Junkyard D'Elegance: Once-Mighty Cadillac's Downward Spiral

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

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
Murilee Martin

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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  • Thornmark Thornmark on Mar 19, 2011

    Actually, in 06840, Cadillac does mean something, i.e., no class and no taste.

  • And003 And003 on Apr 06, 2012

    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.

  • ToolGuy Honda was robbed.
  • ToolGuy "Honey, someone is trying to cross the moat again"
  • Rochester "better than Vinfast" is a pretty low bar.
  • TheMrFreeze That new Ferrari looks nice but other than that, nothing.And VW having to put an air-cooled Beetle in its display to try and make the ID.Buzz look cool makes this classic VW owner sad 😢
  • Wolfwagen Is it me or have auto shows just turned to meh? To me, there isn't much excitement anymore. it's like we have hit a second malaise era. Every new vehicle is some cookie-cutter CUV. No cutting-edge designs. No talk of any great powertrains, or technological achievements. It's sort of expected with the push to EVs but there is no news on that front either. No new battery tech, no new charging tech. Nothing.
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