A friend of mine was shopping for a used car back around 2000. The salesman said, "I have just the car for you", and directed us to a lemon yellow Cimarron. I must admit that, body-wise, it was pretty flawless. It was definitely the "widow" car. This thing even had matching yellow floor mats. My friend wasn't knowledgeable on cars, but my first words were, "Oh God, no." The salesman saw my face and knew this wasn't going any further.
@port nut Totally. It’s that… I know what I have bullshit mentality. I have a fondness for cars that nobody likes. But I would not pay nine grand for that car. Maybe four grand just for the funny factor. But you also have to find your audience. I have a Saab in very good condition, a 9-5 wagon from about 15 years ago. Kelley blue book it’s worth like 1000 bucks but they sell on forum specialty sites for six grand plus. You just have to know your target audience.
As someone who owned an 84 Cavalier, I can confirm that this is absolutely the same car with different badges and leather seats. GM seriously did not give a shit in the 80's, and then had the nerve to wonder how Toyota and Honda surpassed them in the 90's.
All through elementary and middle school, my best friend's grandmother "always wanted a Cadillac" but couldn't afford it. When her husband died, she finally bought her first Cadillac with the life-insurance money in 1984. I about fell off my chair laughing after you said "widows" as the first category for Cimarron buyers.
@@germancavallo8277 Very. Most of the 1st and 2nd gen Js rusted out in the rockers and sometimes up the rear wheel wells. Firewall was also prone to leaking, which would rust the floor out.
@@germancavallo8277 I'm guessing that you live in snow-free climate and thus avoid the road salt exposure. Correct? There's no way your J-car can make it through 35 to 40 winters if you're in the Rust Belt.
"affluenza ridden peasants thirsty to drink from life's pimp cup" Sometimes you turn a phrase so well I have to rewind multiple times just to appreciate how good it is
Worse because it has all the notoriously bad 80's GM bells and whistles that break in 8 years or 100K miles. Then when you take it back to Kunkelman Chevy, Olds, Cadillac, Kia they tell you EVERYTHING is off warrenty and on YOUR dime.
I wonder why they didn't use the A body platform. I guess "smaller". My Dad had a Celebrity and got like 15 years out of it. He lived where there was rarely road salt. It was a pretty good car, for how he used cars.
When I saw this vid come up, I was like, "Yesssssss...." I knew this would be gold. I'm familiar with the reputation of this car through automotive folklore. Cadillac had a bad reputation in my family. My dad bought a used 1978 Fleetwood sometime in 1988, as he had just become a realtor and it was a good people mover for showing houses in style (kinda). It had a massive engine (it was the 425). Damn thing could nearly chirp tires on the highway. But it had seen a rough life by the time he got it, and it was as reliable as a politician. In 1990 he traded up to a 1988 Fleetwood. You'd think, "Well then, that would have been a quality and reliability boost eh?" Mmmmmm... no. By 1992 it had what was described as a floppy piston (that's my recollection as a kid). He took it to the local GM dealer. They said they'd take a look (it would take a few days). Meanwhile they gave him a Pontiac Firefly as a courtesy car, after they had originally agreed that if he bought this car, as a realtor he would need a mid-size sedan as a loaner for when he got oil changes or any work done. So that was strike one. His office was right down the road, so when they called him to say it was ready to go, he drove onto the lot and did what I probably would have done (he had already lost some trust with these guys), and check the tires. He had marked them to see if they even moved the car from where it was parked. It hadn't moved. Someone probably got in, started it, shrugged, and said it was fine. I kinda doubt they had handheld diagnostic devices back then. You generally had to pull the car into a bay and do it there. So into the service department he marched. Our neighbour, a Brit with the stereotypical name Mick, worked there. Super great guy. He only worked on foreign and exotics (I one got to sit in a 1976 Lotus Esprit that was parked in his driveway - that was rad). He saw my dad coming in hot and quickly exited stage left (I don't think he even worked there for much longer, mostly out of disgust). My dad chucked a wobbler and probably ruined the day of a few people. That became strikes two and three. Side story on the Firefly "courtesy" car: While stewing in the driver seat of that go-cart with doors, he drove to the Ford dealer. There was a 1992 Lincoln TownCar parked on the lot. It had 100 or so km's on it. Basically brand new given that some new cars on a lot will get test driven enough times to get to that point. Well, this wasn't that. It had been owned by an elderly guy who probably drove it to church a dozen times and then he up and passed away, so the car returned. This of course meant it had to sell at a discount, and my dad was there for it. The dealership, looking at his Firefly situation, offered to let him use the TownCar as his surrogate courtesy car (that's such a hilarious power move, by the way). He would buy that car shortly after. It became the car he owned the longest out of any car, and he had gone through many. I think he had it from 1992 until 2006 when he traded it for a 2005 TownCar. I don't normally write comments this friggin' long, but I thought it was a fun story to tell.
