Junkyard Find: 1987 Cadillac Sedan De Ville, World's Yellowest Leather Interior Edition
One slimy thing that unscrupulous junkyard shoppers do is to lock all the doors of a car with interior parts they want to save for themselves on a later visit (presumably after they’ve done a few smash-and-grabs to get the money they need for the parts). They’re banking on the reluctance of more ethical junkyard shoppers to destroy a junkyard car’s window or punch out a door lock, and that’s the case with today’s Junkyard Find. Still, I was able to get some decent through-the-glass shots of the gloriously yellow and nicely preserved interior of this 1987 Cadillac Sedan de Ville.
Just look at those seats! This might be a Touring Sedan, but I didn’t see any badging and a bit of research indicates that the Touring Sedans had rear-seat headrests (which are not present on this car).
The Cadillac de Ville went to front-wheel-drive starting in the 1985 model year, but Cadillac kept some of the styling seen on the older rear-drive models preferred by the marque’s target demographic at the time.
This car is in very, very nice condition, with just a few easily-fixed cosmetic blemishes. Did the notoriously trouble-prone HT4100 engine under the hood give out?
The ’87 Sedan de Ville started at $21,659, which was a few hundred bucks less than the smaller BMW 325 sedan and about the same as the Saab 9000S sedan, but a massive $5,560 more than the very nice Nissan Maxima sedan. Cadillac Style or Nissan Style?
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
This was a HEAVY car. Could tell just by trying to open the hood after the struts gave out. Rear springs also retired early, so it always sagged in the back. But damn did this car exude a certain kind luxury.
The 4.1 did powerful suck. Horribly unreliable and woefully under-powered. GM fixed the problems with the 4.5, but it was still a dog. They finally punched it out to 4.9 where it had enough grunt so you could pull away from a 76 Maverick at a stop light. Instead of tweaking a kind of good engine, GM decided to try their hand at an over head cam mill, the 4.6. They should have just bought modular 8s from Ford.