Vintage C/D Review: 1979 Cadillac Eldorado – A Brilliant False Dawn

In the fall of 1978, Cadillac rolled out the model that would become one of its greatest all-time hits: the 1979 Cadillac Eldorado — newly downsized and a half-ton lighter, with well-tailored styling and a sophisticated new chassis. Car and Driver editor and publisher David E. Davis Jr. put the new Eldorado through its paces in May 1979, and came away impressed with a car that seemed to signal a new dawn for America’s leading luxury brand.

The 1979 Eldorado, which shared its redesigned E-body platform with the new Buick Riviera and Oldsmobile Toronado, was a truly all-new car, sharing little with its gargantuan predecessor other than its “Unitized Power Package” front-wheel-drive layout. While the outgoing E-body had shared a lot of its bones with the full-size B-body line, which made it bigger and more unwieldy than most of the designers would have preferred, the new cars were scaled back to roughly intermediate dimensions: The new Eldo was 204 inches long and 71.4 inches wide on a 114-inch wheelbase, making it a whopping 20.1 inches shorter and 8.4 inches narrower than the ’78. It had also shed more than 1,100 lb, although it still weighed close to two tons at the curb.

 

With the new size came a crisp new look, returning to the themes of the 1967 Eldorado. To my eyes, the ’79 Eldo doesn’t come off quite as well as the 1967 car in certain areas, but since the ’67 Eldorado remains one of the best-looking cars ever to wear the Cadillac crest, there was no shame in only being almost as handsome. It could have been much worse: GM design VP Bill Mitchell (who retired in 1977) had spent the ’70s trying to get Cadillac management to buy off on Wayne Kady’s ghastly bustleback concept, which Kady (who was chief design of the Cadillac studio from 1974 to 1986) had also pitched for the new Eldorado. Fortunately, Cadillac general manager Edward C. Kennard put his foot down, although that was unfortunately not the last the division would hear of the bustleback.

 

When this review appeared in the May 1979 Car and Driver, Cadillac’s image was at a low ebb with auto enthusiasts. I’m sure neither Kennard nor the Cadillac sales organization were losing too much sleep about that — Cadillac sold 350,813 cars in the 1978 calendar year — but the days when car magazine editors had rhapsodized about the joys of a new Cadillac were a distant memory. C/D‘s David E. Davis began his review like this:

I’m not sure why, but Cadillacs tend to bring out the worst in automotive writers, not to mention automotive enthusiasts. The new Cadillac Eldorado is a case in point. It is the best Cadillac we have ever driven, and the best of the new General Motors E-bodies (sharing its major body and suspension components with the Olds Toronado and the Buick Riviera and outselling them both, in spite of its much higher price). It makes the Seville look and feel like a relic of the Fifties. It does everything the new Riviera S Type does—several things better—yet our friends at Motor Trend have fished their tarnished old “Car of the Year” trophy out of the slurry and given it to the Buick, and Car and Driver has praised the Buick to the skies while showing only the most guarded sort of enthusiasm for its sister-under-the-skin, the Eldorado. Why? Well, partly because the Riviera S Type is equipped with the magic (drum roll) TURBOCHARGER, the gris-gris that is supposed to increase our sexual potency, make us live longer, remove unwanted hair, and make great big engines out of little-bitty ones, all without undesirable side effects. But more importantly, I think, because the Eldorado is a Cadillac, and few if any latter-day automotive pundits are going to risk their reputations on publicly expressed admiration for a Cadillac.

Davis wasn’t too taken with the new Eldorado’s styling, noting:

The basic idea is rectilinear: long flat horizontals, interrupted at intervals by sudden verticals, giving the whole shape a pleasing architectural feeling. But the low, boxy greenhouse is a put-off at first. There’s too much roof for the car, it seems; some of the Carson-top silliness of the Volvo 262C at work here. The difference, however, between the flat-roofed Eldorado and the flat-roofed Volvo is that the Eldo’s roof was done specifically to increase and enhance headroom for rear-seat passengers, which it does, while the apparent goal of the Volvo was to make them as uncomfortable as is humanly possible.

(If the idea of a deliberately uncomfortable Volvo leaves you puzzled, you may want to take a moment to check out the Vintage R&T Review of the Bertone-styled 1978 Volvo 262C coupe, which C/D had caustically described as “The car for people who shrink.”)

