of one of the car pool moms that took me to junior high.
It was brand new, and the boyfriend and mom were a bit exotic for our group, she was a divorcee with a taste for the finer things in life. The Seville was triple yellow, quite a contrast to the dark green ’71 Plymouth Satellite wagon that another car pool mom drove.
When it came to displays of middle class affluence, I was more attuned to my friend’s father, an engineer, that drove a very conservative Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight.
The Seville was cramped, and in hindsight, I’m surprised that he let 5 good size teen boys pile in it. I guess there still was a market for 6 passenger sedans.
I do think the criticisms of the Seville sharing platforms, parts, and using outside vendors run to excess – it was nothing Cadillac hadn’t been doing for decades already, and nothing many other luxury makers haven’t also done.
The high price was a bit arrogant, but it’s worthwhile to note that the Seville had several standard items that were optional on the bigger Cadillacs – tilt wheel, deluxe trunk with pull-down, four wheel disc brakes among them. Still, I believe that comparably equipped, the Seville was disproportionately high priced. America was ready for a smaller Cadillac, and pitching it more as an entry level car might have tweaked Mercedes’ nose a bit. That high price on a middle size car carried through to the next generation, and became just another confusing part of the jillion models GM was pumping out in the ’80s.
Cadillac had lost much of what made a Cadillac special with all of its ’70s era cars. It could have made a recovery with the next generation of cars, but instead GM’s style, marketing, drive trains and reliability all became sub par, leading to issues nobody in 1976 ever thought the General would face.
I don’t think I have seen so much invective and personal attack thrown around since the Leyland P76 article!
I guess it is some measure of corporate success if people feel they have to leap in to defend a product, or a company, regardless of the facts presented. Shame there weren’t enough of these guys to keep GM solvent.
Personally, I find it interesting the GM’s much-vaunted Fisher Body (advertised all over the place, fancy plaques here and there like it meant something great) couldn’t work to Opel’s tolerances. I have to wonder whether that’s an artefact of the whole Imperial/Metric thing (1mm is much tighter than 1/16″), or whether Fisher was just sloppy in the interest of easier assembly. Or perhaps had gotten sloppy over the years? Does anyone know whether Ford and Mopar were any better in the body tolerance department?
I’m not going to buy into the whole Nova-vs-Seville argument. As a foreigner with no experience of either car beyond what I have read, I’ll just say GM had a lot of chutzpah making a smaller car with less material cost Cadillac’s most expensive model.
That was certainly a relevant point, although not the only one.
The issue wasn’t necessarily a matter of tolerating sloppiness, but more of the enormous practical difficulties involved in changing ANY large-scale manufacturing process. Fisher Body didn’t balk at the Opel Diplomat because they didn’t think they could build something that well. Their objection was that they simply weren’t set up to build it as designed, which meant that either there were going to have to be significant changes to existing procedures, tools, and training (which couldn’t necessarily be used with other Fisher Body products — tightening an Imperial bolt with a metric wrench may not have good results), or else there would have to be a substantial number of body engineering changes to the Diplomat design.
The best analogy I can think of is trying to make a recipe from a German cookbook in someplace like Denver, Colorado — the Mile High City, which is at an altitude of over 1,600 meters. You CAN probably make the recipe, but you’ll have to first account for the different units and the different ways products like butter are packaged in the U.S. compared to Germany. Then, you’ll have to figure out ways to account for the various ways the altitude affects cooking and baking, which the original recipe probably doesn’t provide for at all. It will probably take some trial and error to make it work satisfactorily, and even then, people who’ve tried the original German version may complain that it still isn’t exactly the same thing.
The point is that it’s not impossible, and wouldn’t have been then, but that it would have been a major project.
It should also be emphasized that Fisher Body, or really any manufacturing or assembly division of any automaker, was ALWAYS part of a dialogue about producibility. The body engineers would look at a new product design and point out issues: “We can’t reliably do that much curvature in that area, could we back it off about 20 percent?” or “This section looks thin enough that it might snap when it comes off the press” or the like. Sometimes, the design needs to change a bit, sometimes the manufacturing people can stretch a bit to make something work, but it’s a dialogue, and it can happen over many different elements of even a relatively conservative design. It can get complicated because a car or truck consists of thousands of pieces, and design issues with one piece can have a cascading effect.
THIS is where Cadillac should have gone, imo one of the most beautiful and tasteful sedans ever designed, and uniquely American. To me it’s so sad they didn’t follow this direction and also add advanced suspension and propulsion. It’s one of the proposals for the LaSalle, a variation on the Cady design above I believe, the ultimate “winning” proposal was re-named Seville on actual introduction.
Kady, not Cady…pardonnez moi.
Indeed. That’s an international style that would have found market acceptance anywhere. The road that should have been taken.
It does look quite like a 4th-gen (1992) Seville, which is what the 2nd-gen Seville should have looked like.
