@@luismanuelvrf They still do. Cars built today are designed to be complicated, time consuming to repair, and in most cases, require very expensive diagnostic and special tools to properly fix the thing. Engine and transmission failures are more common than ever and usually cost more to repair than the car is worth once it goes out of warranty. You can also thank the EPA for writing mandatory specifications that make no sense, allowing auto makers to add more expensive electronic and mechanical devices to their vehicles. New cars are also equipped to be located anywhere remotely by anyone with the right tracking equipment. Now tell me this is a free country when politicians dictate everything you can buy or do.
Jo Ro , What kind of koo-koo clock goes on an on about these cars as if they were some marvel of engineering?. They were awful , embarrassing and made a mockery of incredibly stupid USA inhabitants
Just goes to show how overly optimistic Motorweek reviews were back in the day. "It's slower than lawn tractor, it handles like a walrus on acid, the brakes are made of celluloid, and you will die instantly in a 5 mph crash... More than a match for Audi, BMW, and Mercedes!"
@@roddydykes7053 Platform still had potential, the Beretta GTZ and Olds Calais Quad442 got through the slalom faster than the Camaro/Firebird of the time. The N and L bodies used mostly J car parts.
GM's dark ages. This is the kind of vehicle a room full of German and Japanese engineers would disassemble and laugh at in 1982. BMW and Audi had nothing to worry about.
The cavalier is a simple, but efficient and deceptively durable daily driver car. I would much rather have a gussied-up j-car than any over engineered piece of european shit. But I realize that BMW is for people with money, and the carelessness to throw their car away after other year or enough of a superiority complex to pump thousands of bucks into an aging ride made by designers who hate mechanics.
All 3 American companies have came to the government for bailouts since the 80's. Chrysler has done this twice, GM twice, and Ford did it twice but theirs were a lot closer together. Ford did it right before 2008, they put up the whole company for a loan, then they did it again after the whole bailout thing with GM and Chrysler had calmed down. The government should have forced all 3 of them to double their production in the US in order to get these loans.
Steven D Very clear evidence of GM's lack of desire to spend even a few bucks on this car to equip it with hydraulic hood struts to improve the quality feel. Any real Caddy from this era would have had them.
Fascinating watching this. The fact that this car was ever produced is amazing. They didn't even try to hide the fact that its nothing more then a J car.
+Joe Moorman Not with the 2 lousy 4s it was offered with it wasn't. Later on the 2.8 was not much better,since the Maxima and Cressida 6s trounced all over it, Lol
+Joseph Rogers This car is why Cadillac's current offerings are still slow selling. Cadillac is now producing world class cars, as good as and even better in some cases than BMW, Audi or MB. Problem is, after manufacturing tarted up Chevys and generally poorly constructed cars for decades, a potential customer is not willing to pony up 50 large for one. Their pricing is also not helping them AT ALL. The recent drop in price of $10,000 for the slow selling ELR is proof enough.
I dont think the 4.1 liter V8 or the transmission behind it helped them any either. The Northstar could have been a great engine if they had done a better job bolting the head down. Heres the truth though, I'd still love to have an early 90's Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham with the 5.0 or 5.7.
This same scenario eventually killed Packard by introducing a cheap model called the Packard 120 (later on, the Clipper). This didn't set well with people who bought the expensive Packards for exclusive luxury, watching a cheap Packard on the road.
@@Nothingtoya That Northstar engine may have been a technological marvel on paper but was an expensive mechanic's nightmare to work on. What dumb ass engineer thought putting the starter motor under the intake manifold with all the junk on top of it was a good idea...and then approved by his boss?
No it was a Chevy that Cadillac put Cadillac badges on it. It still embarrasses the designers to this day They are very blunt about how Corporate forced them to do it
I can think of a few lower (and more recent) points in GM's history from a European (Opel) perspective. And just as Opel starts to get it's act together, it is sold to Peugeot. You gotta love them CEO's in Murica.
Although these cars are now interesting from a historical standpoint, I think they're really the biggest joke ever made by GM. The nerve of them even, ITS A FREAKIN' CAVALIER! The 80s were really the time when GM started to go downhill.