 

The pull quote on the second page is a back-handed compliment wrapped in a literary reference. George F. Babbitt was the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 satirical novel about stultifying middle-class middle-American conformity: a plump middle-aged real estate broker fixated on consumerism and a kind of advertiser-dictated faux-individuality. The word “babbitt” eventually found its way into the dictionary as a derogatory term for someone self-satisfied, narrow-minded, conformist, and bourgeois, which was exactly how buff book editors of this period saw Cadillac buyers.

 

Davis had kinder things to say in the main text:

The Eldo’s lovely, smooth leather brought back fond memories, and made me feel affection and gratitude for cows everywhere. The interior is very roomy for four, surprisingly so in the rear seats. The overall impression, from the inside, is of a large, heavy Cadillac, which is a little surprising, because the most important impression one gets from the outside is that the car has been dramatically reduced in size.

The C/D test car was blue on blue, possibly like this diesel-powered survivor:

 

However, I couldn’t resist the siren song of the Sable Black example (whose listing also had much better-quality photos, and whose build plate says it was assembled in May 1979, the same month as this issue of C/D). The black car’s Dark Carmine Red leather upholstery is arguably a bit much, but around Thanksgiving in 2024, I had a parking lot sighting of a late-model Acura TLX Type S in an eye-popping electric blue metallic with a red leather interior every bit as vivid as the Cadillac’s, so the cycle of fashion has come around again.

 

Back to Davis:

Splendid isolation was the first of the car’s attributes to introduce itself. Surely there cannot be more than one or two cars in the entire world that filter out the ordinary din of driving as well as this one. In this environment the Delco AM/FM/tape system sounded like a performance in the Munich Opera House. Heightening the sensation of vaultlike remove from the outside world are the extraordinary—for an American car—tightness and stiffness of the structure. … The Eldorado simply does not squeak or rattle in the way that we’ve come to expect from even the most expensive American automobiles.

Unlike many personal luxury coupes from the Golden Age of such cars, the Eldorado didn’t punish rear-seat passengers in the name of fashion. “The seat back there is well designed and commodious, and offers headroom and legroom to spare,” said Davis.

 

Davis spent several paragraphs pondering the Eldorado’s array of gadgetry, including its automatic headlight controls (Twilight Sentinel and Guidematic), Fuel Monitor warning panel, and assorted warning lights. Many of the Eldo’s features would become commonplace even on inexpensive cars within just a few years, and considering the video arcade ambiance of a modern Mercedes cabin, his complains about technological overkill now seem awfully quaint:

We have found only one way to deal with all this [technology]. Any automatic device that can be turned off or deactivated from the driver’s seat, without risk of damage to the machine, is turned off or deactivated. Then we can drive the car with some assurance that it won’t perform a lot of services or volunteer a lot of information that we didn’t ask for.

 

 

Let’s skip over the “Cadillac, Buick, Oldsmobile” sidebar for a moment to focus on Davis’s impressions of the Eldorado’s road manners, which continue onto the following page:

It is pleasant and, in many ways, rewarding to drive. Its two shortcomings in normal use are a surprising sensitivity to crosswinds and a disturbingly predictable tendency for the front end to “float” on undulating surfaces. It does get blown around a lot, and one does spend a fair amount of time steering into the wind to keep it straight. The billowy ups and downs at the front are even more annoying, and quite out of character with the rest of the car, which simply doesn’t behave like the lumbering Cadillacs of days gone by.

In abnormal use—let us say, being hurled around a gymkhana course by some gee-whiz enthusiast who fails to grasp the car’s primary function—the Eldorado demonstrates that it is not a front-wheel-drive Mercedes-Benz. It was designed to convey rich doctors and successful corporate executives from their homes to their offices, or from their homes to their country clubs, and no attempt was made to get it homologated for rallycross competition. Given those parameters, it works fine. It is considerably better than the kind of car such people are accustomed to driving. When the going gets ugly, the Eldo (along with its sisters, the Riviera and the Toronado) simply moves into another league. No BMW, Mercedes, or Jaguar — and certainly no Lincoln or conventional Cadillac—is going to equal it on bad, slippery roads.

The wayward crosswinds behavior is surprising for a front-heavy front-wheel-drive car. I’d be tempted to attribute it to some problem specific to the C/D test car, but in his comments on the Eldorado’s E-body siblings in the sidebar on this page, Davis complained that “none of the three is particularly good in crosswinds.”

