(Image by CC’er Tim Brands)
It’s 1978. A revolution has engulfed Saudi Arabia, and oil prices are spiraling out of sight. In the US, gasoline rationing is in effect, and the national speed limit has been lowered to 45 mph. GM is desperate, and the 2.5 L Iron Duke four has become the standard engine in its B-Body full-sized cars. Datsun B-120s are being auctioned to the highest bidders. The VW Diesel Rabbit has become the best selling car. Cadillac needs a small car right now: enter the Cadette. Its 1.4 liter four features a very early version of Cadillac’s cylinder de-activation, and is dubbed the I4-3-2-1-0. In a huge pre-launch PR campaign, Cadillac trumpets that it has created the world’s first car to get over 100 mpg (actually 103 mpg in one-cylinder mode at a steady 27.5 mph), and full deactivation on over-run and possibly other (unexpected) occasions. Special horizontal shock absorbers are mounted to minimize its extreme side-to-side rocking in one cylinder mode, after test drivers reported motion sickness. But then disaster hits.
Suddenly, the revolution is over and oil prices plummet, just as the Cadette comes on line. And it turns out the one-cylinder mode is the default mode, which is occurring much of the time. A few thousand are shipped to dealers before GM realizes what a fiasco it has on its hands. All are hastily recalled in closed trailers, and the thirteen that were actually sold (after dealers snipped the cylinder-deactivation wires) are bought back from their owners, to be crushed. GM launches a massive campaign to eliminate any trace of the Cadette’s existence. It insists that magazine ads be sliced out before delivery, and billboards are hastily taken down at night. A major PR campaign is unleashed, claiming that the Cadillac Cadette never really existed, and that Ford “planted” the whole thing, including some doctored Chevettes with halo vinyl roofs, opera windows, and Briggs and Stratton lawn tractor engines.
But somehow, one slipped through the cracks, and was stashed away in a secure storage facility by its owner. It was to be auctioned last week by Barrett-Jackson, with a reserve of $5o million. Three days before the auction, it was cancelled. B-J now says there never really was a Cadette.
Dang, they should have run with it. Look how well the Cimarron worked out. And yes, I believe every word. 😉
My sisters friend had one of these back in the early 80s. Although it was only 4 years old t the time, the vinyl seats were torn and the Waxberry Yellow paint was faded. The engine, replaced at 11,000 miles (under warranty) knocked and pinged like crazy. The thing was actually worse than the Chevette because of all the “luxury” items reverse engineered to make the car a Cadillac (like the power window and door lock motors, and the leaky sunroof).
Her friend did participate in that massive class-action lawsuit over this car that has been documented so well in previous CCs. Like most CADette owners. She got the 24,000mi warranty extension and a coupon worth $1,000 if she purchased any new Cadillac with either a 4- or 6-cylinder engine. She never did se it tho.
She actually drove ths car until 1987, at which time she traded up to a brand new Pontiac LeMans with the classy roof rack.
I saw one. A friend who worked at a Cadillac Dealer who got one of the very few that made it into the distribution channel before the whole thing was killed. He called me one evening and told me to come over if I wanted to see it because the car was to be picked up by GM sometime after midnight. It was in that beautiful Cadillac light yellow. The leather in the interior was beautiful. The one I saw even had the gold trim package, wire wheelcovers and those slightly wide whitewalls that were coming into vogue at the time.
My friend warned me not to ever tell anyone about this. He was afraid of GM. He turned out to be right. Soon, his dealership was closed and turned into a J.D Byrider franchise. My friend moved away and I did not hear from him until several years later when he was found dead of an apparent suicide.
But I am not afraid to speak truth to power, and am now working on scanning into my computer the Polaroid photo that I took of the car that evening. It will be finished any second. . . . Hello, who’s out there. Hello? Anybody there? I guess it was my imaginatiwperisfnckzxmb,adt
“I did not hear from him until several years later when he was found dead.”
You have skillz my friend! Respect!!
In areas other than the English language, it would appear. 🙂
Sorry about all the grammatical errors, but is literally impossible to make edits when using my iPad
Plus, I forgot to mention the time when one of the wire wheels flew off the car and nearly hit a little kid walking down the street!