$30k (in 2017 dollars) for a bargain basement j-body (that STILL LOOKED like a bargain basement j-body), with leather seats. To discourage haggling, the dealers offered each buyer their choice of: undeveloped ocean front property, just outside of Phoenix, or, their very own bridge in New York.
@@larrylaffer3246 Ford was at least smart enough not to try and play in this game. if they did, that would have meant them taking an Escort, putting a big grill and a spare tire on the back and calling it a Lincoln. They kind of did that a few years prior when they did a "me too" to copy the Seville with a gussied up Granada, but that was forgivable.
@@kennethsouthard6042 Yeah that was an almost unforgivable mistake on their part. The Grenada was the most Malaise of that era. Well a decent Cimmeron type car would've come from Ford in 86/87 with the Mercury Sable. Though it was actually good and it wasn't overselling the luxury angle. It was a Taurus with a bit more and it knew it. With the sleeper hit Taurus SHO's coming in 89/90.
@@larrylaffer3246 I actually thought the Granada / Monarch was a pretty well done car for what it was, which was basically an evolution of the Falcon and later the Maverick into a well equipped smaller car. In 85 I bought one for $700 and drove it around for about a year. To me Ford's bigger cars after 73 were the height of their malaise with the LTD, LTDII, Torino and the Elite. It's funny how the standard answer back then was to put a vinyl top on it along with coach lights and opera windows and call it a Brougham.
Eddie Lopez Also simply amazing how the Big Three had the gall to build such crap cars in the late '70s and '80s and foist them on us. Whether one is a fan of certain foreign autos or not, we can thank Toyota, Honda, etc. for literally *forcing* GM, Ford and Chrysler to step up their game and build better quality cars.
I don't know, I'd say calling a dolled-up 80s Chrysler Le Baron a Maserati takes the cake. Not that Maserati's own products have been all that great over the last 35 years or so.
Even in the video he said that the 1983 version "hit the mark" meaning that it was comparable to a BMW 320. The Cimarron was more than a Chevrolet with a Cadillac badge on it. It had different interior, suspension and was better insulated from road noise. Look at ANY Lincoln of the time, outside of the Towncar, which was an LTD, the rest were Grenada or Thunderbird based.
I had a 81 Datsun 210 Station wagon. If you think a 22 second quarter mile was bad, youd die in that Datsun. Hell, it had a top speed of 80 mph going down hill.
@@Nothingtoya I know exactly what you mean I have a 79 Datsun 210 Sedan I found out later in life that it was a California emissions vehicle making it even more of a turd
@@pyrrhicvictory1707 mine had the larger engine option, I think it was a 1.6l but that didnt matter at all. I do wish I had kept the car though. It was pretty mint and no rust whatsoever.
This could have been a decent car, but in classic GM fashion they were complacent and half-assed it. I think this video shows that perfectly. If GM had started with something like the 83 and built on that, rather than starting with something as abysmally bad as the 82 and fixing it in post, the car may not have been a smash hit but it certainly wouldn't become the embarrassment it's known as now. Then again, I guess I'm being overly optimistic if I expect something good out of a J-body, the living embodiment of corporate cynicism.
True, but really the J Car is too weak a chassis to work with and there were already too many budget models sharing the same general appearance. The sub compact Caddy really should have been a bespoke design, and ideally one whose development was inspired closely by the BMW 3 Series concept.
From the Cimarron to the current ATS, Cadillac sure has come a LONG way. Thanks Motorweek for these old reviews; nice to look at these older cars that are even older than myself.
Makin Bacon Wrong about what? In my opinion Cadillac has stepped up the game with premium platforms & world-class driving dynamics. Sure they aren't quite there yet (Rome wasn't built in a day), but their current lineup is a heck lot better than Acura & Lincoln.
Everyone's here mocking this car, and GM for producing it, but at the time it was a gamble that made sense to try. Cadillac was already dying. Fewer and fewer people were interested in huge land yachts. It would cost a fortune and take years to design an all-new Cadillac. The J-cars, particularly the Cavalier, were selling extremely well, and were decent little cars. So Cadillac (GM) took a gamble and chose to see if a Cadillac version of this car would do as well as the Pontiac and Buick versions. For people who wanted a Cadillac, but wanted something a little more nimble, better on gas, easier to park, fit in a garage, and less expensive. They lost that bet. A few years later, they took another gamble (actually two) that ended up saving them - the Escalade (a Cadillac TRUCK???) and the unpopular at the time, odd angular styling of their whole lineup. On paper, making a Suburban into a Cadillac sounds just as dumb as making a Cavalier into a Cadillac. One was a huge failure, one was a huge success.
