The Cadillac Cimarron is a car that I have mostly contempt for. I feel pretty comfortable in this, because these things were, charitably, heaps. Well, that’s not really accurate: they were overpriced heaps. These slightly overdressed Chevy Cavaliers sold for the equivalent of about $41,000 today, and I can tell you, they were not worth it. What bothers me about this is I think they were part of why the concept of a luxury compact car never really caught on.
I feel qualified to throw shade at the Cimarron in part because I had a college girlfriend who had a 1982 Chevy Cavalier, which was based on the same J-body platform, had the same 85 horsepower, 1.8-liter drivetrain, the same three-speed slushbox, most of the same body panels, and the same all-encompassing blandness that made any time with that car only slightly more exciting than a book of industrial carpet samples.
That car drove like a block of surplus cheese shoved across a sidewalk, but maybe with a little less, um, dynamism.
The Cimarron was, of course, a Cadillac and not some plebeian Chevy, but aside from badging, all that really meant was you could get the inside slathered in leather.
What was especially galling about the Cimmaron was how Cadillac chose to market it, and what cars it chose to compare it to. Look at this:
Look at the cars it’s up against there: Audi 5000, BMW 320i, Volvo GLE, and the Saab 900S, all of which were vastly better choices than this Cavalier that shoplifted some jewelry. Also note that its referred to as “Cimarron by Cadillac” and dealers were told not to call it “Cadillac Cimarron” because of, um, I guess reasons? Who the hell knows what goes through the brilliant yet often addled mind of GM?
I’m not really sure why Cadillac wanted that comparo chart up there, because it only shows that the Cimarron got better gas mileage and had, um, leather.
There’s some of that leather! Of course, it’s wrapped around an interior that was pretty much the exact same as the cheap-ass Cavalier, but at least you could get these with a stick shift, though I’m not sure I ever saw one without the three-speed auto. Just seeing that steering wheel is giving me some really boring flashbacks.
Sure, these things were crap, but you know what the worst crime really is? The Cimarron was boring, so deeply, unrelentingly, clinically dull. It had all the pizzaz of a manilla folder, but without the sexiness.
These things are why we don’t seem to understand the potential of premium small cars. Well, maybe the Aston-Martin Cygnet was a factor, too, but that thing was way cooler.
What a pile.
I’m surprised by how small the logo is on the steering wheel.
It would be funny to wear that around your neck in your next hip hop video.
Heck, Cimarron would be a good name for a blither artist too. It would fit right in with Drip or Bouncy.
Cimarron sounds more like a ‘dancer’ name 🙂
I thought Cimmaron was Bouncy’s girl.
There are two problems here; the J-car program was supposed to be entirely “premium”, with the Cavalier aimed at Honda Accord buyers while the Chevette was the car for people who just wanted cheap wheels and the Citation for the traditional domestic-compact buyer.
But then they let GM’s accountants (who were notorious for thinking of extra features as “lost profits” coming from an assumption of entitlement to the sale in the first place) run rampant on it, and they costed out everything, everything, that could make a car feel “nice”. Even the Chevy was a dud at launch, it had to get a crash program to deliver a stripped-out base model (the Cavalier Cadet) late in the ’82 model year and improve the engine with 200cc more and single point EFI for ’83 along with across-the-board price cuts to get the value proposition where it should’ve been from day one.
On top of that, the Cimarron was last-minute (which is why in some ways it’s more Chevylike than the Buick Skyhawk and Olds Firenza which were part of the original plan). There was some friction between GM corporate management, who knew better for once and wanted the program delayed to at least 1984 to give time to build in some better differentiation and make the 2.8 V6 standard, and Cadillac Division bosses who wanted to be in the upscale-compact market RIGHT NOW DAMMIT no matter how minimally-acceptable the product would be at first.
I think the other reason it was more Chevy-like was because Chevy styling — especially in the grilles — purposely resembled Cadillac’s more than the other brands did. The Cavalier would have been the easiest to modify to look like a Cadillac.
