#CadillacCatera

Starting in the late 1950s, officers in The General’s Michigan command post pushed hard to get Americans to buy German-built Opels. Buick dealers sold Kadetts, GTs, and Mantas well into the 1970s, and Isuzu-badged Kadett Cs could be purchased here as late as 1984. One of the most ambitious attempts to move Opels out of North American showrooms took place during the 1997 through 2001 model years when the Opel Omega B became the Caddy That Zigged. Here’s a final-year Catera in a northeastern Colorado yard.

This week’s AMA is a double-header, courtesy of reader Mark, who might be the only person who will cop to owning both a Cadillac Catera and a Jaguar X-Type.

We’ve made it pretty plain that the floor is definitely open here at TTAC for reader contributions of all types. Most of all, we’d like you to contribute cash via Paypal, or buy something from Derek’s Amazon wishlist, but if pressed we will also accept Sunday Stories, reader-ride reviews, editorials, and all sorts of other features.

It’s possible, however, that you don’t want to write for TTAC at all. You want to write for a major automotive publication or the “wheels” section of a newspaper. If that’s the case, you’ll need to learn how to slam the holy hell out of a manufacturer without appearing to have done so. One of the most frequent ways in which this happens is the “First Paragraph Of The C/D First Drive” technique. It goes like so:

The Cadillac Catera, a rebadged Opel Omega that was supposed to entice car shoppers about 50 years younger than the typical (non-Escalade) Cadillac buyer of the time, disappeared from the streets of North America without leaving much of a trace. Sufficient Cateras remain, however, to ensure that examples will show up in wrecking yards from time to time; in this series, we’ve seen this ’97, this ’98, and now today’s find.

After not seeing a single Catera on the street for several years, I ran into this ’98 Catera in a Denver wrecking yard over the winter. That’s the last time I’ll see one of those, I thought, but then a 24 Hours of LeMons team raced a Catera in South Carolina (as the ill-advised result of all my demands for a LeMons Catera). That Cadillac failed spectacularly, of course… and now here’s another Catera in a Denver junkyard!