I’ve been thinking a lot this year about mindfulness, intentionality, and being present. In a recent essay I had written about a ’59 Ford Galaxie, I had touched on the idea of age being relative and the importance of recognizing and enjoying things the way they are right now. I’m a work in progress, and this kind of thinking takes practice. I’ve been known to fall into the trap of rumination, though I’m much better about not doing so now that I’m more aware of that tendency. I am content, but the occasional “what ifs” can trip me up if I allow myself to dwell on wondering what could have been if I had gotten better grades in school, if I had never gotten into that relationship, if I had been born into a different family, etc.
It has been neither helpful nor useful to compare my path to those of other individuals, a futile exercise which rarely if ever has made me feel better about a past which I cannot change. With relatively newfound clarity and frankness in discussing such life matters with friends, I’ve learned that quite a few of them that I might have otherwise held as benchmarks of leading successful, trouble-free lives have indeed had their share of significant personal challenges, setbacks, and insecurities.
I want to make it clear that I’m not talking about misery loving company. That can be another snare, though we all need to commiserate from time to time. It’s just that there has been freedom in understanding that it’s not just me, and that I’m not somehow in some category by myself, banished from some plane of existence populated by everyone else who had somehow uniformly deserved and been handed better treatment and life experiences than me.
This triple-white, third-generation Cadillac Seville could represent the life, person, place, or thing you think you want which will make you feel complete and whole once acquired. Parked at the curb on a sunny, summer Saturday seven years ago, it looked perfect and angelic from the sidewalk, like a fluffy, Wreath-And-Crest adorned cloud on wheels. Even then, it was noteworthy for being what looked like a gorgeous, daily-driven example that would have been at least 26 years old at the time, with ’91 being the last model year of this generation. I couldn’t nail down the exact model year from a recent, fruitless license plate search (which leads me to believe the car has either changed hands or no longer exists), but from the 15″ alloy wheels with red center caps, this example looks to have been produced for one of the three model years between 1989 and ’91.
Even if this isn’t exactly my type of car, it was truly impressive to behold from the sidewalk, gleaming almost as if it was wearing a halo. From what I could see from that vantage point, it made me question why it was even parked on the street, given that it looked to be in pristine condition as if it had been garaged and pampered for most or all of its life. This smaller, third generation of Seville appeared for ’86 with a conventional three-box design to replace the previous, controversial bustleback. The new K-body was about 350 pounds lighter than the outgoing model, and between fourteen and sixteen inches shorter in length, depending on the model year. It was also loaded with lots of the newest, mid-’80s GM electronic goodies. Those who hadn’t cared for the “slantback” and had waited for a return to form a la the original, lauded ’75 Seville should have been pleased. Right?
Wrong. Though aesthetically unpopular with some, the second-generation Seville had always been a consistent and steady seller, averaging 33,000 cars annually from between 1980 and ’85, and almost hitting the 40,000 mark in its final two years. This next generation was supposed to get everything back on track. If only the Seville looked better. If only it was smaller, lighter, and more efficient. If only it had more electronics. General Motors delivered this new design for ’86… and saw sales immediately plummet by over half, to just 19,100 units. Sales eventually improved to 33,100 for ’90, this generation’s sales peak, but then they dropped again the next year to 26,400, even despite the addition of the performance-oriented STS. (Some buyers were undoubtedly waiting for the sleek, new ’92.)
Our featured car had looked like an absolute creampuff… that is, until I stepped into the street to get some pictures of the other side of the car. What had looked like a showroom-timewarp example on the driver’s side revealed itself to have significant damage on the other. Can you imagine having bought this car from a lot or an estate sale as a once-cherished chariot, and then being involved in a wreck that left its passenger’s side looking like this? There’s no eating a gourmet soufflé that has landed face-down on a dirty floor, not even after you scrape off the dirt with a kitchen knife. You may still try to eat it depending on how much you had your heart set on doing so, but you just know that it’s no longer perfect.
