(first posted in 2010 at TTAC; on 9/6/2012 at CC. Undoubtedly my most controversial and least understood GM DS. The comments are even better than the post itself.)
In 1977, GM offered the above two vehicles for sale. Squint a bit; can you see a certain fundamental similarity? Yes, the exterior skins and styling are somewhat different, but beneath the vinyl top and some other superficialities, you’ll find a lot in common, as is obviated by their shared basic architecture. They both rode on essentially the same platform/suspension, although the bottom one’s rear wheels were set back three inches to provide a touch more leg room. Both were powered by versions of GM’s fine 350 (5.7-liter) V8 engines; the version in the blue car made 170 hp vs. 180 hp in the green one.
The Chevy Nova (top), with more than a hint of BMW in its styling and underpinnings shared with the Camaro, was perhaps the best handling American sedan of its time. It was priced from $3,500 ($12.5k adjusted). The Seville (bottom), which was aimed at the Mercedes S Class, went out the door for about $14k ($50k adjusted)–or four times as much. Can you tell where this is going?
Admittedly, the Seville had its charms, mainly in the eyes of affluent, middle-aged women who had been hankering for a smaller, easier-to-park Caddy for years. And lest you protest the Seville’s DS categorization, keep in mind that the Cimarron, the universally-acclaimed all-time GM DS turkey, cost less than twice as much as its donor Cavalier. Yes, the Nova-based Seville undoubtedly proved to be among the more profitable vehicles in GM history, but at what cost? It also proved to be one more milestone in Cadillac’s long decline.
The Seville owes its existence to Mercedes, whose (then) superbly crafted and relatively compact sedans were making serious inroads into the American luxury market of the late ’60s and early ’70s. In contrast, the Big Three’s luxury cars had followed a more dubious evolutionary model: cancer. Eventually, their unchecked growth (especially considering the usual one or two persons aboard) reached the inevitable, terminal limit; historically, car-pooling and flashing one’s wealth have been mutually exclusive activities.
Women, who tend to be a bit less obsessed with exaggerated length then men, had been telling Cadillac for years that they’d like a smaller edition. The 1961-1962 Park Avenue with its shortened tail was a minor concession, but women weren’t exactly the decision-makers back then, especially not at GM. Eventually came 1971 Cadillacs that were over-the-top big, and none the better for it; quality was down, and they looked and felt like a tarted up Chevy Caprice. Meanwhile, Mercedes sales boomed. The Cadillac formula was broken, but it would be decades before they actually figured out the new luxury-car paradigm. Did they ever?
The Seville represented the first step in what Cadillac thought was the right direction. And Cadillac was quite clear in that the major driver of the Seville’s existence was Mercedes. Unfortunately for GM, the Seville’s successful first few years sent the wrong signals and only accelerated Cadillac’s demise. That was the bittersweet aspect of cars like the Seville, which helped propel GM’s 1978 sales to an all-time high of 9.66 million with a 46% market share. When women are tearing overpriced Novas out of your hands, it takes a while for that flush of flattery and pride to dissipate…say, about a quarter-century. Pride goeth before the fall.
Could GM have done things differently? They could have looked to Germany, where Opel built their Kapitan-Admiral-Diplomat luxury sedans to compete against the Mercedes S-Class. It would have been a logical starting point. The latest version, which dated back to 1969, had handsome lines (that undoubtedly influenced the Seville), featured a DeDion semi-independent rear suspension, and was built with precision–a bit too much precision, as it turned out.
The inability to maintain Opel’s precise panel gap tolerances in its U.S. factories forced GM to abandon the idea of building it stateside. But who or what to blame for the Nova-based S-Class fighter that was ultimately produced? The GM bean counters, who said it would be cheap and viable to cobble something together from X-body components? Or was it just Detroit’s old and entrenched belief that they alone knew what Americans wanted or deserved?
The Seville did provide a break in GM styling, and it was a breath of fresh air–at least until it became stale. It represented the tight and boxy new design paradigm at GM, and was the standard bearer of their switch from obese-looking seventies’ bulgemobiles to a crisp and very boxy future. Unfortunately, a virtually identical look now graced the entire GM line, especially the A-body intermediates. The rather bracing effect of the Seville’s arrival, in 1975, was short-lived: Within a few years, everything from GM looked like a Seville. No wonder the gen2 Seville was so desperate, and even more toxic.