Okay, you expect us to believe that your sister had one of these cars? GM pulled out at the last minute, and they were never sold to the public! How gullible do you think we are?
Actually, the Briggs and Stratton twin cylinder 16hp Commercial series engine was a premium engine option buried in the options book under code ZL-1.5. I believe the engine deactivation was a half hearted attempt at dynamic breaking (sic?). Sister division EMD and their engineers were consulted during the design phase and they advised Cadillac that an appropriate roof mounted dynamic brake resistor grid was required. Since this would ruin the design esthetic of the Cadette it was nixed. Instead, the dynamic brake mode went straight into the small group 24 AC/Delco 12v Freedom battery. The resulting battery explosions finally convinced the Cadette engineering group to nix this idea, too. So, in the end, the only remains of this ill-fated design could be found in the snipped and taped wire harness tucked up inside the rear of the headliner……..
I am happy to report that I evaded some guys in suits who tried to shove me into an Escalade. I have logged back in from an undisclosed location.
Your info answers a question I had. I saw those unused connectors under the headliner that was poorly installed. I had assumed that those were for the Cadillac Rear View Information Center that was supposed to be released later in the model year. All engine management and climate control functions were to have been incorporated into a display across the top of the back window and viewable by the driver in the rear view mirror. Several of these items displayed were to be adjustable by the driver touching the mirror glass, but I read that Cadillac could not get the kinks worked out of the system. In any kind of sunlight or with cigarette smoke, the light interfered with the infrared signals that sensed a finger on a particular place of the mirror. Also, whenever the mirror automatically adjusted from rear headlights hitting it, the sensors would be confused and the engine would drop to 1 cylinder and the Climate Control would default to full heat and high fan.
Ah, the old HBD (Heads Back Display)! If you are looking at a Scotch-Lock blue connector, you are correct. The dynamc brake resistor wire harness could be indentified as a red and red wire group snipped and taped. Mr Roger Smith approved this modification after finding it saved 5 cents off each car sold.
Is that the Escalade with the “Waterboard Device, Portable” in the back? If so, consider yourself very, very, lucky indeed!
Oh. Never mind.
I remember interviewing an Industrial Designer some years ago who, off the record, mentioned he had worked on this very rare ‘piece of work.’ I specifically remember him saying they had to delete the stand-up Cadillac emblem from the top of the grill because it impacted the Cd badly enough while in 2 or 1 cylinder mode that it dropped the mileage by almost half.
Sure enough, the car in the photo is missing the badge—so we can be assured that this indeed is a genuine Cadette, not some photoshop mashup.
I wonder how many were sold with the dealer continental kit that was stupidly attached to the hatch, not the bumper…
Hatches became inoperable after the kit was installed.
The original design for that Continental Kit package was for really big gas struts with helper springs for the hatch to offset the weight of the spare tire. Unfortunately, the hatch was not designed for that kind of stress and the mounting points for the struts would start to tear. About a dozen cars were made before the decision came down to just weld the hatches shut and access the luggage area through a fold-down back seat.
Yeah, there was a kid in Wisconsin who was decapitated when that happened. I think the buff books blamed the parents for letting the tyke put groceries in “a car that was clearly not designed for that sort of use.”!
When I tried to edit this post, the strangest thing happened — my screen went black and up popped a message from the head of the Cadillac PR department. He told me I’d better Calais low or this might Escalade; then his entire Fleetwood be after me, and there would be the deVille to pay. Best I leave this one untouched, Paul.
They will probably send the same Cadi-lackeys they sent after me! Be careful. One of them flashed the biggest revolver at me I have ever seen. I think it was a .60 Special.
Does it shoot through schools, or is that just the .88 Magnum?
I remember reading about these cars in Trend & Driver, but I never saw an actual photo of one until today. With a little more commitment from GM, this car could have worked out, and provided some competition the similarly-sized Lincoln ProNator, the car that pioneere the Shoeless Entry System. A very well-researched article.
LOL at the special horizontal shock absorbers. My favorite bandaid of all time, on the Fox Mustang rear axle.
The later models had a Sell Vehicle Soon warning light on the dash. I pulled the PCV valve out after 20,000 miles and replaced it with a turbocharger. ( gotta love JC Whitney) The more blowby it got, the faster it went. Please note that the odometer was set to 12,000 from the factory and counted down to zero. Disposable car.
