|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » 1980S » Cadillac ( RSS)
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Hard times is a-comin', and it's time to prepare for life on the move! The global economic meltdown doesn't mean you have to take a break from Hell Projects. In fact, it's more important than ever that you break out your Hell Project skills in order to give you and your'n an edge when it comes time to hit the road in search of work, handouts, escape from rampaging urban mobs, etc… and that means building a vehicle that can haul you, your loved ones, and a large percentage of your personal possessions around the land. We're talking pots and pans, crates of squawking chickens, and mattresses strapped to the outside of the vehicle here, with maybe Grandma lashing down the spare engine with bungee cords as you horse-trade some crafty yokel for a sack of cornmeal to feed your white liquor still. Sure, you could just buy a diesel Econoline...
|
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! You want an insane project limo, right? Sure you do! Last time, we had a momentous upset in the Choose Your Eternity poll, with a Detroit car somehow managing to beat two French cars! Granted, no Citroëns were involved, but we're sure there's some weeping and gnashing of teeth in Paris right now. Not like France loses its PCH SuperAwesomeMegaPower rank, of course, but for now that turbocharged Falcon has brought a bit of the pride back to the reeling Motor City (and we're going to have a Detroit-on-Detroit matchup in honor of that accomplishment). Today we're returning to a level of the underworld we haven't visited since the Octo-Door '57 Chrysler took on the Stretch Ferrari 400 : Hell Limousines! Chrysler never built a Hexa-Door Dodge Dart station wagon- which we think was a terrible miscalculation- but when the Vatican demands such...
|
-
|
A decisive 85% of you felt that the $39,975 Iran Khodro Paykan Deluxe required a major helping of Hubba Rocks to look like a wise investment, but today's choice might be more of a dilemma. Yes, the Cimarron was a total disaster for Cadillac, diluting its brand at the worst possible time, but that makes it a historically significant car… and Pixel has found this super-original, low-mileage example in a used-car dealership with an $8,995 price tag. You might be looking at the best Cimarron on the planet here; check out Pixel's Flickr sets , then make the jump to read his comments on this fine Cadillac compact and vote in the NPOCP poll. galleryPost('NPOCPCimarron', 3, 'Low Mileage Cimarron With Big Price Tag'); I saw this a week or two back at a Worcester MA car dealership and thought it might be right up your alley. It is an near-perfect all-original (less CD player) 1981 Cadillac Cimarron with 10,500(!) original miles. It may be most perfectly preserved example of...
|
-
|
Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Today we're going to look at one of the many reasons that Cadillac has had to struggle so mightily to build a coherent brand image- ideally, one that attracts buyers who might otherwise buy European machinery- in the Post Malaise Era: the 1984 Eldorado Biarritz. These cars weren't built for the long haul, but The General built them in sufficient numbers that you still see one now and then. This example parks near the high school, just down the street from the '69 Lincoln and the '76 Buick Donk ; while it rarely leaves its parking place, the current registration tags indicate that it has moved under its own power in the not-too-distant past. In '84, the base engine in the Eldorado was the 135-horse 4.1 liter V8, which was good enough to haul the car's 3,748 pounds. The disastrous Oldsmobile 350 diesel engine was also available...
|
-
|
Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. With all the cool cars and trucks we've seen in this series, it may come as a shock to some that the first-ever DOTS car- that is, the first use of "Down On The Street" as the name- was this Cadillac Cimarron d'Oro , shot with a seriously crappy cellphone camera. Since that time, I've been packing better photographic hardware and keeping an eye open for another Cimarron… and now I've got one! What's the difference between the '85 Chevy Cavalier and the '85 Cadillac Cimarron? Some emblems, some leather… oh, and an extra $7,045- more than twice the cost of the $6,477 Cavalier (though the $560 cost of the optional V6 pushed the Chevy's price up to just about exactly half that of the Cad). The General's management, already reeling from relentless Japanese competition, the Fiero fiasco, and a bad case of Cerebral...
|
-
|
Since yesterday's Packard Straight Eight Swap Edition (which was won by the '37 Pontiac) was so much fun, we're going to stick with Alternative Powerplant Hell for another day. All engine swaps are fun, of course, but the best ones involve stuffing an engine much, much larger than anything the car's designers ever considered. When you accomplish such a swap, you get respect ; when you start with the knuckle-shredding, sanity-destroyingly tight engine compartment of a small mid-engined car (say, a Fiero or MR2)... well, that's when folks start treating you with the deference reserved for the truly mad! We're going to pull our punches here and choose a V8 that's not only fairly small for a DOHC unit but already set up for a front-wheel-drive application. That means the engine and associated transaxles are already lined up in correct orientation in the recipient cars' chassis. So whip out $1,600 and drop a Buy It Now bomb on this 300-horse late-90s Northstar...
|
-
|
Normally I don't pry off many emblems during visits to my local wrecking yard; I'm there frequently and my house would get overwhelmed by clutter if I pocketed every somewhat cool emblem I encountered (though I do make an exception for early 1970s Chevy Impala emblems ). However, every so often some emblem catches my eye and I must have it; in this case it's the emblem representing Cadillac's infamous V8-6-4 engine of 1981, which combined with the Cimarron to give Cadillac's image a couple of big black eyes that lingered for years (cylinder deactivation works great these days, delivering excellent mileage from large-displacement engines, but not all the bugs had been worked out back then). Best of all, it's a Malaise-style "stick-on" emblem without difficult-to-mount studs, so it's getting JB Welded to my laptop as a theft deterrent. I mean, would you steal a V8-6-4?
|
-
|
Sometimes you need to secure your Cadillac 80s GM heap from break-ins , and sometimes you just need to make your Cadillac 80s GM heap shorter . The junkyard is a wonderful place to see all manner of last-ditch backyard repairs... repairs that were ultimately unsuccessful. For example, this car, which was apparently involved in a wreck that mashed in the nose. Someone took quite a while working with sheetmetal and Bondo on the fenders, did a good straight cut across the hood's remains... but then seems to have had about 45 seconds to rope a truck radiator into place. No cooling fan, y'all- just keep moving! galleryPost('JunkyardShorty', 5, 'Short Nosed Cutlass Down On The Junkyard');
|
|
|
|