Oh man, it’s been a while since we did one of these, right? I was on such a streak there, for a while. Maybe a continual daily feature just isn’t in my bones? Well, whatever, it is what it is, and what it is happens to be time to bring back my attempts to defend the poor cars so unfairly maligned in the 2005 book, The World’s Worst Cars, written by Craig Cheetham.
As you may recall, the way we do this is to have an archaic Commodore PET computer pick a random page from the book, and then defend and redeem the car shown on that page, because I maintain that Mr.Cheetham has created a book not of The World’s Worst Cars, as the title claims, but rather of some of the World’s More Interesting Cars. Most of the cars in this book – perhaps all – do not deserve to be trapped in between the covers of this deceitful tome. And I’m going to redeem them, one by one. So let’s do it! We’re back, baby!
So, what page of this cursed book did our 8-bit friend pick for us today?
Page 82! Okay. what do we find on page 82?
The Cadillac Seville! We actually just did a big redemption piece on the Seville, and you should probably go read that, right now, even, because it does a very good job of redeeming this car. That doesn’t mean I get to just stop here, though – oh, no, around here we do what the Commodore PET tells me. And the PET says defend the car on page 82, so I will.
I think I can defend the Seville without repeating too much from our other defense, especially because Cheetham seems to be focusing primarily on the styling of the Seville as its biggest offense, and I think he’s dead wrong there. If you’re going to try and justify putting the Seville in any sort of “Worst Car” book, you’d most likely want to focus on some of its more troubled engine options, like the ill-fated Oldsmobile diesel or the bold-but-flawed cylinder-de-activating V8-6-4 engine.
Those engines were, charitably, garbage, but there were, fortunately, a number of other more reliable V8s that could be bolted in. The Seville was one of the first really “modern” Cadillacs, with a front-wheel drive layout adapted from the Toronado/Eldorado platform. This allowed the car to be quite roomy for its (relatively) compact size, which never hurts. It’s by no means a small car as it is, but compared to previous Cadillacs, it’s surprisingly lean.
In his excoriation of the Seville, Craig Cheetham says things like
“… the US luxury automaker laughed in the face of good taste when it unveiled this abomination in 1979.”
and
“The Seville was overly adorned with chintzy false chrome trim and was also a ridiculous shape.”
He’s dead-ass wrong on everything here. The Seville, if anything, was incredibly restrained chrome-trim-wise when compared with other Cadillacs. I mean, has the man seen other Cadillacs? It’s not like they were shy with the chrome. The Seville was downright understated.
And as far as that shape goes, yes, that’s the distinctive part of this car, and yes, it was controversial at the time. But an abomination? No. Unexpected, maybe, novel, distinctive, unusual, striking, confusing, all of these are valid adjectives.
Craig, still hammering away on that bustle-back, goes on to say
“The tail end is definitely the talking point of the Seville because it is completely out of harmony with the rest of the car’s design. Cadillac never did supply a reason for its stunted appearance.”
The fuck, Craig? Did you do any research for this? Cadillac absolutely provided a reason for this design. It was deliberately designed to evoke bustle-back designs and proportions from luxury cars of the past. Look:
It’s not a mystery, it’s pretty clear what Cadillac was going for, here. In fact, legendary GM designer Bill Mitchell was well-known for his love of pre-WWII luxury cars, with their dramatic long hood/short rear deck proportions, and he wanted to bring some of that back to modern cars. Another Cadillac designer, Wayne Kady, was thinking along the same lines, and was doing some really dramatic sketches for a possible future Cadillac V16 car:
That’s full of concept car glorious madness, but you can see the seeds of the Seville’s tail end in there. The Seville was a modern car designed to evoke proportions and styles of a bygone era, but updated into a current design vocabulary.
And you know what? I think it worked! Sure, it freaked out some of Cadillac’s more traditional buyers and people like Craig who seem to shit their pants in alarm every time something they didn’t absolutely, 100% see coming invades their line of sight. This was a Cadillac that looked like a Cadillac, but also brought something new – something new that was, ironically, something old – to the table, and people noticed.
Even if it wasn’t everyone’s mug of motor oil, other companies were impressed enough to try their own knockoffs, like Chrysler with the Imperial:
Cadillac was onto something here, even if people like Craig just assumed they were on something.
This is yet another case of a car ending up in The World’s Worst Cars for daring to be interesting or unexpected. Sure, the Seville had its share of flaws and problems and is by no means the best Cadillac or even the Best Cadillac of the Late 1970s, but it’s also in no way a Worst Car, at all, and its novel styling is no reason to try and make it so.
Today, I think people would find the Seville to be pretty cool, a design standout among a sea of almost indistinguishable cars of its era. Once again, Craig, you’re wrong.