Amazing story, as a town car owner of 5 years, that’s a great decision. I began with a 2011, and now have a 2009. Rebuilt the 2012 from an accident and my friend drives it now. Has 252K on it currently.
@@nlpnt Truly painful to consider as the Cosworth Mercedes 190 models are some of the greatest sports sedans of all time, IMHO. Those were dark days indeed at Generic Motors.
@@amerigo88 Well Buick made a pretty wicked turbo 6 in 87. The Cutlass was the best selling car in the US for a few years. Dark days for some, coke and IROCS for the rest of us.
My dad had the 5-speed manual Cimarron. He adored it. Everyone else hated it. Really reliable. Far more reliable than the 5 Northstar STS he bought after it. He then sold it to my uncle. My uncle gave it to his son. I learned how to drive stick on a Cimarron.
Honestly, you could do worse than a GM 60-degree V6 mated to that HM282 5 speed for reliability. Only real weak point was the lower intake manifold gaskets, which were a bit of a bitch, but most GM techs could do them with their eyes closed by 1990. And you can’t break one of those 5 speeds. That’s the preferred transmission used in V8 Fiero conversions. Upgrade the clutch and axles, but you can mate those to 400+ HP small blocks bone stock and they won’t even blink.
I don’t have the time or space to keep one, but someday I would love to own a Fiero GT with a SC3800 and 5-speed conversation. I’d love to at least drive one as that is the car GM COULD/SHOULD have made. Mr. Regular, an idea for a road test?
Funny! My mom had an '82 4-speed manual Cimarron. I learned to drive a stick shift on it in a parking lot. It was beige with blue leather. I remember it well. I liked the smell of it. The sound of the Neil Diamond cassettes not so much. We didn't keep it for long.
OMG! I remember my neighbor bringing home his new "Caddy Cimarron" and he was soooo proud.....but my sister had just bought a new Cavalier that looked suspiciously just like it, it was hilarious! It was so hard not to laugh every time we saw it...... Happy Belated Birthday Roman!
That’s so funny. The same happened in the 00’s in Europe when Chevy rebadged south korean Daewoo’s as Chevrolets. Daewoo Evanda for example. I heard that some guy was proud to be driving his new ”american” car so he was quickly told the truth and for some reason he went all quiet…
@@kobbetop Yeah, I remember when the Daewoo-Chevrolet thing happened. The first few times I saw a 'Chevrolet Matiz', I thought it was just a bunch of local Daewoo Matiz owners being cheeky and slapping a 'cool American' badge on their cars.
@@vulpesinculta3238 it was doomed from day one. That Matiz was as bad as badge-engineering can get. And then after few years of making nothing but loss, Chevrolet pulled out of Europe. I heard Cadillac could be coming back. Maybe it’s time for a new Cimarron…
I'm old, but I remember this car like it was yesterday. My good friend's family owned a Cadillac/Oldsmobile dealership in eastern PA. His mother got a brand new Cimarron every year starting in 1983 through 1988. I recall quite well all of the rides to his house on the buttery leather, impressed by the Cadillac badge, looking forward to time in his pool with his older sister looking after us. What caught me off guard was when my aunt picked me up in her brand new '87 Cavalier and the 10 year old me came to the realization that GM was full of shit.
I suspect the Cimarron was the insult to the intelligence that had more than a few buyers permanently swearing off buying GM cars at all, never mind Cadillac.
It was a time of great change in the automobile industry. These cars were hated by us young gear heads, we lamented we missed owning and driving the cool cars of the Post War Boomers by a generation.
