In 1979 Cadillac launched an advanced halo car. The Cadillac Seville boasted the kinds of equipment we take for granted in cars today like self-leveling suspension, digital gauges, and absolutely power everything. The Seville also came with two engines of the future, but hilariously poor implementation of this future tech and a controversial design mars this burned-out halo’s history. We think it’s time to forgive the sins of 1980s General Motors.
Welcome to the first entry in a series we’re calling Automotive Pardons. We’re unapologetically pro-car at the Autopian. We love the icons and we love the stinkers. We love EVs and we love ICE. We just love cars. Every once in a while, we feel as if a car in history wasn’t given a fair shake. Or perhaps enough time has passed that a car’s faults don’t really matter anymore. Regardless, we think some vehicles deserve a pardon for the crimes they’ve been convicted of in the past.
You’ve already seen us pardon some vehicles in the past from the Pontiac Aztek and the Volkswagen New Beetle to the Dodge Caliber and the Chrysler PT Cruiser. We’re finally giving these sorts of stories their own dedicated category.
One of history’s maligned rides is the second-generation Cadillac Seville.
On the surface, this car is easy to hate. It’s a vehicle that’s clearly from the 1980s but has a rear-end design that’s trying its hardest to go back to the 1930s. Then there are the engines. Cadillac saddled these with Oldsmobile’s infamously unreliable diesel engine and then gave you the option for GM’s also infamously unreliable displacement-on-demand engine. But look past this and I think there’s something awesome for the Radwood-era collector.
Imported From Detroit
The Seville is a nameplate that hasn’t been around for two decades, but when it launched in 1976 the vehicle was a big deal. This luxury car was Cadillac’s answer to European imports.
The Seville was also more than just an American import. As Hagerty notes, Cadillac faced peculiar headwinds in the 1970s. The brand, which was known for its large and ostentatious vehicles, watched as some American customers darkened the showrooms of European automakers. While a Cadillac was practically large enough to land a Cessna on, the German imports were comparatively svelte.
As Hagerty continued, this baffled Cadillac. For decades, Americans with money overflowing from their wallets purchased the largest, grandest vehicles. Having a Cadillac — The Standard Of The World — meant you made it. So why were some of Cadillac’s clientele spending their valuable money on smaller, seemingly lesser imports?
Research conducted by Cadillac revealed a new type of luxury customer. Americans were getting fed up with a perceived loss in quality and exclusivity in American cars, plus, these drivers just weren’t really into commanding land yachts anymore. They wanted luxury, but with refinement. They wanted style, but didn’t want to shout about it.
This sent Cadillac looking for a way to compete. Reportedly, one of Cadillac’s early ideas was to beat the Europeans by joining them. Cadillac figured it could possibly take an Opel Diplomat and make that into something for the American market, but the automaker figured out that turning an Opel into a Cadillac would have been impractical.
Thankfully, the General Motors parts bin provided some help. Cadillac found that the X platform would be a decent fit for the mission, but that was the platform used for the Nova, and Cadillac couldn’t just sell a rebadged Nova! Engineers were given broad authority to Cadillac-ify the X platform and they did just that. Cadillac designers stretched the X platform from a 111-inch wheelbase to a 114.3-inch wheelbase and the changes were extensive. The resulting K platform shared some floorpan, front suspension, roof, and rear subframe with the X platform, but the rest was Cadillac.
The original Seville, which was named the LaSalle during its development, launched in 1976. The sedan was a reinvention of Cadillac, one where the most expensive flagship model was actually its smallest car, a reversal of the past. The original Seville was a commercial success with sales that increased every single year throughout its first generation.
But there was one problem the Seville didn’t solve.
The Caddy For Young People
Cadillac enjoyed the success brought on by the first Seville, but research by the automaker brought out bad news. While plenty of people were lining up to buy the Seville, the brand still failed to pull buyers away from the import brands. Cadillac still wanted those young, affluent buyers and figured there had to be some way to lure them away from a Mercedes.