I have seen enough episodes of The Twilight Zone to have had it reinforced in me, at least cognitively, that wishing to become someone else or have a different life than the one I’ve been given can be a dangerous game. Someone else’s life that one may secretly covet, with the limited perspective from which one can see things, may have major damage or issues visible only from certain angles. So what, if I don’t have an advanced college degree, a management position, or make a gazillion dollars? The fact that I had put this essay together on my own time and wasn’t still on my work laptop after hours speaks to just how imperfectly perfect my life is for me. My hope for the owner of this Seville is that he or she was able to appreciate the beauty, comfort, and stunning color scheme of this Cadillac, as well as his or her life, whatever “dents”, unchangeable circumstances, or imperfections may exist.
Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois.
Saturday, July 22, 2017.
Brochure pages sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.
Personally, although I was never one to even consider a Seville, the ’79 was a nice trim car, the “bustleback” was an absolute horror, and this one (IMO) was an awkward combo mix of styling themes that didn’t form a cohesive total. But, styling is subjective and the drop in sales indicated that quite a few people felt as I did. Now, the ’92 Seville was a return to what a Cadillac should look like. Like you, I hate to see any surviving model having been subjected to such damage after being kept pristine for so long! As for looking at others, an old saying that I heard frequently came to mind: “If, ands, and buts, were candy and nuts, we’d all have a real good time!” LOL! Have a great day!! 🙂
I still remember the Simpsons episode where Homer started the “ifs and buts” rhyme and got only that much out… 🤣
I actually think the styling on the gen-3 Seville was cohesive and all-of-one piece. IMO, it just wasn’t quite as distinctive as what would be expected. I thought it was a nice looking car, but the ’92 was a knockout.
Great life advice.
And ohhhhhh, I feel bad for whoever owned that Seville. Unless one had a close relative in the autobody business who would do the work for mostly free, that kind of damage would never be “worth” fixing. I’d guess the car didn’t last too much longer after you saw it. It’s a shame as it probably was someone’s pride and joy for a while.
Thanks, Jeff! And I had a sinking feeling that his car was now toast (or a toaster) after doing my license plate search and having nothing come up. This car was most certainly totaled out. Seems a shame. Same principle behind quite a few Curbside Recycling subjects we’ve seen.
Great essay, Joe!
I’m a contrarian on the Seville; I thought the ’79-’84 was hideous, and that this generation was a huge improvement. A friend leased one back then; maroon with tan interior. His was a “sport” model with road wheels, blackwalls and no padded roof. Gorgeous car that made me appreciate the low ‘chariot on wheels’ design. For a Cadillac it handled quite well in the hills. Unfortunately, it was gone within 18 months due to constant mechanical and electrical maladies. Replaced with a Lexus GS; he’s since never looked back from Japanese vehicles.
Thanks, Dave! And it’s a shame about the short tenure your friend had with his due to that car’s woes. That seems consistent with what I remember about at least one example I knew of. My one friend whose parents had a Bonneville SSE traded it for one of these Sevilles, and like the Pontiac, the Cadillac had myriad issues.
The older I get, the more deeply I appreciate the uniqueness of each individual and how futile it is to either wish we were them or criticize/judge them.
I’m even finding that applies increasingly to cars that I used to really dislike, although in the case of this Seville, I still have a bit more work to do. I’m getting there…
Paul, I appreciate that you’re at least trying with this Seville!
To help narrow the year down, it looks (from what I can see looking very close) to have the driver’s side airbag. Thus it would be a 90 or 91. The 86-89 were without the airbag and of course the 92 was the new body.
I owned an 89 STS in white and they all had the beachwood super soft leather bucket seats. That car was the most comfortable cruiser I’ve ever owned and that includes any of the many new cars I’ve owned. I was living in southern California and found the car at a dealership in Seattle (WA). I flew up, purchase it and drove it home. That was my first long distance trip of many. A year later I drove it round trip of LA to Missoula (MT) for a family wedding. A year later I drove it to IL one way and parked it in storage. A few months later I drove it from NW Illinois to Nashville, TN. It was good on gas, quiet and handled well with amazing seats. I sold it to a guy in Florida who flew to Nashville and purchased it and drove it back. That car never failed me or him on those trips. It had close to 100,000 miles when he purchased it.