Yes, the main point of difference at launch was the Cimarron’s four-headlight nose with eggcrate grille which Chevy copied for the Cavalier’s 1984 facelift.
What was funny for me about the J-cars what that in high school, between a few different friends and another friend’s mom, I got seat time in a Cavalier, Sunbird, Skyhawk, Firenza, and Cimarron, often almost back-to-back-to-back. To paraphrase the “Pam from The Office” meme, they were all the same car.
“Aluminum alloy wheels …with computer-matched radially ground tires”
“Computer-matched”?? Like an online dating app for tires? Tinder for Tires? Or perhaps Grindr for Tires? Since the tires are radially ground?
Rubbr
(Oh God that probably is an app but I’m not checking.)
In all honesty, was there anything compelling about the Cimarron? Picking out the bad things is easy. I want to know if there was anything genuinely good about the car.
The tach was standard and the radio delete made it a little cheaper.
The few I’ve seen in junkyards over the years had little wear on the leather seats. That made these cars worth twice the price of a Chevy, right?
Yes.
It was compellingly expensive for a goddamn Chevrolet Cavalier in a nice suit.
As probably one of very few people here to have had extensive real-world seat time in a Cimarron – and almost certainly the only one to have ever spun one out on the Interstate at 60 MPH – I feel honor-bound to disagree with most of what my esteemed colleague says here.
When I was in high school, in about 1989, my mom was leasing an Audi 5000. She had a long commute, and the Audi was gaining miles too quickly; she would have had to pay a mileage penalty after the lease was up. So to save miles on it, my dad went shopping for a cheap but comfortable car to save some miles on the Audi. He came home with a butter-yellow 1984 Cadillac Cimarron, with a 2.0 liter four and an automatic, with about 60,000 miles on it, for $2,600.
My brother and I both tried our best to kill that car, unintentionally. He went for a joyride on the night he got his driver’s license and ran it into a hedge on a country road. He mangled the left front fender, flattened a tire, and tore the front spoiler clean off, a long with one fog light.
Dad fixed the damage himself, with junkyard parts, and then six months later, I was driving the Cimarron to college, hit an icy patch on the on-ramp from I-88 to I-39, and spun it around two and a half times and went backwards into a snowbank. Somewhere during the spin, I clipped off a reflector post with – of course – the freshly-replaced left front fender. Dad left the dent this time. I looked around to see if I could find the reflector, but it was lost in the snow.
Despite all this, that little Cimarron kept chugging along, through two teenage boys, a divorce, and about eighty thousand miles of neglect. My dad sold it when he got a promotion and bought himself yet another used Audi. It ran flawlessly, hardly had any rust, and he got $1,000 for it.
You say it was boring and terrible. I call it noble.
A J-Body, like most GM cars of the vintage, will run badly longer than most cars will run at all.
On Wisconsin? Or are we talking Beloit College or god forbid, Rockford?
Outside Rockford, going from Aurora, IL to UW-Superior. I was barely an hour into a seven-hour drive.
The perception of value changes when paying $2600 for a car rather than the nearly $20k the car was new.
Back when you could count on Audis to run. Even if you didn’t want them to. 😉
Great that front wheel drive was standard and not extra cost. Phew, what a relief.
And NOT AVAILABLE on the BMW or Volvo!
At least Volvo, and to a lesser extent BMW, have finally come around to the vast superiority that is FWD. (/s)
While the Cimmaron was indeed a terrible Cadillac, in the late 90’s/early 2000’s they were they absolute finest $500 beaters you could find. I knew two people who had them. Each paid 5 c-notes, and got years of comfortable trouble free service out of them.
Interesting, no mention of the engine displacement or horsepower in the brochure/ads? Torch used in the article. Yes, yes it would have been embarrassing to mention it at all for the introductory model years.
Optional White-Striped Steel Belted ‘Radially Ground’ Tires, wtf?
As usual GM SOP by the last model year, it had become a decent representation of what it originally aspired to be.
On the other hand you could get it in a manual. Try that on nearly anything with 4 doors these days. The engine was true crap though. My dad had the Buick version with the 85mph speedometer, which was an aspirational figure.