 

Unlike some transverse front-engine/FWD applications, the GM Unitized Power Package didn’t have problems with torque steer — early FWD E-bodies had coped just fine with far more torque than the 270 lb-ft of a gas-engine Eldorado. The UPP layout did tend to produce heavy understeer, but that was a standard Cadillac feature even on RWD cars, so it was no great sacrifice. Compared to its E-body siblings, a 1979 technical paper on the Eldorado suspension reveals that Cadillac split the difference between the Riviera and Toronado in front spring ride rates, but dialed in more understeer than either. Cadillac would shortly offer a firmer “Touring Suspension” package, but the standard Eldorado suspension was definitely tuned for a smooth ride rather than neutral handling.

 

Davis continued:

Interestingly enough, it is a larger and heavier car than Cadillac wanted to build. The Oldsmobile and Buick divisions outvoted Cadillac when push came to shove on weights and dimensions. The car is probably too large and heavy for its personal-transportation mission, but marketing realities undoubtedly support the less revolutionary approach. There is already evidence that old-line buyers of previous megaton-models of the Eldorado, Riviera, and Toronado have not taken to the smaller versions as enthusiastically as a new group of younger, less conservative professionals. Cadillac certainly welcomes these new buyers with open arms, but they’d prefer not to be abandoned completely by their old friends.

That Cadillac wanted to make the new Eldorado even smaller than it was is quite surprising, and this intriguing detail provides a good segue back to the sidebar on the previous page, which includes some commentary from Cadillac chief engineer Bob Templin about how the 1979 E-body program was developed. Templin explained:

“In a nutshell, the way this coordinated car program works at General Motors, where there are shared bodies, as in the case of the E-body—there were three divisions involved, Buick, Olds, and Cadillac—we divvy the car up, and normally Cadillac gets relatively little involvement. If the five divisions are involved, Cadillac’s piece of it is usually pretty small. In the case of the E-car, that was not so. Since we were basically the lead division, the high-volume E-car—in other words, our sales were twice what the other divisions’ were—we said, ‘Okay, it means more to us, it’s a bigger proportion of our total market, you know, we sort of feel that the responsibility is on us.’ So we got a bigger piece of the E-car than any other coordinated car that’s been done at General Motors, but we didn’t have complete control. With the E, we compromised; Oldsmobile had the front suspension and steering, and Buick had the brakes, and we had the frame, the rear suspension, the electronic leveling. The body was consigned to Fisher [Body Division of General Motors]; each division had their own engines; each division had their own sheetmetal. When we got into the thing, as you might expect, everybody had kind of a little different flavor they wanted to put into the soup.

“We had a big incentive to make this car right, and everybody that had other parts of the car did their thing, buL we wanted to make sure we had our nose under the tent. The same with the brakes: the basic brake system was front disc, rear drum; we said, ‘Hell, we want four-wheel discs,’ so we ended up doing our own brake system, even though we had a coordinated disc/ drum available. When we got to the front-end sheetmetal, of course, we threw the computer at it whole-hog. I mean the structure, the lying in of the front-end sheetmetal, and we had the frame. The frame was all done by computer; the system was all done by computer.

“Engines? The basic engine decision was each division’s. We wanted to go all electronic fuel injection. We didn’t want a carburetor in the job. Our long-term program here is to get rid of all carburetors. The final drive is our design, the new front drive. The transmission is Hydra-matic’s design, but we had an awful lot of input to that, because we wanted to keep the larger, 12.2-inch torque converter. It’s got better fuel economy; solid, tighter feel; so we kept room in there for it. Certain things are a plus to a car, and you have to struggle to keep ’em in there.

“All three of ’em are damned good cars, so on that basis, the intrinsic engineering decisions we made were all very sound. We’ve got ourselves a good fundamental building block there. If [NHTSA administrator Joan] Claybrook and company give us even a gram of mercy, we could probably get six years out of it.”

The transmission for all three 1979 E-bodies was the new TH325, basically a scaled-down version of the TH425 in the outgoing Toronado and Eldorado, with chain drive from the torque converter to the transmission.

 

Although Templin claimed “this car’s got everything new,” the engines were only new to the Eldorado. The 1979 Eldorado offered two engine choices, the 350 cu. in. (5,737 cc) Oldsmobile V-8s also used in the Cadillac Seville. Standard engine was the gasoline V-8, with Bendix multiport electronic fuel injection and 170 net horsepower (10 hp more than the carbureted L34 version in the 1979 Toronado). For an extra $287, you could order the LF9 diesel engine, which had better fuel economy, but sluggish performance and very dubious reliability. (The gas engine’s Bendix EFI has a bad reputation, but most of its early problems had been resolved by 1979.)