I was a mechanic at a GM dealership when these came out. I attended a 7 week training class on how to service the engine. It had iron heads, aluminum block, magnesium pistons and titanium connecting rods.
And a plastic gear on the distributor, no doubt…
Back in ’78, IIRC, then Vice-President Mondale went to Saudi Arabia and brokered a deal between the rebels and the government. A grateful nation elected him President in a landslide two years after Carter retired due to a strange malaise related condition.
Seems like I did see one of these in a Mondale motorcade at one point during his eight year presidency…
From there it was all uphill with the Cadilly, soon followed by the Cadoozy.
You forgot about the left side unbolting with three wingnuts and being able to ride away on two wheels with the aux 75cc bike engine. Groundhog day is on 4/1 this year eh Paul?
Someone pinch me i can,t believe it,s April fools day already !!!!!!!!!!!
This article is very poorly researched. That car in the photo is not a Cadillac. It’s not even an American car, although it is a GM product. It is a WA Statesman, built in Australia by Holden. (It may look like the car in the photo has left hand drive, but this must be the result of a reversed negative.) The Statesman was Holden’s most luxurious model, and Holden had concerns similar to Cadillac when the big crisis broke in ’78. Introduced in 1979, the WA was a replacement for the earlier HZ Statesman, which had suddenly become a gas guzzler that no one wanted in the wake of rising gas prices. When gas prices reversed course, the WA was quickly withdrawn from the market and replaced by the larger WB series.
The article notes the resemblance of the supposed “Cadillac Cadette” to the Chevrolet Chevette. That’s because the WA Statesman was built off of the same GM T-body platform as the Chevette and other cars like the Canadian Pontiac Acadian and Australian Holden Gemini. Holden supposedly used styling cues from an Acadian they had obtained (which is very similar to a Chevette, in case the author wasn’t aware of that) because it was a car Australian consumers wouldn’t be familar with, and the Statesman wouldn’t be as easily recognized as a tarted up Gemini. GM’s home office had suggested this to them, noting the success of the Cadillac Seville, where Cadillac had gone to some effort to make the Seville distinguishable from its downmarket Chevy Nova relative. Holden used an Acadian rather than a Chevette because they thought a Pontiac would be a better starting point, in terms of being slightly closer to the Statesman’s target market, than a Chevy would. The failure of the WA Statesman reportedly discredited the Seville approach in the eyes of GM managment, and nothing of the sort would be done again in the future.
While WA Statesmans aren’t exactly common on Australian roads today, they are out there, and anyone with any familiarity with Australian cars (or anyone who had done any research on Australian cars at all) would easily recognize one. Let me guess — the author thought that when Holden went to the W(x) series Statesmans, they started with WB, and just skipped over WA?
GM wasn’t the only one to have this type of debacle. Ford had a similarly short-lived model in Australia, the P7 LTD. It was built off of the equally short-lived “Hamster” platform. It got that name because Ford Australia had turned to Ford North America for help in developing it quickly, and it was closely related to the North American Panther and Fox platforms, but it was smaller. (It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the author of this article was under the impression that the Panther and Fox were the only two Ford platforms with animal names before that naming convention was abandoned.) Like the WA Statesman, it didn’t last long, being quickly replaced by the FC series LTD.
Chrysler took a slightly different approach. Over time, Chrysler’s presence in the Statesman/LTD segment had become increasingly marginal, and while they saw the disruption in the market as an opportunity to break back in on a larger scale, they didn’t have a lot of resources to sink into a Statesman/LTD competitor that would replace the older Valiant-based Chrysler Regal. Given what Holden and Ford had done, there was some discussion about basing a new model off on the North American Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon. Holden was reportedly interested in part because they had heard that Chrysler was working on a “ute” version, and they thought there might be some potential for a luxury ute in the Australian market. But Chrysler North America couldn’t guarantee that the ute would be ready for 1979. They said the vehicle, to be called the Dodge Rampage in North America, would be ready by 1980 at the latest. Chrysler Australia just couldn’t wait that long. There were also some questions raised as to whether buyers in the Statesman/LTD segment would buy a car with front-wheel drive. Chrysler Australia could only look with envy at GM, which had the foresight to develop a small car platform in the mid ’70s with rear wheel drive rather than front wheel drive, leaving them much better prepared for the future.