The US national speed limit was 55-mph when the J-cars debuted, so not being able to do 85 mph wasn’t really a problem.
my college roommate back in the late 1980s had one and my 78 vw rabbit was superior in every way.
I owned that series of Cavalier for about a decade. No noteworthy issues during that time, so it counts as a reliable platform in my book.
I’ve heard it said that the Cimarron is the best version of the Cavalier. From that angle, I’d probably be quite happy with one, as long as it had the 5-speed.
Edit to add – Mine was an ’85 with fuel injection and a 5-speed, neither of which were available in ’82.
“only slightly more exciting than a book of industrial carpet samples.”
“That car drove like a block of surplus cheese shoved across a sidewalk, but maybe with a little less, um, dynamism.”
Pure gold here, Torch. Pure gold.
😀
If that’s gold what’s this?
“…vastly better choices than this Cavalier that shoplifted some jewelry”
This is Fort Knox.
The biggest reason for this car turning out the way it did was parts proliferation. My old man talked (and wrote) about how insane it was at that time. My numbers aren’t going to be completely accurate here, but GM had something like 18 different horns, 38 different ignition assemblies, 50 something washer fluid reservoirs etc.
As anyone can imagine, this made building cars very expensive to assemble on the same line at the same time. GM was really pushing hard into the global market, and even though they were re-badging Opels and others as their own, they realized how much money was being flushed away shipping little shit all over the place and therefore component sharing became one of the topiiest of priorities, both in the US and abroad.
As a result, the big dogs sent out mandates saying design what you want, but we’re going to share as many parts as possible and cut back on the insane amount of customizations.
So, while the bean counters were involved in breaking down parts costs and (way more importantly) currency exchange issues that dictated profit in various countries, the “blame” here lied with the fellas on the 14th floor in Detroit at that time. The workers that didn’t appear on the Org Chart weren’t given much to work with.
I’ll quickly add something that just popped into my mind from a recent TMS about CEO’s. This is why CEO’s are worth the money and not just figureheads. A bad one can absolutely torpedo entire generations of cars when their focus is flawed. There are plenty of examples of this then and now.
Yeah, but all CEOs seem to get paid the same regardless of how good they are. The only difference seems to be how long they stick around.
You know that’s not true.
You know what would have fixed it?
A giant light up badge on the grill! Only with one of those will EVERYBODY knows you are their better. Especially those contemptible poors in their (ugh!) Cavaliers.
Get better credit ya losers!
I’m trying to imagine the cheap ass who will buy a Cadillac but specify that they want the radio deleted for credit.
That would be the cheap bastard who prefers to put their money into an aftermarket system that actually sounded tolerable vs whatever grossly overpriced scratchy, paper coned flea market reject GM was hawking as “premium sound”.
Somehow I’m not visualizing Cadillac’s geriatric owner base lining up at the car audio shop to get their Rockford Fosgates installed, but maybe the 80s were different.
yeah, no. Alpines or Pioneers. Or in my case, a Sparkomatic. I was a poor bastard
Who else was around in those days? Kraco? Realistic?
Kenwood or Sony.
You’d have ordered it through the Crutchfield catalog – with a model-specific wiring harness.
To my rough recollection:
Low end: Sparkomatic, Pyle, Pyramid, Kraco, Realistic, Kicker, Jensen, Optimus, Sanyo, Sherwood, store house brands and flea market no-names
Mid range: Pioneer, Sony, Blaupunkt, Kenwood, JBL, Proton, Acoustic Research, Infinity, Rockford Fosgate, Klipsch, Fischer, JVC, MB Quart, MTX, Polk Audio,
High end: Alpine, Eclipse, NAD, JL, Denon, Yamaha, Boston Acoustics, Harmon Kardon, Morel, Orion, Zapco
Very high end: MacIntosh, Marantiz, Nakamichi
(Of course this ranking is based on my opinion. You may think differently and that’s OK)
A more complete list is here:
https://www.diymobileaudio.com/threads/old-school-car-audio-manufacture-list.160736/
I figure SOMETHING needs to fill that hole in the dash. Otherwise the only sounds you’ve got are the sounds that car makes.
