Vintage Ad: S&S FWD Cadillac DeVille Professional Limousine – Ready For the Flood
– Posted on April 3, 2020
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With front wheel drive, it would be interesting trying to get this up a hill in slippery weather. Still, kind of cool.
The key is not having enough power to break traction while having a low enough first gear/loose enough torque converter to keep the feeble engine from stalling.
Because, this car wasn’t malproportioned enough already… That grille is all kinds of wrong, looks like it slipped and fell a few inches. The three doors look like each was intended for a different car. The C pillar looks like it’s on the door instead of behind it.
GM’s own Fleetwood 75 limo built on this platform looks a lot better — although it has jump seats rather than three full benches.
“GM’s own Fleetwood 75 limo built on this platform looks a lot better ”
I can go with “better”, but “a lot better” may be overstating things. 🙂
What odd observations.
Based on the grill and tailfins, this is an ’89 at a minimum.
Agreed, ’89+
Which somewhat explains why these were built, as GM had discontinued the factory FWD Fleetwood 75 after 1987.
In fact, H&E did the cutting and splicing for GM to make the 1985-87 Fleetwood 75’s. The center door on this ’89 looks very similar to the one they created for the 85-87 cars.
S&S must have really been excited to offer a limo based on the “new” Cadillac. While people kept buying limos based on the old RWD Cadillac and Town Car.
Families at a funeral are already sad, something that should not be made worse by having to ride in a limo that looks like this.
Well at least there is no transmission tunnel?
These still had a sizable center hump that covered the exhaust pipe, unlike the ’85 and earlier FWD Seville and Eldorado whose floor was nearly flat.
Pretty decent ground clearance, though!
Those cars made horrible funeal coaches too…too narrow between the rear shock towers. An a really big enhanced width casket wouldn’t fit. The firm I worked for had RWD Buick LeSabre 6 door professional cars, one even had crank windows. Families bitched a blue streak.
Somehow the Buick version wound up looking better proportioned:
The 3800 in the LeSabre would have been more reliable than the 4.1 or 4.5 in the Cadillac.
That’s much better. Looks like a real car rather than a cartoon.
Completely lacking in the dignity and presence essential to a Cadillac, or any limousine for that matter.
Exactly.
This thing could just as well have been made in Russia or China.
It’s Ill-proportioned and way too high on its wheels. The gaudy wire wheels don’t do it any favors either.
Funny, when I first quickly scanned the ad’s spaced apart text,
in the opening line I thought I had spotted a subliminal nod to the firm’s founder, Hess.
At the time, I would have suggested this builder invest a few thousand dollars, and have a recommended ad agency prepare their marketing. To appear their most professional. This appears to be a brochure cover. Some potential customers may overlook the lack of polish, but many wouldn’t. I wouldn’t be impressed by this first impression.
The poor close cropping on the photo, the fake-looking shadow under the car, the studio photography that makes this look like a Franklin Mint die cast miniature. Investing a few thousand dollars in great photography and ad copy, as well as a professional logo, would make me trust this builder a lot more on initial impressions.
If this is the professional limousine, what’s the amateur one like?
Well, you did ask.
Ouch. I didn’t need to see that!!
It takes a warped sense of humor to build a Cimarron limousine…
Guess that’s why I like it! 🙂
Wow! The things people do…but it actually looks better than the subject car.
Picture this: the firm where I worked had always used powder blue livery with navy top and navy interior, high end Cadillac coaches, Lincoln lead cars and a mix of Chrysler and Cadillac limousines, all painted in the same GM light blue. Then the corporate conglomerate bought them…white LeSabre lead cars, Cadillac coaches from the lowest bidder and 6 door Buick limousines, all with base wheelcovers and base interior trim. The funeral directors were pissed too, because they took the lead cars home and they were used to full size Continentals with leather and whatnot, not stripped down Buicks.