Today I proudly own a pristine and very low miles 1986 Seville in silver/dark maroon two-tone with only 23,000 true miles. With the 4.1L engine, it’s not as powerful as the 89 with the 4.5L engine, but it’s ok. I didn’t buy it for racing. Again, a very comfortable car and quiet as a tomb. These aren’t as controversial as the 1980 to 1985 Slant backs nor as timeless as the 1976 to 1979 models, but I do love driving them.
I agree about it being a 1990-91 due to the airbag.
As far as I know, the only exterior clue to the car’s year would be the rear badging. Since the engine size increased from 4.5 liters in 1990 to 4.9 in ’91, the rear badge would say “4.5 PORT FUEL INJECTION V8” for the 1990, but “4.9” for the 1991 models. I can’t make it out from these images, but if Joseph can see what those tiny numbers say in the original images, that might be the needed clue.
Dan, I love reading accounts like this, of you with your example. I’m trying to remember the last time I might have ridden in one – I’ve never driven one, for sure. Silver and maroon sounds like a fetching color combo.
And thanks (and also to Eric) for confirmation on the likely model year of the featured car.
It occurred to me when looking at these images that I’ve never been in a car with a white interior. And when I began reading here about the perils of comparing oneself to others, and how other people invariably have hidden blemishes of their own – I thought you might be heading down the path of discussing the white upholstery. After all, it looks neat in these pictures, but you may not want to look too closely at all the scuffs and stains.
But ultimately that passenger side damage is a better analogy. Definitely a Twilight Zone type of revelation. Nothing’s perfect, after all.
Eric, I don’t know if I’ve ever ridden in a car with white leather or vinyl. At least as an adult, I’m pretty confident I haven’t. The angle you mention might have been a very interesting one to pursue had I thought of it. Perfection is often an illusion. And that’s okay!
The funny thing about white interiors is that the trend is coming back. White upholstery seems relatively common on Teslas, and I’ve seen it on BMWs and other premium cars. I wouldn’t have guessed that white interiors would come back in fashion someday. Could cabriolet roofs be next?
Any affection I had for that generation of Seville (and the Eldorado) vaporized instantly on seeing that instrument panel. Wouldn’t have been shocked to see a square steering wheel.
Looking at life that way can also get you into some good situations. Was no fan of the big square headlights on the Gen 5 Prelude but I figured I’d only be seeing their brightness from behind the wheel.
I also lamented the disappearance of pop-up headlamps on not just that redesign of the Prelude, but on many sporty or sports cars of that era. A “Quartic” / square steering wheel like on the Austin Allegro in one of these Sevilles certainly would have been something!
I’m going by memory now and would need to do more research, but I think if memory serves me correctly, they had slightly different tail light lenses on the 91. I’m kind of coming to the conclusion that this white one may be a 90. But at least we have it narrowed down to the two years!!
I tried to see the script and badge on the trunk, but it doesn’t even look like factory emblems. Having that top on there, they probably have different emblems on it as well.
Dan, I just got home from work and blew up the original photograph to see if I could read the badge, and I couldn’t. Those were some very good clues that you and Eric provided as to the possible model year of this car, and the air bag thing also helped, so thank you.
The ’90 and ’91 Seville dropped the chrome winged crest in the middle of each lens on ’86-89s.
The STS had amber rear turn signals not on the Seville, plus horizontal reverse lights instead of vertical. That left room in the bumper dip for European plates. Wishful thinking.
Thanks, Ralph. I guess we’re down to ’90 or ’91 for this example.
“The past brings great comfort.
It holds no surprises,
You know what has happened,
You know what has gone.
Good times there are, yes,
But you cannot live there.
The past is all over;
You have to move on.”