I cannot get enough of the audio on the tape. It's such a perfect time capsule of what corporate America believed spoke to 51st and higher percentile. It also syncs so well with a lot of the audio cranked out by Disney at the early years of EPCOT Center (a different obsession of mine) which again was such a target of the 51st+ er's.
My grandma had one of these. My grandpa bought it for her birthday back in '88. He passed in '92 from a heart attack. But, my grandma is 82, and still going. One time, when we were sitting in the garage, she told me how often she would take the car for a ride around the lake. Then, she walked over to her current car, (2015 Chevy Trax,) and she opened the trunk. She pulled out the last remaining thing from that old Cadillac: one of the floor mats. Now, she uses it as a trunk mat to put boxes of plants on top of, when she visits my grandfather's grave.
That’s beautiful actually. It’s amazing the little sentimental things that have no value to anybody else but have amazing value that to us. I had my grandfathers pocket watch and a very old revolver. They’re not for sale. When I touch them, I still feel his energy. Take good care of your grandmother. It’s hard when they’re gone.
Wow she sounds just like my grandma who has I think an '84 or '85 Cimarron that my grandad bought new for her sitting in her garage as I type. She's 97. I don't think the car has more than 30k miles on it. She stopped driving sometime in the early 90's. Probably is virtually worthless today and I don't think me or any family that visits has opened that garage in a decade or more. This video is probably going to make me drive over there tomorrow and take a look.
The late ones like this with a V-6 weren't terrible, and the suspension was firmed up a bit. I had a housemate in the mid 90's who had one and loved it. On the other hand, I had a h.s. friend who had a 1st or 2nd year model. Those had a very loose suspension, and a wheezy 1.8 4-cyl, made in Brazil I think. He had a lot of problems with it and it was very low on power.
Respect to John Manoogian at Cadillac for designing this thing in only 9 months out of a Cavalier whilst only being allowed to alter front fascia and taillights. “Rare Classic Cars” did a good video about the Cadillac Cimarron and why it failed.
The most interesting "what if" with Cimarron was that Cadillac wanted to develop the car on the A/X platform, which would have made it a larger car and had a V-6 out of the gate. According to Adam, Cadillac had to use the J platform because the Assembly plants were at capacity building the A's and X's.
I owned a 94 cavalier for a few years, 4cyl auto, four door, actually a very reliable car. I put over 200,000 miles on it in four years, and it had nearly 200,000 on it when I got it. Not fast but the AC always worked.
Has there ever been a feature in ANY car with as cool a name as "Twilight Sentinel"? Other than that, I like the look of this car. It looks cheap but clean, like it's wearing a Burlington Coat Factory suit that was fitted by their in-house tailor.
My 95 Roadmaster has that, and a sticker proudly stating “PROTECTED BY THE SENTINEL” on the rear passenger window. Hilariously pretentious! I wish modern cars were more campy like that
My girlfriends former 96' Buck Park Avenue had "Twilight Sentinel" on the lights, took me a moment to realize they were auto lights. They actually had a adjustment to how sensitive they were to dark, most auto-lights are just on or off, the manufacture determines how dark it needs to be before turning them on.
Quite a novelty for the time. Its just now starting to become common on cars. I had a 2007 Saturn, 2009 Jeep, and my wife had a 2012 Mitsubishi, none of them had it, but my 2018 Ram does.
14:22 - The GM “cup holders” in the glove compartment may be the most useless feature ever designed into a car. Classic GM. Think of a useful feature, then do it poorly.
That was an industry standard going back to the '50s, it was so your cups would stand steady in a parked car in the drive-in. Obsolescent by 1987 (it's the original J-car dash designed in the late '70s) but what the people who actually bought them expected. And it's not like the Germans were doing any better.
@@nlpnt Then again, it took until the turn of the millennium for German carmakers to actually integrate cupholders into their cars and not use some aftermarket looking thing that were all but useless.
@@MiamiZombie2012 That's precisely what they are for. They were never meant to be used while the vehicle was in motion. They were there to provide a flat space to place a beverage while parked, such as a drive in resturaunt or theater.
My parents drove Devil's back then, I remember the dealership tried pushing this thing. My mother could NOT stop laughing, then went on to tell them they had escaped Buick and Oldsmobile and weren't going back!