OK, so the Seville wasn’t exactly a Nova with a squared off roof and gaudy interior, although there’s a lot the two really did share, as this post on this “Noville” coupe clarifies. GM’s prodigious engineering talent had worked feverishly to give it the kind of quietness and soft ride appropriate to a Caddy. Indeed, its ride was as smooth and soft as every American luxury car of the time, so long as the pavement stayed smooth and the curves gentle. But the Chevy-to-Caddy transformation had added 1,000 pounds (!) of weight to the Seville, which naturally hampered performance. As averaged from two contemporary road tests, it ambled from 0-to-60 in a leisurely 13.2 seconds, and reached the quarter-mile in 18.3, while turning in mediocre, mid-teens fuel economy–and all against a backdrop of proud GM trumpeting of its new (Bendix) Electronic Fuel Injection! A unit that turned out to be quite troublesome too. The Nova could run rings around the Seville, but did luxury car buyers care about these details? Well, yes and no.
The buyers of Mercedes diesels didn’t; but they were after something else, which they sure as hell didn’t find in the disastrous diesel Seville that appeared in 1978. Buyers of Mercedes were looking for two things: superb quality, and/or the prestige that came along with it, even in a poky 240D. The Seville sold well enough, but just not at the expense of Mercedes. Its size and buyer affluence, especially in California, merely made it the Caddy for latecomers to the M-B/BMW party–and, most likely, to the last of their own.
That Cadillac was clueless about the rise of Mercedes and BMW was evident in the Seville’s interior design and instrument panel. Let’s not waste time analyzing them; it was obvious which one pointed to the future. Cadillac still insisted that it had something unique, or at least distinctly American, to say about the design of luxury-car interiors and instrument panels until finally caving in with a very M-B-inspired look in the gen4 Seville.
There is one good thing to be said about the gen1 Seville: It went only downhill from the start, and its wretched successors will have their own days of reckoning here soon enough. Of course, the Seville also spawned a whole generation of imitators (Lincoln Versailles, Chrysler Fifth Avenue) and custom freaks that blighted the vehicular landscape with garish and kitschy faux-luxury half-padded roofs, crests, and hood ornaments for at least a decade-and-a-half.
PS: GM’s Deadly Sins does not mean the specific cars lack redeeming features, or are “deadly” in or of themselves. It is a continuing series of the many steps GM took toward its eventual demise. The Seville may have sold well in its day, but undermined Cadillac’s former position of leadership in the luxury car field, which it soon surrendered to Mercedes and other import brands. The gen1 Seville may have been handsome and rode smoothly, but the expectations of luxury buyers were changing quickly, and the Seville failed to meet them. It was not until the CTS that Cadillac began to fully embrace the changed realities of the luxury car market; about three decades too late. Here is a further explanation of the Purpose and Nature of GM’s Deadly Sins.
I don’t think I have seen so much invective and personal attack thrown around since the Leyland P76 article!
I guess it is some measure of corporate success if people feel they have to leap in to defend a product, or a company, regardless of the facts presented. Shame there weren’t enough of these guys to keep GM solvent.
Personally, I find it interesting the GM’s much-vaunted Fisher Body (advertised all over the place, fancy plaques here and there like it meant something great) couldn’t work to Opel’s tolerances. I have to wonder whether that’s an artefact of the whole Imperial/Metric thing (1mm is much tighter than 1/16″), or whether Fisher was just sloppy in the interest of easier assembly. Or perhaps had gotten sloppy over the years? Does anyone know whether Ford and Mopar were any better in the body tolerance department?
I’m not going to buy into the whole Nova-vs-Seville argument. As a foreigner with no experience of either car beyond what I have read, I’ll just say GM had a lot of chutzpah making a smaller car with less material cost Cadillac’s most expensive model.
That was certainly a relevant point, although not the only one.
The issue wasn’t necessarily a matter of tolerating sloppiness, but more of the enormous practical difficulties involved in changing ANY large-scale manufacturing process. Fisher Body didn’t balk at the Opel Diplomat because they didn’t think they could build something that well. Their objection was that they simply weren’t set up to build it as designed, which meant that either there were going to have to be significant changes to existing procedures, tools, and training (which couldn’t necessarily be used with other Fisher Body products — tightening an Imperial bolt with a metric wrench may not have good results), or else there would have to be a substantial number of body engineering changes to the Diplomat design.