Joseph, I used to live in the past, and have my head full of ‘what if’s’. Much as the past might be nice to revisit now and then, it can be a snare and a delusion to live there. While ‘what if?’ can be a great question to ask in the present (What if we twiddle this? What if we change that?) and lead to real progress, most times there is nothing positive gained by what if-ing about the past, just a lot of bad feelings. Learning from past mistakes is good; living in them is not. It’s a theme I’ve visited several times over the years in my poetry. And something I need to remind myself of, sometimes, still.
Regular readers will know I have scant time for these Cadil-lacks. Even if they had had the world’s best engine and chassis (which I gather they didn’t…), I would have had a hard time taking the styling seriously. Just as there can sometimes be a fine line between great art in the gallery and a nice piece you’d hang on your wall, so there is a line between great automotive design and ‘yeah, okay, but….”. This is not great art. The world’s biggest car company, with all of their potential resources, should have been able to do better. That they did not is a tragedy.
Okay, you might say, “But Peter, you were never a potential luxury car buyer. And you’re not American.” Fair comment, both counts. But… there is nothing wrong with a 108″ wheelbase, or a 190″ length. A 72″ width is quite generous, too. But, when I think of what any other car company, anywhere else in the world would have done with a package this size to work with…. no, I won’t go there. Bad feelings result.
“Old skeletons stretch out
Their bony arms to you,
But they cannot harm you
Unless you submit.
You are not who you were,
Not yet who you shall be:
For now is the moment,
This is the Day.”
Peter, I knew you were a master builder of scale models, but didn’t know about this other talent… beautifully written. Thank you.
You made an important distinction between “what ifs” as they relate to the past, present, and future. Absolutely, my own what ifs about what could be, and implementing those changes, have lead to highly significant, very beneficial changes in my own life. It’s how we set goals, and if we’re determined, we implement them. It’s the hypotheticals about that past that are fruitless.
Within the past month or so, I finished reading “It’s Not You” by Dr. Ramani Durvasula (a clinical psychologist), and one of the concepts that hit me like a ton of bricks was that of *radical acceptance*. The ability to acknowledge that a truth or set of circumstances isn’t necessarily they way you’d want it to be, but that it exists.
It sounds like a few in this thread are not at the point of radical acceptance of this Seville’s styling! haha I will say that the vinyl roof cap does help prevent it from looking more like a lesser GM N-body compact of the same era.
Thanks Joseph. I’ve never been one to make a big song and dance about things. I’ve been writing poems and short stories for ages, and often have poems in the local paper. This one, from 2013, just seemed to fit the mood of your article. As to the Seville’s styling and radical acceptance, I’ve accepted that it happened, but I no longer take GM’s miscue as a personal attack on my aesthetics. They’ve been punished enough.
There would be a lot less angst in society if people could accept that the universe does not revolve around them personally (applied radical acceptance!), and that their anger is often counterproductive; dialogue and de-escalation is the way forward.
Peter, I feel like shaking your hand. In my head, I just did.
“Nobody’s perfect!” is of course the best last line of any comedy film ever made (from 1960’s Some Like It Hot), leaving the historically unforseeable, ironically delicious fact that an ironic line about lack of perfection is itself perfect.
And no one is perfect, of course, despite the insatiable and insistent messaging about the illusion of achieving it that our commodity society pours daily upon us, but I’ll confess it has not been until I’ve arrived at an older age that I’ve come to better understand, to accept, the imperfectability of being, whether of myself or others.
Having become peacefully wiser, I still cannot help thinking – ungenerously, or perhaps just mischievously – that this model Caddy is so belligerently incompetent in its styling that the dented side is practically an improvement on the one facing the curb, so for sure, I am still on a journey!
So then, we’re both on a journey. Beautifully stated with respect to the inevitability of imperfection. And I say this not as a pessimist, but as a realist. Thanks, Justy.
‘Belligerently incompetent’ – Love that expression!
It is hard for me to have much love for these cars. They are in my opinion right sized but the execution is just terrible. It looks like a box framed by two rectangles, like how I drew cars when I was six years old. When the padded vinyl roof and fake wire wheel covers were added it made it pretty repulsive. The styling cues of a huge Deville weren’t going to transfer to a much smaller car.
