Vintage C/D Review: 1978 Cadillac Coupe De Ville – “Surprise! Opulence Can Be Fun!”

A year and a half after introducing the smaller Seville, Cadillac downsized its full-size models for 1977, making them a bit less grotesque in size and somewhat better to drive. Car and Driver, not Cadillac fans by any means, tried the downsized Cadillac Coupe de Ville in June 1978 and found it “surprisingly capable” as a car as well as a status symbol.

The thing to understand about this 1978 review, penned by the voluble and grandiloquent David E. Davis Jr., is that when it appeared, Cadillac was at the absolute height of its domestic popularity. The division had more than 1,600 U.S. franchises, which were doing a brisk business (an average of 18 cars per dealer per month). In fact, while the 1979 model year (which began about four months after this issue of Car and Driver hit newsstands) would Cadillac’s all-time best production year, the 1978 calendar year was the peak for new car registrations: 335,053 Americans bought new Cadillacs in 1978, representing 3.06 percent of all new cars registered in the U.S. that year.

Cadillac accomplished this with surprisingly little advertising. The division did advertise, of course, but its direct ad expenditures ($14.7 million in 1978) were among the lowest in the industry. Lincoln-Mercury spent three times as much on advertising as Cadillac did, and among GM brands, only GMC Truck spent less. Few Americans of the time needed to be told about Cadillac — a whole generation had grown up seeing it as the pinnacle of domestic automotive prestige, and now the division was cashing in.

It’s little wonder, therefore, that Cadillac weathered its first round of “downsizing” quite well. There had been some last-minute trepidation about that, since big car sales had improved considerably since the 1977 B- and C-bodies were planned in 1973, but it turned out Cadillac had no need to worry. New Cadillac registrations jumped from 293,716 in 1976 to 325,724 in 1977. Stretching 221.2 inches overall on a 121.5-inch wheelbase and weighing over 4,200 lb at the curb, the 1977 Cadillac De Ville was hardly small, but its 900-pound weight loss and smaller engine (if you can bear to call a 6,970 cc engine “smaller” than anything other than maybe a Rolls-Royce Merlin or a prewar Bugatti Royale) cut back its lunchtime drinking from three martinis to two — 14 mpg on the contemporary EPA combined cycle.

Davis began:

It’s a dirty shame that Cadillacs aren’t built in England or Germany. Their humble Detroit birthplace means that they never get taken seriously as automobiles. Rich Republican burghers want them because they’ve always believed that a Cadillac was their due, a perk, baked into the deal along with the country-club membership and the GOP-camouflage Hickey-Freeman suits. The nouveaux riches want them because the rich Republican burghers have them. Pimps are not unmoved by Eldorados, but they really prefer the big Mark V Continentals. People who read Road & Track magazine detest Cadillacs, their hatred falling only a few points short of that registered by the eco-troops, those sons and daughters of wealthy orthodontists from the Bronx, who long for pre-Industrial Revolution America and dream of wildernesses organized along the lines of a Montessori school.

Contemplating the staggering Cadillac sales figures of the late ’70s, the contempt of the era’s buff book editors, and the sometimes very defensive reactions of hardcore Cadillac fans, I would say that most people of the time fell into one of three camps when it came to these cars:

1. Those who loved Cadillacs and what they represented with little reservation;
2. Those who liked what Cadillac used to be, but preferred some prelapsarian era when the brightwork was shinier and the wood trim less fake; or
3. Those who disdained these cars and all their social and symbolic connotations, whatever their tangible merits or lack thereof.

For a long time, this split often fell along generational lines. The median Cadillac buyer of this period was 50-something, what pundits later called “The Greatest Generation”: born in the 1920s, often veterans of WW2 or the Korean War, now moving into middle age in an era that had been marked by sometimes spectacular postwar affluence. Their children, the Baby Boom generation, had different priorities, and on the whole tended to fall into the third camp. Buff book editors of the time were not necessarily Boomers (Davis was born in 1930) — although their readers predominantly were — but they generally prided themselves on being iconoclasts not beholden to the popular tastes of The Masses, and might fall into either the second or the third group, depending on whether their style ran to wistful nostalgia or performative vitriol.