Based on this, you would think Cadillac would try to make a car like a BMW or Mercedes, but the brand went in a completely different direction, one more appealing to older car buyers rather than the youth.
Reportedly, legendary auto designer Bill Mitchell was getting close to retirement and he wanted to go out with a bang. As luck would have it, General Motors was working on the second generation of the Seville, so that’s where Mitchell would make his mark. There was just one problem as Mitchell had a bit of a different outlook than other designers of the time. Mitchell loved the beauty of pre-World War II cars and wanted to apply classical design to new cars whenever possible.
Mitchell’s influence can be seen in the gorgeous “boattail” Buick Riviera and all of GM’s A-body vehicles of 1973.
Mitchell would find an ally with Wayne Kady. Like Mitchell, Kady loved applying the design philosophies of old to modern vehicles. In an interview with Hagerty, Kady indicated that in the early to mid-1960s, he began focusing a lot of his design efforts on making vehicles with distinctive rear ends. Sure, Harley Earl thought a car’s face was its most important part, but Kady felt that the rear end deserved just as much attention, too.
One of the sketches Kady penned was the 1967 Cadillac V16 concept. This vehicle was a coupe that was a nod to the 1930s while also having a comically long hood. It’s one of those cars you might expect an oil baron to own. Sadly, that design did not go into a production car back then, but Kady did lead the design for the 1971 Cadillac Eldorado.
Still, Kady never gave up championing his rear-end design. Kady really wanted to see the “bustleback” treatment applied to a coupe and pitched it for the 1979 Eldorado. However, Cadillac General Manager Ed Kennard wasn’t having it. Mitchell loved the bustleback and managed to convince brass that it could be used for the Seville. The distinctive coupe styled by Kady gained two more doors and the green light was given.
As Kady says in the interview with Hagerty, the new Seville was initially a hit out of the park, from Hagerty:
I was invited to the dealer announcement in Long Beach. When they announced that car, they had it on the stage and when they pulled the curtains back, the car started to revolve on a turntable and was partially concealed with fog. Then the lights gradually came on, like the sun coming up. As the fog cleared, you could see the car. It got a standing ovation. I’ve been to a lot of these dealer announcements, and this was by far the most applause for a new car that I’d ever seen.
The new Seville wasn’t just a striking design piece, but also an advanced piece of tech on wheels. Front-wheel-drive was pitched as a possible innovation for the first Seville, but that didn’t happen. That finally came true in the second generation thanks to the vehicle riding on a modified K platform, itself a derivative of the E platform used for the Cadillac Eldorado, Buick Riviera, and Oldsmobile Toronado.
The E-body was an advanced piece of engineering for its day. It sported four-wheel independent suspension, four-wheel disc brakes, anti-roll bars front and rear, and even electronic suspension leveling. The platform also boasted quick over-boosted recirculating ball steering and it was even lighter than the outgoing platform despite not much of a change in size.
Perhaps the quirkiest part about the platform under the second-generation Seville was the fact that the standard engine was a diesel V8, but we’ll get to that later.
The interior continued more technological advancement. I’ll hand the microphone to Car and Driver for a moment:
As before, the Seville is nothing if not a gimmick car. It has, for your pleasure and detachment from reality, a headlight sentinel with automatic dimming and shutoff; intermittent windshield wipers; a cruise control almost the match of Mercedes’s; power windows, power mirrors, and power locks; an ambient-temperature gauge on the driver’s outside mirror; an anti-theft security system that flashes the lights, sounds the horn, and disables the engine; light-Âup information centers, left and right, with various words of warning; a three-Âlight, fender-mounted monitoring system for headlights, brights, and turn signals; tiny red taillight telltales that show in the rear-view mirror; cornering lights that activate with the turn signals; a glide-out ashtray nearly big enough to serve a TV dinner on; an electric trunk release; and infinitely more. Drive the Seville a hundred thousand miles and we’ll bet you still won’t know all its tricks. Why, the console alone is a work of genius, albeit a sizably chunky one. It has a map-and-litter pocket on its front and two storage spaces within. The back one is smallish, intended for whatever you like. The front one, on the other hand, is ribbed to organize a row of eight-track tapes (or presumably cassettes if you order that sound system), and also provides a miniature clipboard for a notepad, a clip for the writing utensil of your choice, and a light to scribble by. What next?