It was stuff like this that sank GM. They still make a valiant effort with Cadillac brand but I doubt anything but the Escalade makes any money.
X2. Long front overhang and a short rear only ever works on a compact car, not a full-size one, in particular a luxury full-size one like a Cadillac. I have no idea whet people were thinking at GM during this period (that styling reared its ugly head in all car divisions). Unless I’m greatly mistaken, they combined this atrocity with the infamous HT 4100 (?) engine, which certainly did not help. The tragedy is that the Seville SLS/STS which replaced it WAS right style-wise (I remember them here in Austria, they did not look out of place among the usual German suspects). But, GM being GM, they managed to botch this one up too with those tiny head bolts on the Northstar engine.
Sigh…
Whenever this Seville resurfaces here, I try to understand the thinking behind the design. The package size is pretty much on point for many of today’s cars, but the proportions are totally out to lunch.
I think the over-long front overhang is to give a long hood and the resultant illusion of a big engine and imply power. I get that they didn’t want it to look like an Austin 1800. Unfortunately the 5mph bumper added to the already long overhang gives the look of an undershot jaw, adding to the general ungainliness. There is too much visual mass forward of the wheels. It needed a longer wheelbase and less overhang.
Unfortunately GM’s dogged insistence in hanging onto that 1976 formal roof, a fashion to which the rest of the world outside North America had said a firm “No thanks!” made the vehicle look decidedly strange on the international stage, rather like a double-cab pickup with a short bed rather than a prestige sedan.
And, as you say, that engine….
I despise Roger Bonham Smith and all that he stood for. There is no excusing his contribution to the destruction of General Motors. It was momentous and may his soul rest in Hades.
I’m not his fan, either. I’m reminded of this when I go home to Flint.
“What if” is fine as long as you’re just meandering along, don’t ever take those thoughts overly seriously .
“head in the clouds” ~ I can dig it even though I don’t see any sunroof .
I grew up around cars like this but from the late 30’s through the mid 50’s ~ _almost_ pristine, why they weren’t scrapped , some low $ person or Motor Head or garage Mechanic would own it and take tender loving care of it in spite of a mangled side or quarter .
In 1973 I got a 1956 VW DeLuxe Beetle for the labor of a top end job on another 1956 Beetle, it was center punched smack at the trailing joint of driver’s door and rear 1/4 panel, somehow managing to avoid touching the perfect rear fender or running board .
It was originally black so of course (I used to track these things) it had been re sprayed fire engine red and that Acrylic Enamel paint was really good so I waxed the entire car and after a few weeks took the seats out and set to work with a hydraulic bottle jack and some 4X4’s, I was able to push it out enough to where the door opened and closed properly and the window even rolled down .
This was long before anyone else cared about “Oval Window” Beetles, I ran that thing hard all over the Desert , I miss it still .
I hope whomever has or got this old Caddy takes care of it even in Yeoman Duty .
-Nate
Nate, I love what you described in your third paragraph and wondered myself if that wasn’t the case here. I seem to recall that the door card on the passenger’s side was missing, which made me think someone was about to embark on some work on it. Or maybe just to get in and out of that door.
When these came out I thought they were too small for a Seville but not hideous like like the baby Fleetwood and DeVille was. Nor was it plain like the baby eldorado especially before the power bulge and rear fenders and lights were fixed. Still size and looks wise a Betty White or bussel back Seville it was lacking. I still feel Cadillac should not have down sized cars for a second time or used crap engines. But the baby seville would have been great had it been the new cimmeron to replace the horrid j body at a reasonable price point it would have been a hit. As a Seville it was too small. But perfect as a cimmrron and there could have been a touring model BMW fighter. Baby Seville, Like a mark vi, or an 80 t bird, or a 78 Grand Prix were decent cars when ordered with the V8 but never found the love the early cars had.
This as the replacement for the Cimarron seems like it would have been a great and face-saving idea for the brand. That thought had never even occurred to me.