Damn that bit about the widow is so true. I’ve worked as a bike shop salesman and they’ll go on and on and on about stories like that and you just have to be like “mmmm uhuh yeah…anyway let’s move on”
To be honest, if you were giving away a 1987 Cimarron I'd be way more likely to enter than for a Corvette. Thank you for your superb content as usual, Mr. Regular!
@@RegularCars Absolutely. Been a subscriber of yours since 2014 and originally I subbed for the rare and eccentric 90s cars. And of course your humor. Also I can't praise you enough for your literary mastery. Some of the advice that comes out though your content has changed my life.
I saw one of these in a junkyard and wanted to steal the Cadillac badge off the trunk but when I opened the trunk an angry raccoon was in there and it attacked me, I've never slammed a trunk faster in my life. happy belated birthday Roman!
Suffice to say none of this ever happened, you sad attention seeker. You don't need to open the trunk to take off the bage and why would a wild forrest animal do in the closed trunk of the car? How did it get there in the first place? Do you really need attention this much to make up this pitiful excuse for a story? I pity you and people like you.
My grandmother's hairdresser had one of the last model years with the digital gauge cluster. Believe it was a hand-me-down after her mother went permanent horizontal. I can still remember Tom Petty playing on the speakers one Saturday morning when Lindy came to pick us up for grandma's weekly hair appointment. Just something strange about the car perfectly matched the vibe of her hair salon's purple neon lights and ambient hair spray smell. The rear leather seats were slippery and hard as hell on the outside, yet had lots of soft cusion lol.
I think I found my dream car. It's the embodiment of mediocrity and haplessness, the kind of car that not even people were interested in scrapping during the Cash for Clunkers program.
My first car was an 88 cimarron. My grandpa bought it new, drove it for about 10 years and then it sat for a year or two before he "sold" it to my dad for $1 for my first vehicle. I had fond memories when I was young riding around in that car, and loved driving it. It was red with the... "adult film" red leather interior, and the sound system was actually really good. Only problem I had with it was the fuel pump and one of the windows didn't always go all the way back up so you had to push up on it while you held the switch to go up.
I worked for a BMW dealership in the 80s. We would occasionally get these things as a trade-in, usually with very low miles. GM made such little effort to disguise the Cavalier. It's amazing that anyone bought one of these.
My hypothesis is that the only reason it sold at all was because some people still thought it was a big deal to drive a Cadillac back then. For my parents it was a big deal. After the Cimarron, they switched to imports.
Happy belated birthday Roman!!! The perfect automotive example of the aggrogence of America exceptionalism immortalized in steel & plastic. Is there a Razzy award equivalent in the auto industry? Cadillac Cimarron, most likely to have an existential identity crisis. Love you guys!
Been waiting for this one for a long time! As someone who thinks of badge engineering and "aspirational goods" as bougie bullshit, thinking the whole concept of luxury brands as obnoxious, I love this car. It is GM/Cadillac unintentionally parodying their own nonsense. Making it plainly clear what Cadillac, and luxury brands, really are. Trying to make cars feel more valuable (and accordingly charging more for them) by putting a different name on them.
Its amazing how different the same basic platform can be between markets. In the UK and Europe we got the J-Body as the Vauxhall Cavalier MK2 and the Opel Ascona C. We never got an outright "luxury" one (just a high trim Cavalier) but we did get the SRi which got 130bhp from a 2.0 four cylinder 8v unit (though the 1.6 and 1.8 models were much more popular). The later MK3 Cavalier/Vectra A got more rounded styling and both the 2.0 16v Red Top (150bhp) and a 2.5 V6 (170bhp).
@@jareknowak8712 I've got a Focus MK2 1.8 petrol (Mazda MZR), a mate had a Volvo C30 1.6 (Ford Zetec-SE) and my other mate has a Mazda 3 MPS (Mazda 2.3 Turbo). I'd have loved to have tried those three back to back
I love that no matter how long I watch your videos even through all these years they are never boring and always have some nice story’s and deep looks into why people like the cars they do. Thank you Mr.Regular and Roman for being awesome and for spreading the PA sense of humor not many get to see
Speaking of badge engineering. I was behind a Chevrolet SS the other day that had the Chevy Bow Tie replaced with a Holden emblem. Made me wonder if the Aussies swap out their Holden badge for a Chevy badge on their Commodore's.