The joke I made as a kid when I saw these was that it looked like they dropped the clay model on the floor and didnt have time to fix it so they went with the design. I thought at the time they made clay models the size of my Ertl ones and didnt realize clay models were actually too big to accidentally drop.
Yeah, and don’t forget to tear out your pages!
Middle-school me loved the way the Seville looked with that trunk. Then I grew up.
Headlines we’d like to see:
TORCHINSKY BEATS HACK!
Torch Redeems the Bustle Back!
I thought about this series over the weekend when I was tidying and found this exact book on a bookcase in my living room. The horror! (I think it was given to me as a gift?)
My parents bought a new one with the 6-8-4 motor and the faux convertible top. It was peak Brougham Age. And it was awful. But, you could deactivate the cylinder deactivation feature which made it run ok. And it definitely was unique looking. It seemed pretty cool to 7-year-old me. I liked the little tattletale lights on the fenders and, before the engine was set to just be a V8, it was entertaining to watch the onboard computer screen thing tell you your MPG and how many cylinders were firing.
That design was everything that has been said already, but in actuality it was pretty much accepted as normal within two years. Nobody would have looked twice at one and thought they were weird. Looking back at it now, it freshens up the weird, but that doesn’t mean that it was ugly or a poor seller. If it was that terrible, it wouldn’t have had a 7-year run. Worth noting that trunk space better than you would think. The design had a low liftover and offered greater height than a conventional trunk.
“but there were, fortunately, a number of other more reliable V8s that could be bolted in”
Yes, you can do an engine swap. But that doesn’t defend the fact that what it had from the factory was crap.
The design doesn’t work. Sure, it looks ok from very specific angles, in very specific colors, with very specific lighting conditions. That doesn’t mean it looks good or that the design worked.
It’s awkward. Always has been, always will be.
There is a chrome strip running the center of the hood, top of the fender front to back, at the belt line of the door and stainless cladding at the rockers on top of the chrome acreage at the nose and around the windows.
That’s too much. And it’s way more than the non Biarritz Eldo or Coupe/Sedan DeVille.
No, I’m sorry Mr, Torchinski. You are wrong.
The L61 was the original gas V8, and that was a solid, factory choice. The L62 8-6-4 was only available for one year, 1981, and you could opt for a Buick V6 instead. One of the better ones, iirc. After that, you could get an HT4100, which…ok which is really bad as well. But the Buick for 81 and 82 was solid. So not wrong. If you squint.
Damnit, I really wanted to defend this one since my extra stereotypical Italian American uncle had one and it seemed like the coolest thing in the world at the time.
I’m not saying I don’t like them. But I’ve also gotten a little soft as I’ve aged.
I always felt the Imperial was the best looking of the early 80s bustlebacks and the Continental being the best overall package.
I think this series over time is simply proving that this entire book is just the paper equivalent of a clickbait buzzfeed headline.
I was just wondering when this feature would come back!
I remember when these were new and not liking them at all, especially when compared with the first-gen Seville, which was elegant and well-proportioned (and has aged exceptionally well). But what would a non bustle-back Seville have looked like? (Calling The Bishop!) It probably would have looked like an Eldorado four-door; fine, but not unique or distinctive. This Seville is memorable … and good for GM for coming up with something that (for a year or so) didn’t look like anything else on the road.
My friend’s dad bought one of these new when we were in High School. I thought it was awesome. SO much more luxurious than other cars at the time. My buddy got to borrow it for our occasional movie night. good times.
I really like this sort-of series you got going and I hope you manage to keep track of the entries. I count about ten of these in my head,so you should be able to keep this going for a few years I hope.
I agree with it being unharmonious. Especially the ones with that accent line that dramatically curves downward on the quarter panel. That curve is out of place on an otherwise geometric design. It really does look like it got sat on or smushed.
The Imperial did it better with the boot area that sticks out further. It balanced the look.
It looks like they took the hatch off of a Gremlin and modified it to fit some specific load.
Which yes, is completely off with the rest of the car’s styling.
Horrendous styling, a design brief that completely missed the point of why its predecessor was a success and an absolute murderer’s row of completely different unfathomably terrible engineering year after year. Is there any one car that destroyed its brand’s reputation as much as this one did; nevermind a one that was a direct followup from a car whose entire goal was to repair it?
Other than maybe the NSU R080 this is probably the car that this author has been the most right about; and at least that one was a groundbreaking car before they started hand grenading *their* engines.
I’ve come to like the gen 2 Seville’s styling as automotive sculpture but it was still a huge marketing blunder that actively repelled the “import intender” customers the gen 1 had quite a lot of success with while appealing to nobody who wouldn’t have bought a Fleetwood if Cadillac had taken the Seville in a more progressively contemporary direction.