+BroccoliBeefed It probably looked good on paper to them and figured people wouldn't be able to see that it was a fucking Opel and not a real Cadillac.
+MinnesotaChevy454 They were probably thinking... Hmmm, a rearwheel drive sedan, engineered in Germany, and relatively successful in Europe.. Noww this is gonna work! How hard can it be?! :P Over time, here in Europe it was also known for a unreliable piece of a GM rustbucket...
I love how he keeps comparing this gussied up Cavalier to Audi's, Bmw's and the like! LOL. Eventually they did add a V6 but by then the whole model was toast.
I bought this new in 1985 for my wife. A Chevy Cavalier...It almost broke Cadillac. It was so very poor to carry the name badge. We traded within 3 years. Thank you
Never knew someone who had one and didn't have lots of issues. The problem was not just that it was a cavalier. The larger issue is GM tried to "Caddy" it up with technological bells and whistles that broke more than they didn't. Frankly it was a better move to stick with the regular Cavalier. They weren't too bad.
LOL. I've always wanted to find a clean Pinto, and tart it up as a "Lincoln Trinket" - complete with the padded 'spare tire' hump on its little ass. *padded for safety!
My friend bought a brand new '82 Chevy Cavalier, which was the same car. It was actually a pretty good car, quiet and well built, but it was dangerously underpowered.
GM thought they were saving lives using those anemic carburetor engines & the early wheezing fuel injection systems. Give the customer 82HP and let em crawl to work.
My 86 Trans Am does the same thing when you open the hood, these cars were all about Fuel Economy due to the fuel crisis when they were designed and I swear the metal is paper thin in some places. Guess I shouldn't complain about my 5.0L Fuel Injected TA pushing out 200/215hp after all compared to the smaller motors of the era OMG!
I remember when this so-called "Cadillac" first hit the market. I was working at a full-service gas station when a local realtor, a regular customer, came in with a new 1984 Cimarron D'Oro (not 'Cimmaron' as titled here). He bought it for his blushing bride for a whopping $12,000! lol. The Cimarron with the D'Oro package, which is Italian for 'Gold', was basically just a few gold accents, it only came in black, with a tan leather interior. D'Oro Package Gold accents were added to the following: Aluminum Alloy Wheels, Grill, Fine Gold Accent Stripes on the Beltline, Bumper Rub Strips, Hood Center Line, and a unique D'Oro Hood Badge. Also included were blackout bumpers with smoke grey fog lamp covers. Inside there was D'Oro plaque on the instrument panel and the 3-spoke steering wheel which had all-metal spokes in a special gold finish. The very next day we had to go out and toe the blushing bride's new baby Caddy back to the dealership. It turned out to be a fault with the Lil computer. Poor Cadillac, after the late 1970s Cadillac was never the same status symbol car company ever again.
Ah, the memories!! Haven't seen one of these on the road in years. Mom and Dad had an '84th Olds Omega Brougham. A slightly larger car, but same premise. Compact luxury. The Omega was plush and comfortable. Velour seats that were like a couch, loaded, a veritable baby Delta88. Under the hood, though, was an anemic 2.5 liter four. Good on gas, but slow and noisy. No power at all on a steep hill. 40 mph with 4 ways on, foot buried in the carpet, with older v8 cars blasting past
brett cannon You must have missed when he said the Omega was a "slightly larger car" than the Cimarron - he acknowledged it's not built on the same platform. His point was that it's another GM car built with the same purpose as this one.
These were amazing cars for their time. They spent such little time on the road that when they went to the junkyards they were crushed whole, no one needed any parts off of them. Truly prestigious for GM.
It's like putting a Band-Aid on a turd. It's a Cavalier anyway you look at it. Leather, and power sacraments will not save this car. Cadillac had made some bad choices over the years. The Opel based turd mobile was one of them, as well as the Cimmaron. I was working in retail sales. An influential customer customer came in, and the lights were left on in his Cimmaron. Of course they were of the "Twilight' variety, but I mentioned that his Cavalier had the lights on. He was quick to point out that the car was a Caddy, and I was quick that it was a cheap Chevy. He still bought.
