(first posted 1/13/2014. One of my favorite (and most effective) trolling posts) Talk about instant gratification. At today’s Seville conversions post, nlpnt left this comment: I would’ve liked to see a Seville coupe using an unmodified Nova coupe body-in-white. Ask and you shall receive: Less than an hour later, Bill R. leaves this picture as a reply, and later sent me some more as well as his explanation as to how he built his “Noville” coupe, and how almost everything between the two lined up perfectly:
I am responding per your request on my Seville-Nova mash-up – the resultant bastard child of someone (me!) with time on my hands, knowledge of the car design process and some cool tools (namely a Sawz-all and a MIG welder!)
I followed the design of the Seville and how it was morphed off the Nova X body platform. I started with a Seville that I found in a local salvage yard. It had been flooded in a garage and the brakes were locked up. i also found a Nova hardtop that was very rusty and had a tired 6 cyl.
The first step was the front clip swap. By unbolting the subframe mounts, steering column and the wiring harness, the entire assemblies rolled out and swapped easily. The same was true for the rear axles/leaf spring assy’s. The rear bumper was a bolt in swap. I cut the Seville rear quarters and rear panel as one piece and it lined up perfectly to the Nova trunk floor. The floor seam along the back of each car was identical! (the lower bodyline was identical too and served as a good reference point)
I de-skinned the Seville doors and welded them together. I was then able to use these pieces to reskin the Nova doors and the remaining pieces were used to fill the gap in the rear quarters. I did have to shorten the Seville trunklid approximately 2 inches to make it fit.
As I said in the earlier posts, the transition between the end of the front Seville fenders and the top of the Nova doors required a lot of fabrication. I did not get to that stage however. If I were to do it again, I would either start with a less rusty Nova, or I would try to fit the Nova doors and roof onto the Seville.
I’ve been hoping to see something like this for years, as my Deadly Sin CC on the gen1 Seville has always generated lots of intense comments pointing out that my calling the Seville a tarted-up Nova was off base. ” the Seville was so changed from it’s X-body brothers that it got its own internal K-body designation unique to the Seville only.” Or this one: “Why does everyone think the Seville is a Nova/X-Car? …these two cars share very little if nothing in common… I will tell you the only thing a Nova shares with this Seville is the ring and pinion and maybe the U-joints”. Yes, well tell that to Bill, who found out that just about everything bolts right up.
Interesting project. But even though the Caddy parts bolt onto the Chevy, the resultant car would still drive and feel like a Chevy Nova, not a Cadillac Seville. The platform may be the same, but there is a very tangible difference between the two. And at the time, nobody was ever confused about which is which. If only GM put this much thought into subsequent differentiation of cars built on the same platform!
For the record, I never drove a Seville, but I did drive a ’76 Nova coupe on a long road trip in 1985. It was a very nice, competent car, but it didn’t feel like a Caddy. I also had plenty of wheel time in a ’82 Olds Delta 88 and a ’79 Sedan DeVille – another two cars built on the same platform. While more similar, there were very tangible differences there too. Until the early 1980s, there was always enough difference between divisions to justify a price difference. Only with the Cavalier/Cimarron did it become a phoned-in, cynical shell game.
Well said!!
The Seville was indeed a (heavily) tarted-up Nova – but… not that there’s anything wrong with that. The Camaro rode on similar mechanicals and was regarded as a good-handling car in its day. Cadillac beefed up most of what needed beefing up to make their car ride softer, smoother, quieter, and most expensive-feeling than any Nova. Was it enough to win over European car fans? No, but there weren’t as many of them yet, and it was good enough to stem the tide of defections from Cadillac to M-B or Jaguar, enough to give GM time to design a successor that would actually beat the imports at their own game, which of course they failed miserably at in 1980. As others noted upthread, the Seville’s kinship to the Nova was less obvious than the de Ville/Fleetwood’s kinship to the Impala.
Things like which cars share the same platform or drivetrains concern car nuts far more than typical buyers. My older brother, who is not a car guy, took me car shopping recently; he didn’t know how many cylinders the engines had, much less how a CVT or DCT is different from a conventional automatic, or the significance of IRS or any other such technical tidbits. He only cared if he found the car comfortable to drive, got good fuel economy, and was inexpensive and reliable. My younger brother who drives a Lexus RX knows more about cars and is well aware his pricey ride uses the same platform and drivetrain as a plebian Camry. He was still happy to pay more for it because of the more luxurious ambiance, fancier tech features, and the coddling you get from Lexus dealers. As far as he’s concerned, the RX reusing a Camry engine and platform is an advantage. Why wouldn’t you want your car to share its mechanical bits with one of the most reliable cars ever built?
GM should have paid more attention than it did to the rise of German and Japanese imports in the late 1960s and early ’70s which would have given them time to develop cars like the Seville from scratch – they certainly had the money at the time – rather than the crash program that led to the Seville. But I still think a Nova-based Seville was better than the other short-term option available at the time – basing it on a larger Opel. I think doing so would have resulted in the same sort of problems that sank the Catera two decades later, including a car full of parts unfamiliar to U.S. dealers and mechanics.
My favorite ‘discovery’ is the original name of each the GM Division’s Nova variants
Then read the list down looking at just the first letter!
Nova – Chevrolet
Omega – Oldsmobile
Ventura – Pontiac
Apollo – Buick
Seville – Cadillac
NOVAS – Always made me laugh.
though they called it the K-body instead of X-special body – which it actually was.
A leaf-spring rear solid rear axel suspension a dead give-away. Camaro & Firebird also heavily Nova under the outer body for their F-body…
Does anyone know if this car ever got finished?
I irrationally love that thing.
There’s nothing wrong with this kind of platform engineering, as long as it’s done right. Cadillac put a lot into differentiating it and it showed. Ride, interior quality, and features let it stand out enough to be worth the work. Too bad GM didn’t take the correct lesson to heart in subsequent years, and most of their cars were the same sausages in different casings, as exemplified by the Cimarron and pretty much everything in the 80s.