Davis again:

For all their prejudiced points of view about Cadillacs, none of these people ever think of them as cars. Status symbols, sex symbols, power symbols, energy-consumption symbols, decay-of-the-American-dream symbols, but never as sublimely comfortable ways to get from Point A to Point B in a seated position. The Cadillac people must bear some of the responsibility for this state of affairs, of course. They’ve never really sold Cadillacs as cars. The bland, Osterized sales pitch for The Standard of the World generally tells the prospective buyer a great deal about Cadillac’s assessment of him, but precious little to help him assess the purchase of an automobile.

Davis acknowledged that the Cadillac was “a very good car, reliable to a fault, undemanding to live with, and loaded with potential resale value.” Honda and Toyota might take issue with his contention that “these are not the virtues upon which legends are made,” but so far as the popularity of Cadillac went, I agree that those characteristics were more rationalization than driving force for the many buyers laying out $12,000 or more for a new Cadillac in this period. (An Oldsmobile 98 was also a good car with quite decent resale value, and it cost thousands less.)

Davis mused:

The real reason is that Cadillacs really used to be something special. They were faster than less expensive American cars. They held the road better (see “A heavy car holds the road,” “More road-hugging weight,” et cetera). In the 1950 Carrera Pan Americana, 21 of 126 starters were Cadillacs, and the big beasts took second and third places overall. Mr. Briggs S. Cunningham put a whole slew of European hotshoes on the trailer at Le Mans in 1950 when the Collier brothers came in tenth in his slightly modified Cadillac coupe. Cadillacs were, in those dim, bygone days, built to a higher standard of engineering and workmanship than Chevrolets, and their styling was distinctly their own. Latter-day Cadillac buyers who were mere boys back then undoubtedly carry deeply imprinted tribal memories of those cars, subliminal pokes and prods that lead them to see shades of sharp-edged ’41 Fleetwoods in today’s Cadillac de Villes and Broughams.

… it is undoubtedly true that Cadillac loyalists believe their cars to be the pinnacle of automotive-engineering achievement, but it is unfortunately also true that they’re quite wrong. The Cadillac is an extremely well done execution of the basic American car idea, as conceived some time before World War II, and it is undeniably a great car for the money, but it will have to go like the very devil to catch those cars that are “at the forefront of automotive technology.”

As anyone who’s read Car and Driver from the ’60s to the ’80s will recall, Davis was very keen on BMW, and his ecstatic reviews of cars like the BMW 2002 probably played no small role in cementing the German brand’s image among American Boomers, affluent or not.

The buff books were also very keen on senior Mercedes-Benz models, although Davis had been cool on the Mercedes 450SEL 6.9 he’d tried a year earlier, calling it “an engineer’s tour de force” that “won’t treat you with the respect a man who spends $40,000 for a car deserves.” A 1978 Cadillac De Ville didn’t cost nearly that much and was far more concerned with pampering than Autobahn-storming. Davis remarked:

Our test car was a 1978 Coupe de Ville, and we loved it in spite of ourselves. It weighed in at 4270 pounds and it was 18.4 feet long, making it the lightest Cadillac you can buy (edging the Seville by just four pounds) and almost the shortest (not quite a foot and a half longer than the Seville). It is—surprise, surprise—the nicest of the bunch to drive, offering a much nicer blend of room, ride, comfort, visibility, handling and performance than any of the others, including the Seville and the Eldorado. Why this should be so is hard to divine, but the Seville is claustrophobic and its ride primitive by comparison, and the Eldorado has become grossly corpulent, so much so that the inherent benefits of its front-wheel drive are virtually wiped out, The poor old Eldo is actually heavier than Cadillac’s seven-passenger limousine!

Speaking of limousines: For the sidebar, Car and Driver talked to a New York City limo driver, Danny Hogan (pictured above right), and asked him to try a 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood 75 limousine:

He showed up at the Red Ball Garage with the old tried and true ’73, which we asked him to park, and we (literally) stuffed him into the new one. All you rich folks out there, take warning: if you’re planning to buy a new Cadillac limousine with chauffeur division, hire a chauffeur who is either a double amputee or a midget. The ample physique of Mr. D. Hogan simply overflowed the available space. What’s more, the seatback is so vertical that the unfortunate driver feels like he’s sitting on a fence with a steering wheel screwed into his solar plexus.