The best analogy I can think of is trying to make a recipe from a German cookbook in someplace like Denver, Colorado — the Mile High City, which is at an altitude of over 1,600 meters. You CAN probably make the recipe, but you’ll have to first account for the different units and the different ways products like butter are packaged in the U.S. compared to Germany. Then, you’ll have to figure out ways to account for the various ways the altitude affects cooking and baking, which the original recipe probably doesn’t provide for at all. It will probably take some trial and error to make it work satisfactorily, and even then, people who’ve tried the original German version may complain that it still isn’t exactly the same thing.
The point is that it’s not impossible, and wouldn’t have been then, but that it would have been a major project.
It should also be emphasized that Fisher Body, or really any manufacturing or assembly division of any automaker, was ALWAYS part of a dialogue about producibility. The body engineers would look at a new product design and point out issues: “We can’t reliably do that much curvature in that area, could we back it off about 20 percent?” or “This section looks thin enough that it might snap when it comes off the press” or the like. Sometimes, the design needs to change a bit, sometimes the manufacturing people can stretch a bit to make something work, but it’s a dialogue, and it can happen over many different elements of even a relatively conservative design. It can get complicated because a car or truck consists of thousands of pieces, and design issues with one piece can have a cascading effect.
THIS is where Cadillac should have gone, imo one of the most beautiful and tasteful sedans ever designed, and uniquely American. To me it’s so sad they didn’t follow this direction and also add advanced suspension and propulsion. It’s one of the proposals for the LaSalle, a variation on the Cady design above I believe, the ultimate “winning” proposal was re-named Seville on actual introduction.
Kady, not Cady…pardonnez moi.
Indeed. That’s an international style that would have found market acceptance anywhere. The road that should have been taken.
It does look quite like a 4th-gen (1992) Seville, which is what the 2nd-gen Seville should have looked like.
Is it just me, or does the Seville “coupe” pictured look a lot like a Plymouth Volare coupe?
Funny here, I’m not a GM fan, not a Cadillac fan, not a Seville fan, but I have to come to their defense on this one. Now I’m not a fan of it, but it was popular, sold well and made them lots of money, kind of what cars are supposed to do for car companies. Yeah, it was overpriced, could have been better, but I think it’s buyers were fairly happy.
My Dad had one, a company car I think, probably leased, but he seemed to like it. As we lived a couple of thousand miles away from each other at the time I never even saw it let alone drove it. And while not a car guy, he’d had a couple of MBs from his time in England and Europe, a 280 (I think E, not S) he was particularly fond of. He referred to the Seville as the “Baby Cadillac” even after I pointed out to him it was heavier.
Now I’ll take Paul’s word on this one, but to me it seemed like a 280E competitor, not an S class. So it sold sizzle not steak? That’s what GM did/does. To many it looked good, to me it looked goofy with the big tires and wheels, diameter big. But I wasn’t their market.
They made them money, I don’t think they were so awful that they killed future sales, I can’t call them a DS, even if I personally don’t like it.
It was definitely targeting the S-Class — the people involved in developing the Seville were clear about that. What you aim at and what you hit are not necessarily the same things.
Wow, they honestly believed their Seville would compete with the S-Class? I’m not sure there’s an adjective sufficient for that level of delusion. Either that or someone didn’t tell them benchmarking doesn’t mean doodling on a bench. I’m not a Mercedes loyalist of any kind, but no matter what lens I use, I see nothing to suggest they meaningfully aimed anywhere near the S-Class.
I think given a choice between a Nova-based Seville or an Opel Kapitan/Diplomat-based Seville, they made the right choice. An Opel-based Seville would have been a Catera two decades before the real one, with the same problems (a completely different set of parts, unfamiliarity to American dealership mechanics, etc.). Of course, given how longer Caddy buyers were clamoring for a smaller Cadillac, they should have never been so time-crunched to create the Seville, allowing for a bespoke platform or one that could be shared with an upscale Olds or Buick smaller sedan.