How about the glowing, all-encompassing sound of a digital electronic AM/FM/CB/eight-track stereo with scanning functions, an integral digital clock, and the ability to monitor CB reÂceptions while you’re listening to the regular part of the radio? Perhaps you’II find the superlative automatic electronic climate control to your body’s liking. Red and blue buttons raise and lower the Seville’s cabin temperature one degree for each push of a button. Once set, the system functions without notice or adjustment, providing a continuous flow of air, your choice of blast or balm, neither dry nor humid.
And, oh, we can’t forget the seats. Ours were done up in gray leather, leather being the equipment on all Elegantes, and embossed with a large Cadillac crest in the center of each backrest. These are the most power-adjustable production-car seats in the world. Their controls send them forward, backward, upward, and downward, and tilt the lower seat itself. Cadillac has also powered the backrest rake adjustment and incorporated tilt and in-out steering wheel positioning.
If you didn’t get it from Car and Driver‘s review, Cadillac loaded the Seville down with all sorts of tech. Remember that we’re talking about a car from 1980 here and Car and Driver is listing out features we take for granted today, over four decades later.
The Seville Quickly Falls Apart
Most retrospectives note that the initial response to the Seville was strong. Sure, the design was polarizing, but the car was anything but boring. And that bustleback design was such a stunner that other brands started coming out with their own takes on the same.
Unfortunately, cracks started to show early on. Just above, I snipped a quote out of Car and Driver‘s review of the 1980 Seville, a first model year for the second generation. Well, the car showed its ugly side back then. The first signs of trouble came from the 5.7-liter Oldsmobile diesel V8:
Cadillac’s glow plugs prepare the engine very quickly for starting, even in cold weather taking no more than five seconds to get the job done. The engine’s dieselness seems unobtrusive until the need for fuel or more than marginal performance arises. Its lack of pop is a painful shortcoming in busy traffic. This is the only car we’ve been able to full-throttle around our favorite ramp. Hitchcock could do a film about passing on two-lanes. The motor likes part throttle better than full, feeling less strained and tending to sag less noticeably as you first toe into the throttle. The faultless cruise control is a savior for the muscles of your right leg, which battle a strong throttle-return spring.
That sounds rough enough, but then that late 1970s and early 1980s quality reared its ugly head, from Car and Driver:
The biggest drawback besides the lack of power is constant and wearing wind noise around the A-pillar at speeds over 55 mph, a realm Cadillac seems to have ignored. A steady moan of effort intrudes at 75 to 80 mph, proving this more a town car than dedicated cross-country artiste. At lesser velocities the Seville is a mindless cruiser, almost hallucinogenic in its ability to just driffffift aloonnng. It is sleep-inducing. Its steering is very light, has adequate feel and decent response, but our car had a wander problem with which a momentary daydream could probably be combined to produce an expensive side trip.
Lewin has already written an excellent explainer on why the Olds diesel V8 was such a problem child, aside from its meager 105 HP output:
Oldsmobile engineers decided to start with what they knew, and based their work on the existing Oldsmobile 350 cubic-inch V8. It was this decision that played a role in the failures to come. That’s because a diesel engine typically runs at a far higher compression ratio than a typical gasoline engine. A gas engine might run at somewhere between 8:1 and 12:1, while diesels typically run from 14:1 to 22:1. This is mostly because gas engines are desperately trying to avoid compression ignition of the fuel, while diesel engines rely on that same effect.
The engine’s designers took this into account to some degree, designing a reinforced block for the diesel application. Other changes included hardened camshafts, larger main bearings, and tougher, thicker connecting rods and piston pins.