Is it just me, or does the Seville “coupe” pictured look a lot like a Plymouth Volare coupe?
Funny here, I’m not a GM fan, not a Cadillac fan, not a Seville fan, but I have to come to their defense on this one. Now I’m not a fan of it, but it was popular, sold well and made them lots of money, kind of what cars are supposed to do for car companies. Yeah, it was overpriced, could have been better, but I think it’s buyers were fairly happy.
My Dad had one, a company car I think, probably leased, but he seemed to like it. As we lived a couple of thousand miles away from each other at the time I never even saw it let alone drove it. And while not a car guy, he’d had a couple of MBs from his time in England and Europe, a 280 (I think E, not S) he was particularly fond of. He referred to the Seville as the “Baby Cadillac” even after I pointed out to him it was heavier.
Now I’ll take Paul’s word on this one, but to me it seemed like a 280E competitor, not an S class. So it sold sizzle not steak? That’s what GM did/does. To many it looked good, to me it looked goofy with the big tires and wheels, diameter big. But I wasn’t their market.
They made them money, I don’t think they were so awful that they killed future sales, I can’t call them a DS, even if I personally don’t like it.
It was definitely targeting the S-Class — the people involved in developing the Seville were clear about that. What you aim at and what you hit are not necessarily the same things.
Wow, they honestly believed their Seville would compete with the S-Class? I’m not sure there’s an adjective sufficient for that level of delusion. Either that or someone didn’t tell them benchmarking doesn’t mean doodling on a bench. I’m not a Mercedes loyalist of any kind, but no matter what lens I use, I see nothing to suggest they meaningfully aimed anywhere near the S-Class.
I think given a choice between a Nova-based Seville or an Opel Kapitan/Diplomat-based Seville, they made the right choice. An Opel-based Seville would have been a Catera two decades before the real one, with the same problems (a completely different set of parts, unfamiliarity to American dealership mechanics, etc.). Of course, given how longer Caddy buyers were clamoring for a smaller Cadillac, they should have never been so time-crunched to create the Seville, allowing for a bespoke platform or one that could be shared with an upscale Olds or Buick smaller sedan.
In the end, the Seville was an adequate stopgap that slowed the march away from Cadillac towards Mercedes, BMW, and Jaguar. It hid the relationship to the Nova quite well, both visually (inside and out) and in the way it drove. It should have bought time to design a real world-beater that would stem the tide completely, and I thought one might be forthcoming when I learned the next Seville would be based on the successful 1979 E body. Instead, the 2nd-gen 1980 Seville was the real deadly sin, which now had modern underpinnings but pointless 1930s styling (in back anyway; the front two-thirds of the car was modern 1980s Cadillac that clashed badly with the bustleback rear). Had the 1980 Seville looked and drove more like the 1992 Seville, Cadillac may have been able to stay atop the luxury field. As it is, they’re now in 6th place behind Tesla, BMW, M-B, BMW, Lexus, and Audi, and just slightly ahead of Acura and Volvo.
The other awkward point, vis-à-vis Opel and also Ford Europe, is that their efforts to battle Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and later Audi ultimately failed. GM and Ford kept trying, but it got harder and harder to convince European or British buyers to take an interest in big sedans without a “premium” badge, and even trying to spread the platform costs over a wider range of models for different markets didn’t make up for it.
People want to buy a car everyone knows is expensive. Cadillac was smart to do that with Seville, but they should have been moving their whole line and brand up-market in the 70s even at the expense of sales numbers, since Japan began forcing Chevrolet to improve or die, and BOP were going to get squeezed out. When prosperity returned after ’82, they would have been in a much better position when a lot more people could afford prestige cars.
They should have spent more on engineering and quality plastics and less on chrome. Could they have used the Diplomat’s or Corvette’s rear suspension? It might have improved interior room a bit.
What would have saved space would have been the Toronado/Eldorado UPP. Flat floor, no transmission tunnel, minimal rear unsprung weight — especially with independent rear suspension. In essence, what they subsequently did for the 1979 Eldorado and the bustleback Seville.
Not a deadly sin. Success of the Escalade and failure of Cadillac’s RWD sedans of the last 20 years shows that Cadillac buyers are not and never have been interested in BMW type cars.
The similarity in styling gave me a chance to poke fun at a much older, somewhat pompous co-worker. He’d picked up a used, well-maintained Seville. At a management meeting someone commented on his new car; I jumped in and said that those Cutlass sedans were pretty nice. He immediately made sure all knew it was no Cutlass, but a Cadillac Seville! I apologized, noting that I should have known it was a Nova underneath, not a Cutlass.
As I recall, the SWB S class and smaller MBs were pretty short on rear legroom, too. The high door sills for that vaunted vault feeling made it difficult to get in and out with big feet. The Seville had too much intrusion from the wheelwells.
Not the same at all…PERIOD