When did Cadillac lose it's prestige?

[pwd72s]

Originally Posted by kaisen

Cadillac of the Rat Pack era were COOOOL

Cadillac post-Sinatra, not so much

As good a definition as any...

[varmint]

had a 69 deville convertible. 472 v8, leather and chrome everything. overall excellent car. like cruising on a cloud at 110mph. back seat slept two. could take out a schoolbus head on.

if cadillac still made that exact car with updated tech it would sell better than the cts. that thing looks like an origami dog turd.

[RANDY P]

Originally Posted by varmint

had a 69 deville convertible. 472 v8, leather and chrome everything. overall excellent car. like cruising on a cloud at 110mph. back seat slept two. could take out a schoolbus head on.

if cadillac still made that exact car with updated tech it would sell better than the cts. that thing looks like an origami dog turd.

"Origami dog turd" LOL!

I'd rock one if I had the cash, considering that it's basically suicide to your wallet owning a Benz.

rjp

[looneybin]

it was when they removed the ducks from the emblem - that was the final nail

[yetibone]

Everything Cadillac made with a 4.1, 4.5, 4.9, and 4.6 Northstar engine was a head gasket and intake gasket blowing, oil leaking, electrical problem having, all falling apart nightmare.

[regency]

GM and all of American cars lost me around 1972. As far as Cadillac, when you drive a new one off the lot, it then looses about 1/2 it's value.

Steve

73 911T MFI Coupe, Aubergine.

[Scott R]

Originally Posted by yetibone

Everything Cadillac made with a 4.1, 4.5, 4.9, and 4.6 Northstar engine was a head gasket and intake gasket blowing, oil leaking, electrical problem having, all falling apart nightmare.

My last year of high school and my first year of college I was an apprentice Cadillac technician, and later a regular line tech after that. For those first two years I did mainly engine swaps on 4.5l engines.

Every 4.5l was the same problem, chocolate milk in the oil pan. Between my master and myself, we could have one out in an hour. And we did the almost assembly line style every day. The new motor would come on a pallet and the old one left on the same pallet. GM would cover the part and the customer would cover the labor.

That did all seem to end with the 4.9 though. We didn't see a lot of issue with those early on. But then came the Northstars and it was back to pulling engines again day in and day out.

[azasadny]

Cadillac lost it's prestige when every ghetto dweller in Detroit got one.

[Normy]

1977.

The DeVille was now a chevy caprice with a 425 cubic inch engine.

425 cubic inches? This 7.0 liter engine made all of 180 hp, which is less than several VW/Audi 1.8T's [109 cubic inch engines...] from the early 2000's.

-My dad! In my opinion, my father never understood how to spend money. He grew up in the 1950's in upstate New York [Binghamton], and he grew up idolizing Cadillacs about the same way that I find Porsche's fascinating. The difference between me and him: He thinks the lower the price the better the deal, while I want more information.

Dad saw a '77 Cadillac with a "FOR SALE" sign on the side of the road in June 1978, and after dinner me and him rode in his '72 PINTO [hello?] to the car on the side of the road.

"Dad? It's pink!"

"He only wants $8500 for it! Its a good Cadillac!

"Dad? It's pink!"

"It's not pink, it is just kind of beige"

"DAD! The damn car is pink!"

"Son, i've talked to you about this. Please don't swear"

"Ok dad, but this car is still f$$$ing pink!"

[dirty look from dad]

Well, the long and short is that my dad bought the '77 De Ville. A year later, my mom was driving when the car got hit on the passenger side near the door, and that side was rebuilt, and I was fascinated to watch how it was done..... but I refused to be seen in that car!

-My parents liked to drive around neighborhoods in the evening after treating me and my brother to an ice-cream. I used to hide behind the "c" pillar, hoping that nobody I knew would see me. At first it was simply the fact that it was a Cadillac- in the late '70's, on Grosse Ille....if your parents drove one of these? The other kids taunted you. My best friend [friend at all?] rejected me when he and his parents found out that my parents had bought a... "Cadillac"

"Jimmy Tallman" , the real reason was that his family was falling apart. The following year, his mother divorced his dad; he attacked me one day, and we fought, two 11 year olds. I didn't understand what happened until later when his divorced mother told my mother that her son was rebelling against everyone, so it wasn't anything I had done. We symbolized their failure. I guess the new "Cadillac" in my family was symbol of failure in theirs.

[Why is it that I tend to create animosity just by trying to improve myself, and be the best person I can be?]

I have so many flaws that I cannot believe it. That "Bimini Beige" Cadillac is just a perfect symbol of me and my childhood. Strange, unique, hated, yet when i went to college and got away from my parents I actually turned from a '77 Coupe DeVille into a '77 Porsche 928 with the Op-Art interior-

N

[MRM]

GM degraded the Cadillac brand for so many years, trading on its name for short term profits for so long that it's hard to pinpoint exactly when Cadillac went from the "Cadillac" of brands to a laughingstock. My sense is that the progression starts in the 50s. As Tabs' pointed out, Cadillac was the symbol of postwar America, reaching its Zenith in the late 50s. The brand was so strong that it practically became a trademarked noun, like Crescent Wrench, Xerox, etc. The 60s saw the brand retain its value. But as with football teams, if brands aren't improving, they're getting worse.

Cadillac treated water through the 60s, but the brand was so strong that all the people who were kids in the 50s wanted one and were willing to buy one, regardless of quality, just to feel they had attained the object of their desire: a Cadillac daily driver.