OTOH if the buyers were geriatric maybe the solution was just to turn off their hearing aids in which case the stereo made no difference.
As with many GM products, the Cimarron got better right before it was axed. The V6 became standard, the price went down relative to the other Js, and of course GM stealthily fixed bugs without acknowledging that those bugs existed in the first place.
Not as dramatic of an improvement as the Fiero, or the Century/Ciera that lasted until ’96- but way better than the first years.
This. The later Cimarrons with the 2.8 V6 and digital dash were fine to me but I’m a J-Body aficionado with a 1990 Pontiac Sunbird in my garage, so my opinion is skewed.
It didn’t even have a a Cadillac style name. I would suggest El Bore-ado.
That comparison chart is like the little advisory on packs of store brand toilet paper. You know, the ones where the tell you: Compare to Charmin Ultrasoft. They’re not actually saying it’s as good, just sort of suggesting it. With the Cimarron, like most bargain bog roll, you’ll have poo on your hand.
As to that leather covered interior, every cud chewing cow in the world is covered in leather.
“like most bargain bog roll, you’ll have poo on your hand.”
Sounds like someone had a bad morning…
I only scroll through comments until I find the old dudes’ comment. Never disappointed.
Even on their own chart, they have to admit that the standard 4-speed the Cimarron came with didn’t meet the standard 5-speed of the BMW, Audi and Saab. As Torch pointed out, though, the take rate on the manual had to be in the single percentages. You saw a bunch of these in SWFL in the 80s, probably as “condo cars” for snowbirds who kept the Big Caddy back home.
Had the same Cavalier as a company car. It was embarrassing to drive up to a customers business in that heap and forget about taking someone out for lunch. Raised so much hell they finally replaced it with an Aries. Somehow, it was better but not by much.
“It was embarrassing to drive up to a customers business in that heap and forget about taking someone out for lunch.”
Obviously you needed to up your charm game.
Turn it into a selling point. “I have this cheap company car and we’re passing the savings onto you!”
Cavalier v Aries. And death wasn’t a third option? Oh,dear.
I disagree. The Cimmaron/Cavalier of that era was simple mostly reliable car. I liked them then and now. Yeah it was funny they stuck a Cadillac badge on a Cavalier, but GM did that in the past with Pontiac, Buick and Olds and nobody cared. If you found a Cimmaron now in good shape it could be a low cost daily driver. Cheap parts and easy to repair. The Audi, Volvo, BMW and Saab of that era that the CImmaron was compared to, not so much. They are expensive to keep running if you can even get parts.
My Dad had an ’82 Cavalier. As a Chevy, in that era, it was…fine. Even a revelation in some ways, with interior fit and finish that put the old ’79 Nova to shame.
It was never meant to be a Caddy, but if GM had to go there, couldn’t they at least have created a distinctive dash and some other upscale bits to make it feel better inside? The cheapness is the breathtaking thing.
Hard agree. The leather probably came from cow’s with mad cow disease. Now if this had been sold in communist bloc countries, it would have felt like true luxury.
That first year looks like the cynical rush job it was, and comparing it to the Audi 5000 and the 3er was straight-up hubris. The later model years were a bit more successful at being more than just a Cavalier Brougham (V6 power! New nose!), but by then everyone had moved on.
Standard leather wrapped steering wheel that blocks part of the standard tachometer! Standard!
I don’t think I’ll ever forgive GM for doing what they did to Cadillac. Letting the bean counters run the operation didn’t work out for GM, and it’s not working out for Boeing either.
It was like the proto-MBA class. The sheer ability to milk every single possible dollar out of something while completely missing the point of the brand and destroying it in the process
Oh, there were MBA’s then. Behavior like that was the harbinger of things to come. As MBAs moved and proliferated from management to the corporate boardroom to the prime shareholder majority, it just got worse with every step.