What about the first-class compartment? How do the passengers fare? Well, the paying customers’ compartment is better than the driver’s, but we have to admit that it’s a bit cramped for four, even when two of the four are ladies as soft and pliant as Mesdames Jeanes and Davis. What’s more, the shortage of space has dictated the removal of the old power-operated up-and-down chauffeur division. Now there’s this really tacky sliding-glass affair, manually operated, that lacks even the slightest trace of Cadillac’s formerly classy approach to these matters.

I’m not going to transcribe some of Davis’s more off-color remarks or Hogan’s anecdote about the beginning of his chauffeuring career, but here are their driving and riding impressions:

One area of real improvement, though, is the quality of the ride. The old limousines were pretty long between the wheels and they took some unnerving swoops and dives as they traversed the pockmarked No Man’s Land that is Gotham. What’s more, the sensation was amplified by all that length of passenger compartment plus hood that stretched out ahead of a rear-seat passenger. The new one, being both shorter and narrower, behaves more like a regular American sedan. What we’ve lost in length (read “status”) we’ve more than made up in manageability and improved ride motions. An interesting side effect of downsizing—a visual one, in this case—is that the narrowness of these new GM big cars is greatly accentuated by the greater overall length of the limousine body. The car becomes, in effect, tubular. Some like it, some don’t, but we find the new limo to be pleasantly lean and taut.

Danny Hogan thought it was gorgeous. He admitted that he had trouble finding room for his whole self in the driver’s office, but he allowed that it was a splendid car to drive nonetheless. He enjoyed wheeling it through traffic, and parking it was child’s play.

The as-tested price of the Coupe de Ville C/D tested, which had the Cabriolet package (the padded vinyl half-roof, which most other manufacturers at the time would have called a landau roof), automatic level control, leather upholstery, “dual comfort” split bench seat, and an assortment of minor options, came to $13,375.

Davis remarked:

This is not chicken feed, but neither is it very much money to spend for such a remarkable bundle of automotive virtues, luxuries, features, and super-zoomy Astro-Boy gadgetry. The price puts it right in there with the Porsche 924 ($10,995), the Peugeot 604 ($10,990) and the Saab Turbo ($9,998), while the obvious thrust of the Cadillac concept and its execution puts it right up against the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II ($48,600), the Mercedes-Benz 450 SEL ($27,945) and, of course, the Lincolns.

These comparisons say a lot about Davis’s mentality, or at least his perceptions of his readership. The number of prospective Cadillac buyers who would have contemplated buying a Porsche 924 or a Saab (turbocharged or not) instead of a De Ville, or vice versa, was minuscule. (Almost no Americans of any persuasion were contemplating the purchase of a Peugeot 604, even if they knew what it was.) A Cadillac customer might well appreciate the idea of a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II, but its price made it a distant fantasy object for most of the middle-class people who were buying Cadillac sales in the late ’70s. An up-and-coming cocaine trafficker might conceivably buy a Rolls for himself, a De Ville for his wife, and a Porsche for his mistress, but that kind of overlap was a niche market even in Miami.

Davis again:

The de Ville lacks many of the engineering and performance features that set the Mercedes apart, and it doesn’t have the Rolls’s panache of matched veneers and Connolly hides and hand-rubbed everything, but it more than holds its own if the mission is to transport four normal adults at reasonable speeds over American roads in mind-boggling luxury. In its relationship with the Continentals, we deem it the winner, because GM’s whole philosophy of car “feel” is so much more to our liking than Ford’s (at least as expressed in Ford’s current lineup of big cars). Cadillacs have rather sensitive controls, with quite a lot of “feel” fed back to the driver. Lincolns are Novocain-numb: no feeling, no sensitivity, just softness and silence and the fear that it’s all been taken out of the driver’s hands.

Their tester had Twilight Sentinel and Guide-Matic automatic headlight control, which Davis never liked and regarded with suspicion. While automatic headlight controls seemed the answer to a question I’ve never felt inclined to ask, I’ve always found his mistrust of these options (which he calls “Kafkaesque”) a bit silly. Cadillac offered these features for many, many years, and while popularity is not necessarily a sign of virtue, the division would have dropped the options years before if buyers weren’t ordering them or found the controls “fiendish indeed.” (I’m not convinced that Guide-Matic wasn’t more complicated than just dimming the lights manually as needed, but both systems had a clearly marked “OFF” position if you couldn’t be bothered.)

