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.
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