I'd still rather have this than some BORING BMW that has looked the same for decades and costs tons of money to repair. BMW has it's share of problems like horrible AC and parts that put you in the poor house. No thanks I find BMW's boring ugly boxes and see way too many on the street to feel unique.
Go Clunker 37 years later, and the Cimmaron looks better than any 30 year old BMW I have ever seen. Let's face it, the '80's was a bad year for all auto manufacturers. I blame it on the epa forcing tight emissions standards on engines when technology was not there yet to do so. The manufacturers had to rely on vacuum controlled systems, and other means that all robbed horsepower, reliability, and added great cost to the automobile
"If those initial comments are less than favorable, they can haunt that model for its' entire run..." Oh, you had no idea back then Pat. No idea that it would take Cadillac almost 30 years to live down the '82 Cimarron.
Especially since that's what the C in CTS could stand for - Cimarron Touring Sedan. (STS Seville Touring Sedan, DTS DeVille Touring Sedan). Though some would argue that Catera Touring Sedan is correct....
Actually I think the C stands for Catera. I'd like to think that GM would have been smart enough to let the Cimmaron name stay dead since the 80s, and not bring it back even in an abbreviation.
Many car manufacturers attempted to rebrand their luxury brand cars on cheaper models by adding a few options and the badge. Heck even Maserati rebranded a Chrysler Lebaron back in 88-89 even after the Cimmaron thing! Currently in 2016, the Maserati Ghibli is drawing comparisons to a Chrysler 300
The later, V6-powered car was pretty great. It was, more or less, a Z24 with a really plush interior and classy looks. Great combination. Lousy Cadillac, though. Wish I still had one.
It was my first car . I was at a hole in the wall car dealership with my dad ( God rest his soul ) where he bought it for me . I tried to steer my dad to the v6 cavielier to no avail . I am grateful though for the first car I ever owned though . It was an electrical nightmare to work on . It 1.8 liter carbureted engine and 3 speed slush box was underpowered . It handled well and the previous owner put super wide tires on the stock wheels like 225 so it handled like a go cart .
"Comments... can haunt that model for it's entire run." Amen to that! The V6 Cimarron was SOOOO much better, but suffered because of the boat-anchor '82 model. It deserved so much more.
In 1998, Wisconsin, I worked with a guy with an old Cimmaron. The door skins were rusted through along the bottom the entire length of each door. He could pull back the door skin, reach his arm up through the rust hole and unlock the door. Wisconsin, like the Cimmaron, is an automotive nightmare. Salt, salt, salt,...
@@brettcannon74 I suppose they needed more market share by some corporate edict, but it’s just that in 1984, fior instance you could still buy a new coupe deville for about 18 large, depending on options. I dunno. Maybe there were customers who just had to have a wreath and crest on their hood no matter what, and $12000 was their hard ceiling.
The cylinder heads used to crack regularly on these 1.8 and 2.0 POS engines, too. Unfortunately, I was working for a GM dealer back in those days, so I'm used to pain.
This era of Cadillac was their undoing. I would argue that they're still struggling under the weight of the terrible decisions made at this time, including the Cimarron. In 1980, their incredibly successful original Seville was replaced by the bustleback model, which saw sales plummet and never come close to recovering in its 6 model years. The original Seville had succeeded in arresting Mercedes-Benz's sales growth from 1976-79. When Benz intenders saw the retro '80, they turned on their heels and ran back to Benz. In 1981, the best engine you could get in any Cadillac was the 4.1L Buick 4bbl V6, which was offered only as a delete option. The other two Cadillac engines available across the board were the terrible Olds 350 Diesel and the 6.0L V8-6-4, which never worked right. Then in 1982, Cadillac not only launched the terrible Cimarron, they replaced the underpowered, but rock-solid Buick 4.1L V6 with an equally underpowered, but more expensive, more complex, far more trouble-prone and far less-efficient HT4100 V8 with "digital fuel injection." And made it standard in everything except the Cimarron and limousines. Then fuel prices stabilized and then collapsed in 1983, just in time for the overly-downsized, yet still fuel-swilling FWD C-body deVilles and Fleetwoods to debut. GM's 2.8L V6 was eventually made available in the Cimarron, but it suffered from overheating issues due to water jackets that were engineered too small to cool it properly. By 1986, both the Seville and Eldorado saw plunging sales due to an awful redesign. And then the '87 Allante launched half-baked, underpowered, and $15,000 more expensive than it should have been. In 8 short model years, Cadillac went from the most successful luxury car marque the world had ever seen, to an unimaginable trainwreck of a brand that handed all its competitors - including Lincoln - the world's larger luxury car market on a silver platter and alienated an entire generation of emerging buyers, most of them forever. It took awhile for their traditional buyers to die off, but by 2000, Lincoln passed them in sales, and then Mercedes, Lexus, and BMW did, too. With the final STS, XLR, first SRX, ELR, ATS, latest CTS, and CT6 all absolute sales flops, it's clear that Cadillac's image has yet to recover despite the tens of billions of dollars GM has pumped into the brand over the last 20 years.