For all that the engineers did, they didn’t go far enough. The diesel engine’s heads used the same head bolts and 10-bolt pattern as the gas engine. This decision was made to allow the diesel engine and gasoline engine to share some of the same tooling. However, it meant that the head bolts were extremely overstressed in the diesel application. They were more than capable of handling the cylinder pressures of a gasoline engine, but they couldn’t take the additional strain of the high-compression Oldsmobile diesel design, which ran at a lofty 22.5:1. The design really needed more head bolts, and likely stronger ones too, but budget concerns won the day.
Unfortunately, engineers knew the engine wasn’t ready for primetime, but GM desperately needed to meet fuel economy standards. The engines were shipped out and in the field, they experienced stretched head bolts, corrosion, blown head gaskets, stretched timing chains, failed injectors, failed injection pumps, and so much more.
The Oldsmobile V8 diesel was so unreliable that it couldn’t even be certified for sale in California. You’d think the reason would be because the engine wasn’t that efficient. It was actually pretty thrifty, scoring 21 mpg in the Seville and 28 mpg in a pickup truck. So, that wasn’t the problem. California couldn’t even complete its testing because the Oldsmobile diesel V8s on hand didn’t run long enough.
Kady mentions another problem. The 1980 Cadillac Seville had a sticker price $4,000 more expensive than the first generation. That meant you were paying more for a car that might not have survived a week of commuting before the engine fell apart.
But don’t worry. If the Oldsmobile diesel V8 wasn’t your jam, you could still get the Cadillac V8-6-4 engine and still save some money at the pump, right?
The 145 HP Cadillac L62 V8 was standard equipment across the Cadillac line and an optional no-cost replacement for the Olds diesel in the Seville. This 368-cubic-inch V8 used computer-controlled solenoids to disable the rocker arms of two or four cylinders. The idea was that your V8 would become a V6 or a V4 depending on load, saving you money by upping fuel economy during mild cruising conditions.
The guts of the V8-6-4 included a microprocessor and a bunch of sensors monitoring vitals including coolant temperature, engine speed, intake manifold pressure, and more. Once the computer determined that engine load was low enough, the solenoids would lock the rocker arms, shutting down the cylinders. Compressed air in the cylinders was supposed to eliminate any feeling of misfiring. GM said the computer was so advanced that it ran 300,000 calculations per second.
Whether that was true or not ended up being irrelevant because in the real world, the computer just never kept up with demands. The engine constantly hunted between V8, V6, and V4 modes. The result was that the engine responded horrifyingly slow to pedal inputs and the constant shifting between modes transmitted roughness to the cabin of the vehicle.
Cadillac was quick to try to fix things with 13 software updates an extended warranty, but the damage was done. Those who still had their V8-6-4s often just disabled the system and used their cars like normal V8s, leaving behind the 15 percent fuel economy advantage. The V8-6-4 was also tossed out of the Cadillac lineup after just a year, leaving behind a smaller HT 4100 V8.
The problems with the Seville showed in sales. The 1980 model year saw 39,344 examples sold before sales fell to 28,631 in 1981 and 19,998 in 1982. The second-generation Seville bowed out after 1985 when it sold 39,755 that year. The second-generation Seville at its best still sold less than almost all years of the first-generation model. Even worse, Cadillac still failed its mission to get younger buyers out of their fancy BMWs.
Worth A Look Today
While the second-generation Seville could be piled into the long list of General Motors failures, we think it’s worth a second look today.
As I noted before, a lot of the luxuries found in the second-generation Seville are bits of equipment you’ll find in the cars of today. General Motors didn’t give up on displacement on demand, either, and you’ll find it in modern GM products as Active Fuel Management or Dynamic Fuel Management. The modern systems work better, but they have their own problems, too. In a way, the Seville was perhaps too far ahead of its time with ideas that were great, but didn’t quite work out at the time.