In the end, the Seville was an adequate stopgap that slowed the march away from Cadillac towards Mercedes, BMW, and Jaguar. It hid the relationship to the Nova quite well, both visually (inside and out) and in the way it drove. It should have bought time to design a real world-beater that would stem the tide completely, and I thought one might be forthcoming when I learned the next Seville would be based on the successful 1979 E body. Instead, the 2nd-gen 1980 Seville was the real deadly sin, which now had modern underpinnings but pointless 1930s styling (in back anyway; the front two-thirds of the car was modern 1980s Cadillac that clashed badly with the bustleback rear). Had the 1980 Seville looked and drove more like the 1992 Seville, Cadillac may have been able to stay atop the luxury field. As it is, they’re now in 6th place behind Tesla, BMW, M-B, BMW, Lexus, and Audi, and just slightly ahead of Acura and Volvo.
The other awkward point, vis-à-vis Opel and also Ford Europe, is that their efforts to battle Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and later Audi ultimately failed. GM and Ford kept trying, but it got harder and harder to convince European or British buyers to take an interest in big sedans without a “premium” badge, and even trying to spread the platform costs over a wider range of models for different markets didn’t make up for it.
People want to buy a car everyone knows is expensive. Cadillac was smart to do that with Seville, but they should have been moving their whole line and brand up-market in the 70s even at the expense of sales numbers, since Japan began forcing Chevrolet to improve or die, and BOP were going to get squeezed out. When prosperity returned after ’82, they would have been in a much better position when a lot more people could afford prestige cars.
They should have spent more on engineering and quality plastics and less on chrome. Could they have used the Diplomat’s or Corvette’s rear suspension? It might have improved interior room a bit.
What would have saved space would have been the Toronado/Eldorado UPP. Flat floor, no transmission tunnel, minimal rear unsprung weight — especially with independent rear suspension. In essence, what they subsequently did for the 1979 Eldorado and the bustleback Seville.
Not a deadly sin. Success of the Escalade and failure of Cadillac’s RWD sedans of the last 20 years shows that Cadillac buyers are not and never have been interested in BMW type cars.
The similarity in styling gave me a chance to poke fun at a much older, somewhat pompous co-worker. He’d picked up a used, well-maintained Seville. At a management meeting someone commented on his new car; I jumped in and said that those Cutlass sedans were pretty nice. He immediately made sure all knew it was no Cutlass, but a Cadillac Seville! I apologized, noting that I should have known it was a Nova underneath, not a Cutlass.
As I recall, the SWB S class and smaller MBs were pretty short on rear legroom, too. The high door sills for that vaunted vault feeling made it difficult to get in and out with big feet. The Seville had too much intrusion from the wheelwells.
Not the same at all…PERIOD
I read through this, and I personally never owned a Seville, I did own two different GM cars with the infamous 5.7L Diesel. One was the original 1978 Oldsmobile, a Delta 88 Royale. It had teething problems, as delivered, it smoked terribly, got 10 mpg and was a bigger slug that it should have been. Part of the issue was lack of knowledge of Diesel engines at the dealership. I applied my knowledge of Diesels with some research into the Roosamaster pump and found where it’s internal timing marks were. After fabricating a lock to hold the internals in time, I found that the timing mark on the pump adapter was off by 7-10° and retimed it. Amazing difference! 31 mpg, decent perfomance and light gray smoke under har acceleration.
GM sent a TSB that a number of engines had been built with wrong timing marks, ours was one. Dealer’s service department performed the TSB and found my mark was dead on. Original engine broke the crank around 60K miles, I put a 1983 engine in place of it. After the car was totaled by a drunk, I replaced it with a 1980 Pontiac Bonneville Brouham (last of the B body Pontiacs). I sold it to a neighbor and the rear end went at 220,000 miles, we fixed it and it went on further.
Picture 9 in the article is cute, next the ratty GM product is one of the competition’s big engines, a Ford MEL (Mercury, Edsel, Lincoln 430 or 462 V8, identifiable by it’s top mounted fuel pump and radiator expansion tank.
If I were to see these two cars parked together, on the street or in someone’s driveway:
https://i0.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/CC-45-Duo.jpg
I would never have known they shared mechanical underpinnings,
What if you saw just this one car?
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/cc-readers-ride-the-noville-coupe-and-who-still-thinks-the-seville-wasnt-just-a-tarted-up-nova/