Junkyard D'Elegance: Once-Mighty Cadillac's Downward Spiral
Cadillac’s peak as a build-quality leader and dominant luxury marque probably came earlier than the late 1960s— let’s say 1956— but the perception that GM’s flagship brand was losing ground started sometime soon after the first of the front-wheel-drive Eldorados hit the scene. By the late 1970s, The General was all about faux-metal emblems in cursive script and Beadazzler-applied plastic heraldic crests stuck all over Caddies.
The Cadillac name means something again (no thanks to a decade of blinged-out, Caddy-baded Suburbans), but what a climb out of the pit of Malaise it’s been!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Actually, in 06840, Cadillac does mean something, i.e., no class and no taste.
This reminds me of a 1982 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham modified by Schwartz Extreme Performance into a performance car that could easily be worthy of the 'V' designation. The Caddy in this article could easily benefit from such modifications.