Going back to the Seville, sure, the quality wasn’t quite there, but contemporary reviews did seem to agree that the Seville was about as comfortable as you’d expect from a Cadillac. Today, many enthusiasts are looking for rides that are a bit different and many are looking to the 1980s to get their fix. The good thing about the passage of time is that many survivors have long had their kinks worked out. If you happen upon a V8-6-4 car today, you’ll either have your mind blown that the system still works or know that a previous owner already killed the variable displacement system.
If you find a working Oldsmobile V8 diesel, that alone is just pretty awesome. Sure, GM’s diesel V8 bungling almost singlehandedly killed diesel passenger cars for decades, but nowadays seeing one of these engines alive would be something novel.
These cars are also pretty cheap. It’s not hard to find one in decent shape for $10,000 or less, which is more than you can say about many ’80s and ’90s collector cars today. I’m not saying you should go out and buy one of these as a daily driver, but if you’re looking for an ’80s classic that’s a little different, maybe it’s time to consider a Seville.
(Images: GM, unless otherwise noted.)
That Seville made for a great launching ramp when I was making my cinematic crashes with my Matchbox cars.
When I was a kid a neighbor had one of these that would randomly sound its car alarm at 1 or 2AM or later and the dude wouldn’t wake up to go out to shut it off for a good 15 to 20 minutes
I think I wrote about this here previously, but my old man had a diesel seville back in the 80’s – It looked a lot like the last pic in this article. He went between Caddies and Continentals previously, but when he showed up with this thing, it was kind of eye popping. I should note that he never bought new, only used vehices, and generally they were bought off people that “had problems” of one kind or another (AKA needed money). I can only recall one car that he bought off a dealer lot.
For all of the talk about how these cars were unreliable garbage, I can honestly say that I don’t remember anything about that in the time that he owned it. We took a few trips in it and it performed well and was a really comfortable car. The paint didn’t hold up very well, so he had it resprayed towards the end of his ownership (about 9 years as I recall) and it really looked great after that. I drove it a few times and it was kind of a hoot to be big pimpin’ like that.
Being a kid heavily into cars when this came out, I could tell badge engineering when I saw it. Didn’t know what it was called, but I knew it when I saw it. And I knew even then it was BS.
So here was a car that looked really different, not like anything else on the road, and certainly not like the cars that shared its underpinnings. Different was/is cool. Even if it was a species of badge engineering, this was how you do it. This was a cool car.
When I was young and these were new, I remember thinking they were poorly designed heaps of shit.
And actually, my mind hasn’t changed.
At least Hank Hill could wear custom orthotics to solve this problem.
I miss two-tone cars.
Beginning in the lat 70’s I started buying used Mercedes, the first being a ‘77 450 SLC and I wish I still had it. Sometime in the mid 80’s I bought a used SEL sedan. My senior partner in the firm drove nothing but Cadillacs and he ended up with one of those anemic V8-6-4’s, yet continued to rag on me about my used Benzes.
One day we had to drive a good distance together on business and I offered to let him drive my S class. He drove it to our appointment and asked to drive it back. The very next day he went to the Mercedes dealership and bought a brand new S class without even asking for a discount. And he never drove anything else. He had an E420 when the family finally took away his keys.
I still say the rear end of this Seville is what happened after it wandered onto the set of Wile E Coyote and Road Runner. The Seville was an unfortunate victim of one of Wile E’s poor anvil drops. It landed on the Seville, not the Road Runner, and it made accordion noises as it drove off the set.
These cars were the epitome of domestic auto manufacturing in the 1980s. It was sort of a joke, along with the V6 Camaros of the day. I have seen one bustle-back Seville in the past 10-years, and none of the Nova-Sevilles that I can remember. Good riddance.
This used to be my pick for the ugliest car I’d ever seen. It held onto that title for over 40 years.
And then I saw the Cybertruck.
The V-8-6-4 was a one year only engine for the 1981MY. If you didn’t want it, you could have gotten the Olds diesel or a Buick 4.1-liter V-6.