Loving all these retro clips of your old shows and I am really enjoying all your current shows also. It's a shame we don't get it transmitted here in Scotland. I was wondering if you have done any more reviews of cars in Canada like the one you did for the Hyundai Stellar for cars that were never sold in the USA for example the Lada Signet (Riva in the UK).
It depends. If they don't rot into 3000 pieces, the engines seem to be fairly reliable. Still see quite a few of the A-Body GM cars around. Few Escort/Tracer/Lynx around. Lot's of 80's and 90's C/K and F-Series around with massive rust holes in most.
GM did not fool anyone it was a cheap Cavalier with some Cadillac badges gluded to it. To the few who bought it, they were quick to take off the Cadillac emblems when they got laghed at
I really don't mind that it's a rebadged Chevy. Just do a good job on a rebadged Chevy if they just put more quality Parts on the little car it wouldn't have been so bad
Everytime I see a new (C)TS, that's all I can think of. I would think they would have avoided the letter C in their new models considering those 2 cars were a PR nightmare.
Yeah, why did Cadillac use a waddling water bird as their symbol for the Cat-era? At least use a Jaguar (no can't use that), or maybe a Cougar (nope, taken by Mercury), how about a Linx (nosiree, also used by Mercury) or maybe a Tiger (uh-uh, Sunbeam made one), oh I got it, Wildcat (scratch that, old Buick moniker). "Okay, boys," says a Harvard MBA, "let's use a DUCK!" "Brilliant!" exclaims a VP hired by Roger Smith, "Give that guy a raise and a promotion!"
I'm damn near 60 (MORE than old enough to remember when these were new). I just NOW noticed that the on the '92 Cimmaron, the Cadillac badge has neither the "V" or the Wreath. I thought THAT only happened on Cadillacs in 1970 an 1971.
my grandad, who worked at a variety of GM dealerships as a mechanic from 1968 until he retired in 2002, said that the Cadillac Cimmaron was the biggest pain in the butt to work on, other Cadillac models weren't far behind from that same time period. He said that after the 1980s, Cadillacs became easier to work on despite the Northstar engines of which my grandad was free from having to work on😁
Imagine buying this and having it for a year to sit back and watch the newly released goonies, and catch the new madonna, van halen, michael jackson and cyndi lauper CDs.. ...and watch a thin and pleasant-seeming oprah on TV.
88HP!?! I can push a car faster than this thing can move. Wow, I never really think of my 82 Corvette as being a performance car with only around 200 hp and a 8 second 0-60... but wow, compared this to disaster my Corvette is amazing. Man did the EPA just destroy car performance for about 15 years.
Rod Munch the Corvette was a performance car, this was a luxury economy car. You think the huge DeVille and Fleetwood did any better with 125 HP with over two ton of weight?
brett cannon Those cars had V8's making over 200ft/lbs of torque even with all the detuning. Those cars would hit 60 in about 10 sec. So they would smoke this cadavalier.
88HP isn't luxury. I've owned 3 Cadillac's, a BMW, 3 Corvettes - lots of different cars over the years. I really like Cadillac, well except for the God awful CUE system - it's f'ing awful, but 88HP in a Caddy in the 1980s? That's disgraceful, no matter if it was just a rebadged Cavalier or not. Also a ton of the blame is on the EPA that just destroyed car performance for quite a while.