The “Counterpoint” box on this page offers some supplemental commentary by other C/D editors:

• Steve Thompson called the Coupe de Ville “a civilized, decent performer” and “a very comfortable car” that “will even let you feel something of the way the suspension and steering are handling the messages the road is sending,” a huge improvement over the 1975 Coupe de Ville he’d driven previously.
• Don Sherman found “a solid piece of machinery under this Coupe de Ville’s embroidery that left me favorably impressed. He remarked, “What you have to do is drive the thing hard enough to bottom out all the spongy padding and Jell-O-soft bushings. … It’s the biggest cruiser I’ve ever pitched sideways into an entrance ramp.” However, he warned that the brakes faded rapidly with this kind of treatment.
• Larry Griffin called the 1977 Coupe de Ville “a revelation” that could be used to play “low tricks on guys in two-seaters and two-liter sedans” without alarming the occupants,” and felt the ’78 was even better. “You’ll not be dulled into a stupor by the Coupe de Ville,” he concluded, which for a buff book review of a car like this constituted very high praise.

Davis continued:

Believe it or not, and you probably won’t, the Cadillac is nimble! Once launched, a feeling of undamped softness comes up from the wheels, but this quickly fades as you get used to the car. It has a surprisingly capable suspension system, handling frost heaves and potholes with equal aplomb and enabling an enthusiastic driver to hurtle through corners and place the car where he wants it with remarkable ease. The six-way power seat and the tilt and telescope steering column augment incrementally the driver’s ability to come to terms with this large car. It is not a BMW 733i, and you might want something else for your Alpine land-speed record attempt, but we liked driving it.

He was not so impressed with the latest GM cruise control, which didn’t didn’t work right, perhaps due to what sounds like an electrical fault.

Davis continued:

It’s too bad that American manufacturers are so intimidated by the cost bugaboos of really important product features like independent rear suspension, They know they can get their money out of junk like opera lamps and Twilight Sentinels, but they just don’t have any confidence in the more esoteric appeal of chassis and suspensions like those of Jaguar, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The de Ville, along with the big limousine, is now the only Cadillac that doesn’t have four-wheel disc brakes as standard equipment. We applaud the fact that Cadillac’s philosophy has come that far, but now we’re impatient for that last step toward a real fine-car commitment.

As things turned out, they would be waiting a long time. He went on:

… [M]ost of the people who buy them don’t seem to care. We, on the other hand, would dearly love to drive a Coupe or Sedan de Ville modified and breathed upon in the manner of our Seville project car (August ’77 issue). The new GM big cars, introduced in 1977 and including such impressive and gratifying machines as the Chevrolet Impala/Caprice with F41 suspension (August ’77) and the Buick LeSabre Sport Coupe (May ’77), have proved to be the best sedans the corporation ever made. The Cadillac shares all their basic strengths and undoubtedly has terrific potential as a luxurious car for American enthusiasts, given the same specific attention to handling and roadholding.

It’s true that the F41 suspension package downsized Impala/Caprice quite competent on the road, but I’m dubious about how far a similar treatment would have gone in making the late ’70s Coupe de Ville “a luxurious car for American enthusiasts”: One look at the acres of fake wood, the slippery leather bench seat, and the lack of any instruments other than the speedometer and tiny fuel gauge shows that the De Ville was focused in a completely different direction.

As for their Seville project car (which CC has covered before), it obtained a modest improvement in handling at the expense of a brutally stiff ride, a wheel and tire package that was too big to fit the wheel wells, and a legally questionable gutting of the 5-mph bumpers that would have presented nasty liability issues in an accident or at resale — hardly a model for Cadillac production cars.

The downsized 1979 Eldorado, not yet released when this review appeared, did have both four-wheel disc brakes and independent rear suspension, although its semi-trailing-arm layout was selected for packaging efficiency and ride quality rather than handling precision. Even with the firmer touring suspension offered later, the geometry was not ideal for cornering prowess. As Davis admitted here:

The world’s best road system can be a liability. The Cadillac is designed to be master of the roads most well-fixed Americans normally drive upon, and this prevents it from making any wholesale assault on cars like Mercedes, BMW or Jaguar.