The 368 cu. V8 they based the V8-6-4 on was a great, bulletproof Cadillac built engine. Just had to unhook the displacement on demand garbage.
I always find it funny how far back Cadillac and the other American luxury brands were like “Oh no, young people like European luxury cars!” and then never made a true competitor until the 2000’s. Mercedes was kicking ass in the US in the 70’s and then BMW started doing well too in the 80’s.
The big 3 could have made a 3 series fighter in the early 90’s and a proper Mercedes fighter in the early 80’s but just didn’t. Hubris is a hell of a drug.
Chrysler was almost dead and had to rely on old people who remembered the Forward Look cars of 1957 and 1958. The R-bodies were supposed to be the successors to the Forward Looks. Had the 1979 R-bodies not failed so hard Chrysler would’ve likely entirely died, but sometime by the late 1980s instead. Iaccocca had to focus on selling cheap shit to old people who’d overpay to build up enough reserves to build appealing stuff for young people under cost. Had one engineer not jumped ship from Ford over to Chrysler with Iaccocca and brought the Ford Carnival concept with him Chrysler never would’ve had the bridge between the two and they would’ve been struggling for a lot longer.
Ford about shot themselves in the face by relying on the Mark IV and the Thunderbird all throughout the ’70s, meaning they were faced with a wall of penalties coming up in the ’80s if they didn’t do something fast. Thus all focus went to the Tempo and the Taurus, with the 1983 Thunderbird being the trial experiment of adopting what Ford Germany had learned with the Sierra and Mark III Escort before the main rollout. Even still Dearborn was fighting with Cologne because Dearborn thought forcing their little winged friend from Hiroshima to do the engineering would cost less, and so out of spite the Panther was renewed after 1983, the Sierra was smuggled in and hidden as the Merkur XR4ti, and the Mark III Escort got switched with an illicit copy that had been Xerox’d five or six times and had contrast artifacting out the ass.
GM were screwed either way. Roger Smith wouldn’t do anything but focus on computers. He didn’t care that Cadillac was outdated, he didn’t care that there were strikes at the Oldsmobile and Chevrolet factories, and he didn’t care that Toyota and Honda were murdering the B and C-bodies. His solution for everything was to replace things with computers. Can’t get the Oldsmobile Diesel to work? Run it with a computer. Workers striking? Replace them with robots run by a computer. Cadillacs and Buicks much more visually appealing to old people? Young people won’t care what the outside looks like if there’s a computer they can interact with inside. He was actually scared of trying to intervene in the different divisions because he though the infighting would kill the company. Because of that Smith didn’t try and bring top down management to GM until 1985, and by then mistakes like the Seville, Fiero, Cimmaron, the E and A-bodies, and more had piled up and forced him to make changes.
Twasn’t hubris in the 1980s that beat the shit out of the Big Three. It was complacency and fear in the 1970s that did it. They just spent the 1980s cleaning up the mess after nine years of inaction and pandering.
Hiring a retiring designer to build a car for young buyers? What could go wrong.
I love most of Bill Mitchell’s work but I agree that this was a bonehead decision.
I remember loving and hating these as a kid. A few minty fresh ones for sale around Texas right now and a convertible in Oklahoma
I almost dated a girl in the early 90’s whose parents owned a white with red interior Seville bustleback. It was grossly ostentatious, and so was the family. I passed on the dating and am glad I did. I’m not into high maintenance anything.
The first American Car I rested my eyes on in Switzerland in 1982. I had no idea what I was looking at but just knew it was American.
I already own 1980 Seville which was imported as brand new to Switzerland, near Basil. There is small chance we are talking about the same car 🙂 It’s gold-brown two tone paint
From what I can remember we didn’t get to Basel just glanced through Geneva / Mt Blanc tunnel and then back into France from Italy. Fun fact we were driving through the South of France (Audi 80 with 14foot caravan) and we ended up taking the directions to Genoa instead of Geneva.
The Seville was definitely two toned though – I quite like them. Understated compared to most American cars.
