Junkyard Find: 1989 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz
The Eldorado got downsized for the 1986 model year, as part of GM’s doomed 1980s efforts to beat Mercedes-Benz and BMW (which included such interesting-but-deeply-flawed money-losers-with-vaguely-European-sounding-names as the Cadillac Allanté, Buick Reatta, and Olds Troféo), and of course you could get this car with the tufted-button upholstery and padded roof that made it a Biarritz. Not many of these cars were sold in 1989, so today’s Junkyard Find is another one of those rare-but-not-so-valuable ones.
The price of a base ’89 Eldorado Biarritz with leather seats was $30,240, which comes to about 57 grand in 2015 dollars. A BMW 525i listed at $37,000 and the Mercedes-Benz 280E was $39,200, so any car shopper who felt the Eldorado Biarritz measured up to those two machines was getting a good deal with the Cadillac (though the ’89 Acura Legend LS coupe was a mere $28,377).
Sans-serif fonts make cars look more European, right? Right?
We can make fun of these cars now, but the ride on these cushy seats was very comfy.
The 4.5 liter version of the HT4100 V8 wasn’t quite as sophisticated as the luxury-car powerplants coming from across the oceans in 1989, but at least it wasn’t a Buick V6.
“Its driver-oriented engineering brings the road alive!”
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.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
Just say no to transverse-mounted FWD V8s. That's a brain damaged layout to begin with. Other than GM who else has ever tried this? There's so much comprised to begin with - torque steer, chassis weight distribution, access for maintenance, etc.
The thing that really bothered me about any 80s-early 90s GM cars was that the two doors felt like the doors weighed 1000 lbs each and the door hinges were made out of paper clips. So you open the door and the door drops down and you have to slam the hell out of it to get the door to close properly. It really made the cars feel like junk. Just compare a fox body Mustang vs an 80s F-body. The Mustang just felt MUCH better built, not to mention that most V8 F-bodies had that turd 305 vs the solid 302 in the Ford.