I remember back in the day, someone asked a GM engineer what the difference was between a Chevy cavalier and a Cadillac Cimmaron. He said, and I quote, about $6000!
The Cimmaron's problem isn't that it was a bad car. For what it was and the standards of the era in which it was sold, it was actually a pretty good deal. During the 80s, pretty much every car was slow and unreliable (that second one with the exceptions of Mercedes and Volvo), because technology *still* hadn't caught up to the safety and emissions standards that had been implemented nearly a decade ago. The problem was that although it was a decent car for what it was and with a price that undercut the German competitors by enough that its faults didn't matter, it was a Chevy Cavalier with microscopic Cadillac badges and almost no styling differences. It doesn't matter how OK of a car it was for its price and class, what's the point of buying a car to impress people with if nobody can tell that you have one? Current Audis suffer from the same problem, their entry level cars look just like VWs, so everyone buys C-classes and 3-series instead. Their mid-range cars sell well because you get an incredible amount of prestige and interior build quality for a price much lower than the closest competitors, but the low end stuff looks too anonymous. The largest profits are at higher price points, but it doesn't matter how much you make per car if you don't sell any, and near-luxury is where the volume is at. Even Infiniti and Acura, 2 brands that ceased to carry any prestige nearly a decade ago but still charge luxury prices, outsell them in those segments. Audi IMO is 2016's 1980s Cadillac: unreliable, mediocre, and overpriced versions of cheaper cars, with a bloated, expensive to produce range that hardly sells except for a few near the top that just barely pay for the ones that don't. An A5 is great, but an A3 is not even close to an Acura ILX competitor, let alone a 3-series fighter. They've been making massive improvements to the A7/8 and Q7 at the expense of their models that actually sell, like Cadillac used to do with the Eldorado.
Dude. You weren't alive in the '80s. Trust me, by comparison, this was a complete joke, not just in comparison to the imports (Volvo 240 series, VW Jetta, Audi 5000, etc.etc) but domestic as well. The lebaron was world's better than this, and that's saying something.
My '77 Pontiac Astre Formula wagon (Vega Kammback clone) with Iron Duke 2.5L 4 banger and 5 speed manual (28 MPG city, 34 MPG hiway) outperformed this car in every way!
Not all American cars were built so cheaply. My grandmas 1984 Monte Carlo CL was a trooper. Lasted for years. When Body by Fisher was the rule of the land and a 302 V8 was top notch.
yeah but the vast majority of the American car build quality back then was bad. American car companies got cheap, because they wanted to compete with econo box imports back then. that's when the American car companies started going down hill in build quality, they were more concerned about quantity at that time over quality.
Unfortunately Cadillac doesn't remember Cimmaron with even as much fondness as Autoweek did. This was a thinly disguised Chevy Cavalier that Cadillac was rightly ashamed of. Probably the lowest point for GM quality, and Caddy's reputation suffered for 30 years after. Wonder if the GM bean counters had a line item for that?
It's funny because the Cavalier replaced the Monza in the Chevrolet lineup; and the Monza was the better car. My dad owned a 78 Monza and later an 82 Cavalier; and he said the Monza was better even though it itself was a piece....
6:30 14.6 seconds to 60, and that's an improvement! And, I can just imagine the 4 cylinder buzz that would ensue when the car was driven with such gusto. The Cimmaron looked like a nice car until you saw that it was just a dressed-up Cavalier. It wasn't really bad, but it must have had the same bearable but unsupportive read seats as the other J-cars (and due to undersized brakes, no middle seating position in the first couple of years). I'll bet it was more comfortable in front, though. From what I've read, even the V6 didn't turn it into a $13,000 car, since there was too little space under the hood for compliant engine mounts. It was probably a good buy as a used car, if you wanted the nicest Cavalier on the block.
Insult to injury. It's a Chevy Cavalier. My brother had the 84 Cavalier and I had the 84 Sunbird, the Pontiac version. The Pontiac Sunbird was nicer than the "Cadillac" or the Cavalier. General Motors has never recovered in my opinion. I recently drove a 2018 Chevrolet Cruze with a turbo motor and Chevy can always suck it. If it's not a Corvette I am not interested when it comes to GM