I know, that Cadillacs were quite popular in Switzerland back in the day. It could be the same car, Basil was place where Swiss owner lived, but I found a lot of air tickets and more from France, Germany and Italy, so that guy was driving this car all around Switzerland too. Now car is in Poland and I met via mail son of original owner, sadly RIP.
I remember seeing these on the road in OHIO as a young kid in the 80s and early 90z and they looked like hideous junk to my eyes, even just 10 years in. Especially as the aero Lincoln’s and fords came out. Just terrible, junk.
“Cadillac couldn’t just sell a rebadged nova.” – Mercedes Streeter.
“hold my beer.” – The Cimarron
the Bangle butt, before Bangle butt was a thing. way ahead of its time.
I always hated the way these things looked. I can’t comment on their reliability, because by the time i was able to see and drive these in person they were already clapped out and closing on 20 years old. If they were anything like the 92 LeSabre my family used to have they were complete shit. The engine and tranny were unkillable in the Buick, but just about anything else in the interior was falling apart at just 6 years old. Compared to the Accord, Legacies we had of similar vintage the Buick was just not there. It has turned the family off domestic carmakers for a long time. Just now i am thinking about replacing my wrx with a CT-4 or 5 V, but since Cadillac seems to have a stop sale on the XT5 because of tranny trouble i am seriously reconsidering going that route.
What always fascinated me the most about these was how Cadillac spent all that development money on their brand new super fancy V8 that they rushed into production that was larger and less efficient and no more powerful and far less reliable than the Buick V6 that GM already had and was already 20 years old.
This was back in the era when the individual GM brands still largely controlled their own engine design and manufacture. There was plenty of rivalry and hubris for everyone.
“…the automaker figured out that turning an Opel into a Cadillac would have been impractical.”
Reportedly, it’s due to the tighter build tolerance that no GM manufacturing plants in the United States could do without extensive, expensive changes to the assembly lines just for one vehicle. Well, that “abhorrence” would be “rectified” through the NUMMI joint-venture with Toyota in the 1980s.
The first-generation Seville was quite popular in the Switzerland, obviously due to its “international” size, headlining the massive GM export drive to Europe in the late 1970s with the downsized GM B-platform. This Seville was also first Cadillac model to be extensively modified to meet ECE WP.29 regulations prior to the European sales (that included the taillamps with amber turn signal indicators). Previously, the GM vehicles exported to Europe (wherever required) or Japan had the aftermarket amber turn signal indicators from “Pep Boys” tacked onto the bumpers or bodies (like this one on Australian-built Rambler Hornet) and a few modifications such as metric speedometer and temperature gauges (if they were optioned).
Why did so many brochures show a car on an airport runway or near a small plane??
Oil money during the 1970s meant the executives could afford to fly around in the private jets or corporate helicopters. Thus…
Because the car can only go 65mph on a good day.
Unlike the German cars which were never shown around faster modes of transport – because they WERE the faster mode of transport.
But please don’t forget about domestic Mercedes cars. You in US, always got top versions and best engines. Reality of old Mercedes in Europe is way different, they were small weak 2.0L engines and most of cars had absolutely 0 additional equipment.
That’s why all American cars are so worshipped here. Of course, you can find some nice Mercedes here too, but mostly they are too rare and too expensive
Ah – but US spec Mercedes were so undertuned in the 70’s and 80’s.
The 450SEL only produced 180hp in the US, but @225hp in Germany
The 560SEL produced 237hp in US Spec, but nearly 300hp in Germany.
That steep windshield rake for the time still gets me. Were they trying to match the slope of the back side? Seriously, back in that day, which I lived, this was one serious windshield slant for a sedan
As Mercedes pointed out, while the Seville was designated a K-body, it was really a four-door variant of the E-body coupes (Olds Toronado, Buick Riviera, Cadillac Eldorado). And those cars had the same slope, suggesting it may have been a hard constraint of the platform. I think it works.
Also, the bustleback Seville would likely be called a “four-door coupe” if it were for sale today.