By that time, the Cadillac demographic had gotten so old that "Cadillac" became a bit of a joke to the rest of the population. It meant over the hill people driving huge boats of cars that were as out of step with the times as the people who bought them. This would be the early 70s with the Arab oil embargo and the automotive horrors that it wrought.

But the brand was still so strong that it continued through the 70s, selling larger and more impractical cars than any other brand would dare.

By the late 70s, Cadillac had become nothing more than rebadged Chevy, Olds or Buick models. You paid extra to get a slightly fancier trim and the name. The Cimeron of the early 80s was the final nail in the coffin: a Chevy Citation "X" body rebadged with the Cadillac name.

After that the brand was a joke. Anyone old enough to want one was old enough to make fun of. When the Lethal weapon movies came around, Joe Pesci's walking joke of a character, Leo Goetz, drove the latest model Cadillac convertible, and it was the perfect metaphor of showy self delusion of grandeur.

It took more than 30 years to go from the pinnacle of design to a bad joke, and it will take almost that long to return the brand to relevance. They have made a good start. But it will be another 30 years before the kids who grew up laughing at grandpa’s car are gone and a new generation of buyers have Cadillacs without the stigma that GM earned through long, hard, determined work to degrade one of the strongest brands known to man.

[dan88911]

Cadillacs lost it's prestige when it failed to live up to it's motto " An America Tradition a Standard for the World".

[VINMAN]

In the mid '70s, Caddys just became rebadged Buicks and Oldsmobiles.

[VINMAN]

Originally Posted by dondarnell

I do not understand the critism of Caddillac here. Current Caddies, at least the CTS and Escalade, are the best Caddies ever made. I moved from a 05 Audi to a 08 CTS and there was no comparision, and the cars cost pretty much the same (43k). My only complaint was that the AWD in the Caddy was not as seamless as the Audi, but Audi has been doing that for a while. If the sourness is directed at GM's finacial troubles, then one must have overlooked Porsche's 11 (!!) near collapes, and BMW's several near failures, just to name a few. Where's the love for America's premiere brand?

And, no, not defending my car, traded it for a 2010 Camaro. AND, I don't work for GM, even indirectly.

The Caddy's of today are not the Caddys of yore. They were all about class and luxury. They stood out in the crowd. CTS is just a clone of a euro sports coupe. Escalade.... speaks for itself.

[audiman08]

While Cadillacs aren't the classy cars they used to be, I still think they're doing much better than Lincoln...talk about badge engineering. I'm pretty impressed with Cadillac's performance stats, if nothing else...then again Caddys were never meant to be high-performance cars, but whatever.

[speeder]

I have lots of fond Cadillac memories:

-My first car ever was a 1970 Sedan deVille in 1975 when I was 16. It belonged to the father of one of my close friends and he had sort of abandoned it due to some financial/legal problems. It was left covered in dirt at a condo parking lot in the suburbs and offered to me for a few hundred dollars. (Don't remember exact price). He neglected to tell me that the bank was looking for it, that's another whole story...

-Going further back, my best friend's Dad bought a new '69 Sedan deVille when I was 10. They were wealthy and his Dad was a conservative Republican type, they also had a nice plane, (twin-engine Bonanza), and several boats + a cabin on Gull Lake. I remember riding out to Flying Cloud airport to take the plane for a spin once, he let me take the controls for a while. I was 10 or 11.

-Our neighbors across the street had a beautiful '65 or '66 Fleetwood sedan in triple-Navy blue, it was the first air-conditioned car that I remember riding in. My parents never sprung for A/C in those days, we had a '63 Falcon wagon.

And so on and so on..........they still had some class in the '60s, IMO. Even in the early '70s, even of the quality control was taking a dive. They were super-nice when they were new, just did not hold-up over time...

[The Gaijin]

They have come back a little bit. But they destroyed a lot of good will..

Compared to the Lincoln brand - they have fared well. Does anyone actually walk into a dealer and buy a Lincoln sedan today? It looks like 90% of them are fleet rentals and airport "limos" - and wind up as abused and ratty car service cars..

Funny to read that the late '50's and early 60's was some sort of idealized time for this marque. The new Lincoln Continental came along in what, 1961? The Caddy became frumpy overnight..

[tabs]

Originally Posted by azasadny

Cadillac lost it's prestige when every ghetto dweller in Detroit got one.

Somebody finally said it...and that happened in the early to mid 60's...didn't I say something about that when I used the term the "Middle Class" which is an Obama euphemism

There is a term called being "Nigger Rich" which is the description for having a brand new Caddy parked in front of your shack.

[speeder]

Keep it classy, San Diego.

[audiman08]

Most of the "gangsta" Cadillacs I see are the late 70s or 80s models (the most undesirable ones)...I don't see a lot of STS-V/CTS/CTS-Vs or classic 50s-60s Caddies with 22" spinners running around. Actually, you mostly see cheaper models like Caprices, Bonnevilles, Eighty-Eights, etc. with that treatment. So, as far as I'm concerned...they can have those models.

[anthom]

My father & uncle always drove Caddies. 57 eldo, 61 eldo, 65 coupe,
69 coupe (a real beauty), 71 sedan, 73 sedan.
I always had a 3 year old Riviera 64,67,71, 75 The used Rivs were
always in perfect condition & very resonbly priced.
The Caddies started to decline 1971 and most of the 80 era cars
were trash but I could not resist the 80 to 85 eldorados. Owned
the 81 with 4-6-8 and once the computer was set correctly it ran
great. The 1985 with the works was a great car with class.
The late era DTS with the performance package is a good car for the
money