 

Cadillac’s biggest engineering news for the 1979 Eldorado was independent rear suspension, which was still very rare on American cars. It used semi-trailing arms with coil springs and an unusual U-shaped anti-roll bar with rubber articulating links, arranged so the control arms and anti-roll bar wouldn’t get in each other’s way. There was also a standard electronic level control system with air-pressure Superlift shock absorbers. Cadillac also specified four-wheel vented disc brakes, although the rotor diameter (10.5 inches front and rear) seems a little dinky for the weight of these cars, which was still around 4,000 lb.

 

The remainder of the sidebar (which is also by Davis) offers comparative driving impressions of the Eldorado, Toronado, and FWD Riviera. Davis found all three cars a little too floaty, although they rode well and had impressive wet weather traction. Despite the buff book fascination with the Riviera’s turbocharged V-6, Davis felt the spark-ignition V-8s in the Toronado and Eldorado had much better throttle response and superior all-around performance. Another complaint, not mentioned in the main text, was the E-cars’ long, heavy doors. “God help you if you should ever be foolish enough to park one pointing up hill,” Davis warned. “The door will swing closed, crushing your body like an egg.”

 

Although Davis liked the Eldorado a lot, the Counterpoint commentary on this page offers some dissenting opinions from the C/D editorial staff. Don Sherman wasn’t too fond of the Eldo’s new suspension, complaining that in a sharp turn, body roll “has you sitting on the door instead of the seat, and the rear suspension tries its darnedest to cock you right even though the steering wheel says left.” Larry Griffin groused that “the shock valving has all the character of cold porridge” and that the leather upholstery “provides the same coefficient of friction for your behind as fresh ice.” He also felt the downsized Eldo was still much too big.

Mike Knepper was more positive, but wasn’t keen on the Eldorado’s price premium — the Eldorado cost over $4,000 more than a Toronado — and couldn’t resist another backhanded compliment, concluding, “If you’ve always secretly longed for a Cadillac, but feared ostracism by your enthusiast friends, give them a ride in your new Eldo. They’ll be surprised.”

 

Cadillac responded surprisingly quickly to complaints about the softness of the standard Eldorado suspension. The Touring Suspension became available for 1980, including not only firmer springs, damping, and anti-roll bars, but also revalved power steering and slightly more aggressive tires. Some buyers might have preferred some kind of heavy-duty shock absorber option, firming up the damping enough to rein in the float over undulating surfaces without sacrificing much of the cushy ride, but it was nice to have a choice.

Back in the main text, Davis echoed Knepper’s complaints about the Eldo’s price, wondering how much of the escalation was due to inflation and how much was due to Cadillac not wanting to seem cheaper than European rivals. He concluded:

If you’re a gadget freak and you make a lot of money and you must drive on slippery roads a lot, then you probably ought to have a new Eldorado. If you’re all of the above, plus a little insecure, you should definitely spend another 2600 bucks and get the Biarritz option with its burnished stainless-steel roof panel. If you drive the Eldorado, love the way it feels, but worry about spending seventeen big ones for a car with fake wire wheels, then you should buy a Toronado. On the other hand, you could just wait for the new Seville; it’ll use most of these pieces and it’ll cost a lot more money. Who could resist a deal like that?

For the 1980 Seville, Bill Mitchell finally managed to browbeat Ed Kennard into accepting Wayne Kady’s awful bustleback design, revamped for four doors rather than two, but still as hideous-looking an automobile as GM produced in a decade of frequently terrible design decisions. As Davis had predicted, the Seville cost over $4,000 more than the 1980 Eldorado whose FWD platform it shared, and outside California, it came standard with the dreadful Olds diesel, adding injury to insult.

 

“Biarritz,” named for the seaside resort, was a longtime Cadillac trademark, originally used from 1956 to 1964 on the RWD Eldorado convertible and revived in 1976 for the Eldorado Custom Biarritz trim package. The 1979 Eldorado Biarritz had a padded vinyl half-top with a brushed stainless steel cap over the front part of the roof, reminiscent of the rare 1957 Eldorado Brougham. Starting in 1984, there would also be a Biarritz Convertible, Cadillac’s first open car since 1976.

 

Moving on to the spec sheet, the base price of the 1979 Eldorado is listed as $14,500, which MeasuringWorth puts at $63,038 in January 2025 dollars, with a “relative value” of $72,939. You did get quite a lot for your money in 1979, including automatic climate control, although adding leather upholstery, aluminum wheels (a $350 option on non-Biarritz Eldos, but much better-looking than the wire wheel discs with which these cars were often afflicted), and the usual gadgetry could still escalate things in a hurry. The as-tested price of the C/D car was $17,238 ($74,941 adjusted, $86,712 “relative value”), which didn’t even include the optional CB radio.