Today, of course, with a few regional exceptions, American roads are in terrible shape, and the vast expanses of smooth pavement that Detroit once took for granted in suspension design are a distant memory, something that seems unlikely to change in our lifetimes.

Davis concluded:

We may not be the people the Cadillac designers had in mind when they engineered the de Ville series, but it’s a little startling to look up one morning and realize how far they’ve shifted their product focus in our direction, These are good cars, easily upgraded to terrific cars—with the right shocks, springs, stabilizer bars, wheels and tires—and, compared to prices of the good European stuff, a relative steal. Maybe a hot-rodded Cadillac is your best hedge against the strength of the deutsche mark and the decline of the dollar.

This was both optimistic and a laughable example of buff book tunnel vision (people who bought Cadillacs generally weren’t hod-rodders, and if you wanted to build a hot rod out of a big GM car, starting with a police-package Impala was easier and cheaper than trying to make a Cadillac into something it had never been designed to be).

However, Davis was prescient in one respect: As its tremendous ’70s popularity evaporated in the ’80s and ’90s, Cadillac would eventually become a kind of budget luxury brand, unwilling or unable to go head-to-head with the better European or Japanese models in performance, refinement, engineering, or prestige, but offering greater size and more gadgetry for less money. Even the generally competent 2003 Cadillac CTS, launched about 25 years after this De Ville, couldn’t offer much of a unique selling proposition beyond being a 5-Series-size car for 3-Series money.

What happened, ultimately, was as much a demographic shift as anything else. People in the first of the three groups I mentioned earlier, the ones who loved Cadillac for what it represented, hit their 60s (if they weren’t there already), then their 70s, and eventually their next car became their last car. People in the third group, including a lot of the 20something Boomers who read this review in 1978, went right on turning up their noses at Cadillac, and the ones who became affluent yuppies in the ’80s bought BMWs, Audis, and Acuras instead. Many of their kids did likewise, and if they developed any affection for Cadillac, it was mostly as a charming or kitschy artifact of an earlier age before their time.

A few closing remarks on the data panel: Car and Driver managed 0 to 60 mph in 10.6 seconds, the quarter mile in 18.2 seconds at 78.8 mph, and 108 mph top speed, which wasn’t quite in the league of a 1964 De Ville, but not bad at all for the Malaise Era. No skidpad numbers (C/D didn’t necessarily include those yet except for special features), but a 207-foot 70 to 0 stopping distance, which wasn’t terrible for the time. (Judging by the bar graphs, they had a bad time with their 1977 Mark V, a test I don’t think I’ve read.)

One area where Cadillac had moved forward in the ’70s was on finally standardizing commonly specified equipment. Power windows had been standard on the De Ville for a long time, but automatic climate control had been at least technically optional until 1975, and by this time, a power driver’s seat and an AM/FM radio were standard as well. As you can see from the list of options, Cadillac still found ways to nickel-and-dime its customers ($112 for power locks seems outrageous on a two-door model, as does $58 for floor and trunk mats), but buyers who dug in their heels on extra-cost options still got a pretty complete car, which hadn’t always been the case.

Adjusted for inflation, the $13,375 as-equipped price of this 1978 Cadillac Coupe de Ville is about $68,150 in 2025 dollars, with a relative worth of about $73,450, not an outrageous sum for a somewhat glitzy, not always tasteful, but solidly competent big luxury car — even one that wasn’t comparable (or intended to be comparable) to European luxury sports sedans.

 

Note: This is a greatly expanded version of an older post, with different page scans.

Related Reading

COAL #7: 1977 Cadillac Coupe de Ville – The Things That Dreams Are Made Of (by Jose Delgadillo)

Curbside Classic: 1977 Cadillac Coupe DeVille Cabriolet d’Elegance – There Aren’t Enough Words In The Dictionary To Properly Describe It (by Paul N)

eBay Classic: 1977 Cadillac Coupe de Ville – More Butter Please! (by Tom Klockau)

Road Trip Classic: 1978 Cadillac Sedan DeVille – Across The Great Divide In A Grand Old Lady (Len Peters)

Decade De Ville: Cadillac’s Bestselling ’70s De Villes (by me)

Vintage C/D Review: 1979 Cadillac Eldorado – A Brilliant False Dawn (by me)