In the end, lacking any other ideas, Chrysler Australia noticed that the North American M-body was slightly smaller than the current Australian Valiant. Figuring that it was better than nothing, they decided to base their Stateman/LTD fighter on the M-body. They took a Canadian Plymouth Caravelle, broughamed it to the limit, and called it the Chrysler Fifth Avenue. It actually did surprisingly well, but Chysler decided to sell its Australian operations to Mitsubishi shortly thereafter, and Mistubishi wasn’t really interested in pursuing this market segment. Since Mitsubishi didn’t want it, the lead attorney in Chrysler’s negotiating team put a clause in the sales agreement explicitly stating that Chrysler retained the rights to the Fifth Avenue concept. This subjected to him to some criticism from Chrysler president Lee Iaccoca, as Iacocca had determined that Chrysler didn’t have the resources to compete in every market segment, and had decided to bet the farm on a future dominated by small FWD cars. Against that backdop, it made little sense to retain the rights to the Fifth Avenue. Even if some demand for larger RWD cars remained, Iaccoca reasoned that the M-body was basically a compact design in its origins, and it was crazy to think that Chrysler North America would ever want to sell — or its customers would ever want to buy — a luxury sedan built off a design originally intended as an economical compact. If the unlikely event that there was any ongoing need for a large luxurious RWD sedan (as if that was was going to happen in a world with $5-a-gallon gas prices), Chrysler was well prepared with the new R-body.
Actually not many Australians have seen one, as it was sold exclusively in Western Australia state, which was also the inspiration for the model designation. It is rumoured that Holden collaborated with the Perth-based Ralph Sarich to develop an Orbital engined version for further improved economy.
You know what really bothers me about this story???
The fact that no one bothered to invite me to the Super 8 near Detroit Metro Airport where you all rented the conference room to get together and write this!
How Rude!!!
Same with me! Why!?
IMHO, this is now officially the Best. Thread. Ever.
You think that’s bad? How about the Geo Metro-based Cadillac, the Toulouse? With the HT-1300? They introduced it on the eve of the SUV boom. Not great timing…
The Toulouse? Badge Engineering at its worst! I saw a Toulouse Stretch Limo the other day, and speaking of the badge, of course it was missing. I’m sure we all recall how valued those Cadillac badges were as jewelry. It was far and away the best part of the car.
I’d like to see the Cadillac Toulouse Le Trek Edition…
The Cadillac Toulouse with the Le Trek handling package was another fiasco for GM. I test drove one when they first came out, and i liked the interior, but the ride was incredibly rough. Blame it on those ultra-small tires, I guess. Ultimately, I gave up on the Toulouse Le Trek and bought a Nissan Amplitude.
I much preferred the 1979 Lincoln Siesta with the 500cc Kent Inline Two with the modified Valencia block and Crossflow head. Supercharging AND turbocharging made the Two much smoother and more powerful than the single piston mode in the Cadette. Able to achieve 80 mpg at at steady 40 mph with a top speed of 87 mph as measured by Road & Driver, I found the ride and handling to be much better than the Cadette due to it’s Ford of Europe design team. You had to be careful when checking the options sheet, the vinyl top significantly lowered your highway mpg, while the ‘retro’ mercury full moon wheel covers increased it. Fender skirts were available as a $1,500 ‘premium option’ due to their drag reduction properties.
I found a pic! I thought they’d all gone to the crusher!
As my dad would say, you people are just not right.
You missed the real story behind the story.
That was a badge-engineered captive import from Denbeigh!
That’s right. Denbeigh & Sons’ Successors (1903) Ltd.
They had planned to import it themselves, but ran afoul of NHTSA; seems that their transverse-engine mount created hazards for pedestrians, what with the drive shaft poking out of the right side of the car.
Cadillac apparently offered technical help, and thus earned the opportunity to be first in America with the I4-3-2-1-0.
(Apologies to Bruce McCall…)
The styling on this isn’t half bad. Reminds me of a VW Dasher hatch, sort of, though I doubt that many Cadillac buyers were looking for that.
Just yesterday, I read The Cimarron CC and learned where this Cadette all began.