I worked at a FH during the summers of 1978-82 and on school vacations as hours were available. Fortunately that was before these shrunken cars became available. They had pair of Armbruster-Stageway 6 door Lincolns (a 78 and a 79) in the silver/black vinyl roof livery they used on everything. Even then the base-level Continental interiors were none too luxurious, and the cars never had the presence of the old black 1971 Fleetwood 75 that was being phased out.
It was all Buick and Cadillac sedans and Cadillac professional cars until Lincoln sedans and limos started getting into the mix in 78-79. They had bought one Chrysler New Yorker in 1974 and that car was a legend (and not a good one) because of the disastrous quality, and they never bought another so far as I know.
who died?
Cadillac.
Calling it early, this has to be the comment of the year.
On a more serious note, GM Luxury as a whole is pretty well dead. GM could shutter both Cadillac and Buick, hardly anyone would notice. Just offer “High Country” and “Denali” trims throughout the Chevy and GMC-Hummer Line-up.
Offer the “GMC Yukon Denali Escalade” (essentially a factory installed body-kit that turns the GMC Yukon design into a “Cadillac Inspired Design”) through the GM Fleet for Funeral Services and Special Order for GMC retail sales like The Lincoln Town Car was toward the end of its run. The website already exists.
https://www.gmfleet.com/cadillac-professional-vehicles
Livery color was a BIG deal in the 80s and 90s. Kriegshauser had light blue, Kutis had ugly gold, Hoffmeister had black lead cars and limousines and jewel tone coaches (maroon, green, blue), Alexander & Sons had maroon, Baue had white with black half tops, Schrader had a medium blue with navy sailcloth top, Zeigenhein had silver. You could identify whose procession it was from a mile away.
Well, you did ask.
I saw an end-of-production V6 Cimarron with four-digit mileage that was collapsing under its own weight in some rich family’s elegantly paved driveway on Shelter Island…in 1999. I took a very close look at it, as I hadn’t seen one in a long time even then. A friend of mine was building them a detached garage/mother-in-law-apartment combination for an amount of money that would still buy a beach condo in Virginia.
I wonder if the ride-height of this poor beast is due to the breakover angle of a parking lot entrance at S&S, or if there is some chassis-engineering reason for adding suspension travel as you add wheelbase.
I’d rather have that Ambassador.
Keep in mind a lot of these didn’t have load leveling so they needed to sit high empty so they wouldn’t sit too low when loaded. They were spooky to drive if the back sagged and the nose was high, they would wander terribly on the highway,
I remember reading in the early 2000s that S&S was one of the only limo manufacturers that supposedly did such a great job on construction that GM would allow them to place Cadillac emblems in areas that S&S had modified during the construction process.
The only “stretch” I really wanted was after the Fleetwood was discontinued S&S (I believe) started to make Devilles that had a 6 in stretch in the middle (for more rear seat room) and a slight trunk stretch (for more cubic feet of luggage capacity.) I’ve seen pictures of the car but supposedly it was so well done that it looked factory. And they were sold through select Cadillac dealers.
Raised front suspension so the stretch wouldn’t high-center?
But how ahead of its’ time would this have been – the 1985 Cadillac Utility de Ville
Awesome! Cadillac could have gotten out ahead of the SUV trend and totally dominated with this car!
Sayers and Scoville should have stuck to the RWD chassis, or switched to Lincoln Town Car platform!
Our small local funeral home has a FWD ’80’s Cadillac hearse which looks as ridiculous as this hideous thing, great big tall body chasing a little tiny front end.
It would be hard to make an uglier limo if you tried.
That grille is particularly unpleasant. Either it’s the angle or the curvature, but it looks like it’s about to burst into tears or throw up. Given the powerplant’s reputation, that may be appropriate.
Personally, I find that the current crop of Cadillac funeral livery very awkward looking (IMO); they just don’t have the presence of the “way back” rear wheel drive versions.
I had one. It was fun. I put newer 17″ caddy rims on it