 

The C/D performance figures need some qualification: For a 1979 American car, a 0 to 60 mph time of 9.8 seconds was impressive, but the Eldo’s performance slackened quite a bit above 60 mph, yielding an unexceptional 17.9-second quarter mile time and a lackluster 108 mph top speed. These apparent contradictions will make a lot more sense if you look at the gearing: The TH325 transmission had a 2.74:1 first gear (compared to 2.52 for a TH350), but Cadillac gave the 1979 Eldorado an axle ratio of only 2.19 — so low that I initially thought it must be a typo. (It’s not.)

C/D no longer included graphs of speeds in gear by this time, but it’s evident from the data panel that acceleration was strong as long as the transmission remained in first gear, which was good up to almost 60 mph at full throttle. Once the transmission upshifted, it just wasn’t giving the engine much help. The final drive was so tall that 60 mph was only 2,630 rpm in second, and a mere 1,675 rpm in third! For the land of the 55 mph speed limit, this probably wasn’t a terrible compromise — it let the Eldorado eke out up to 22 mpg on the EPA highway cycle — but even a 2.80 axle ratio would have given the Eldo a lot more snap without much sacrifice in economy.

 

Like the C/D editorial staff, I can find assorted nits to pick with this Eldorado. I’m not sold on the Biarritz stainless steel roof panel or the padded vinyl top, for instance, and the front-end float and wayward crosswind behavior sound unnecessarily vexing even for a car obviously tuned for a plush ride. However, the 1979 Eldorado was an attractive, rationally sized (if still quite large) package, and for the first time in ages, it had completely modern underpinnings, with almost no parts-bin excuses.

As Bob Templin had hoped, Cadillac got six years out of this design, and it sold very well for a car so pricey: 67,436 units the first year, never dropping below 52,000 units a year for the rest of the run. Total production for 1979–1985 was an impressive 454,405 units, outselling its cheaper Oldsmobile Toronado cousin by about 3 to 2 and making this the bestselling Eldorado ever. (The Eldorado also outsold the misbegotten bustleback Seville by about 2 to 1.)

 

Unfortunately, the relatively powerful Olds 350 gas engine was gone for 1980 (except in California, where it survived one more year), and in subsequent model years, the Eldorado suffered the same parade of dreadful powertrain choices as other ’80s Cadillacs, underpowered and frequently unreliable.

 

Dubious add-ons like opera lamps and the Cabriolet Roof also marred the Eldo’s handsome shape, though not as badly as the array of tacky aftermarket Continental kits and ridiculous side mount spare tires that soon proliferated. Cadillac dealers were no doubt laughing all the way to the bank installing or facilitating these modifications, but such excrescences made the Eldorado increasingly difficult to take seriously.

 

The disastrous 1986 restyling, which was as clumsy-looking as the 1979 car was chiseled, then destroyed what was left of the Eldo’s credibility, not to be regained until the ’90s, when the dying market for big luxury coupes made it irrelevant.

 

However, for one shining moment in 1979, it seemed like Cadillac was finally moving forward, adapting its traditional formula to the more complex demands of the modern world in a way that almost everyone liked. If the 1979 Eldorado was a false dawn, it was nonetheless a pretty glorious one: a Cadillac that Cadillac fans adored, and that cynical auto enthusiasts could actually respect — and maybe even love.

Related Reading

Curbside Musings: 1979 Cadillac Eldorado – Life Keeps Moving (by Joseph Dennis)
Curbside Classic – 1980 Cadillac Eldorado Diesel – At Least One’s Left! (by Tom Klockau)
Curbside Classic: 1983 Cadillac Eldorado – The Last Truly Impressive Eldorado (by TooBadItsBav)
Curbside Classic: 1983 Cadillac Eldorado – Mmm, Buttery! (by Tom Klockau)
CC Outtake: E-Body Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz – Best Regards From The Eighties (by yohai71)
Curbside Classic: 1985 Cadillac Eldorado – What’s Under That Hat? (by Joseph Dennis)
Curbside Classic: 1986 Cadillac Eldorado – A Swing And A Miss (by Tom Klockau)
Cohort Pic(k) of the Day: 1986 Cadillac Eldorado, GM’s Deadly Sin #38 – How To Downsize Oneself Out Of Business (by Paul N)