My dad owned a tow company and I was born in 1992. My mom had 1 of these till I was about 3. It was free and almost new bc somebody got it impounded and my mom took it. She put a z24 body kit on it over time and never had a license till she was in her 40s but still drove everyday. She finally got a ticket and had to get her license after being pulled over bc the muffler fell off. She traded it for a ASTRO van
When I was a kid, the adults played at this club called Club Cimarron. I was quite Cavalier to their activities at that time, but this video single-handedly put things into perspective, 25 years later.
Were there Skyhawks and Sunbirds in the trees? Did they serve you Pizza Firenza? Was it served by the three servers: Aska, Camira, and Ascona? Was it anywhere near Monza? lol. J-Body K. J-Body K.
I am curious, in those shots you take of many cars where the car is just cruising along slowly while traffic whips by.... have you guys ever had to deal with road rage? I assume most people notice the camera car and keep control, but I know many people that cant control themselves, especially these days.
Right! Anyone could have easily done a better job Frankensteining a smaller sportier Cadillac together from the GM parts bin than just slapping a Caddy badge on a Cavalier.
The funny part is the ATS-V and CT4-V Blackwing are legitimate modern 3-series competitors, while this thing had no chance of competing with the 3-series of its time, yet someone at late-'80s Cadillac was strung out enough to think that a riced-out Cavalier could ever compete with the 3-series.
Ok it was not a great idea, but as European i really like seeing a 4.5m long Cadillac. Its shape looks more proportionate than the usual Cadillacs, but this is my opinion based on the fact that here a 5.5 m car is considered a wheeled cruise ship.
Over in the US, this looks stubby. Cadillacs and Lincolns are supposed to have hoods and trunks you can land a plane on. They're not just land yachts, they're aircraft carriers.
I will always thing of this as a missed opportunity. Imagine if GM had threw in the Cavalier Z24 engine, transmission, suspension, brakes, tires and priced it the same as the Z24. Would it have been damned as being a halfhearted attempt to go after the three series? Probably. But it would've been better than what it was.
This would have been the perfect car for someone like my father in the 80’s. Wanting to live the complete yuppy lifestyle, but not really quite having the funds to do it correctly. Incidentally he was looking at one of these for a work car in the mid 90’s, an ‘85 model, but ended up getting an S-10 pickup instead, because that’s what you cross shop a Cimarron with.
Yuppies never drove Caddilacs, they drove expensive German imports like BMW and Porsche. Caddilacs were old people cars back then. But you're right about the pretentiousness aspect of it all. I had a coworker who used to own a Cimarron. She was divorced, didn't make a lot of money, and despite working two jobs was always broke because all of her funds went to the mortgage on a house in a nice neighborhood where she lived alone after her husband left her. She was a typical example of house poor. Yet, she was seriously convinced that she drove a prestigious car because it was a Caddilac.
My dad bought a used one in the late 80's as a commuter car, he commuted about 35 miles to work every day. He liked it for what it was, an inexpensive beater with comfortable amenities. But it was always kind of a joke of a car, we called it the Cadlette.
If I did a Top Gear esque cheap car challenge through the US I would definietly consider getting a decent condition Cimarron. They seem comfy and are dirt cheap. Alternatively I'd also pick something Eagle related from AMC, if not just an Eagle outright.
I just saw an AMC Eagle this past weekend, thought about how it might be cool to own one, my friends dad had one back in the 80's. I then thought about the upkeep or what might break. I hardly see them on the road anymore, then it's likely the parts are hard to come by. No modern junk yard keeps vehicles that long anymore, be lucky to see early 90's cars in any junk yard these days unless it just came in that week.
Speaking of Eagle, I'd try to find an Eagle Premier (originally designed as a replacement for the long discontinued Matador). Not that finding one in decent shape would be possible.
Wow actually never seen 1 of these in the wild. And i was a tech 4 years. GM in the 80s was crazy. The c4 got a targa top but had no reinforcement fot it as the execs requested it so late. Craziness. Also guy in passenger seat looks like James from AVGN
I can top you on that. My dad owned an independent repair shop for 25 years, but prior to that, he was the service manager at a Cadillac dealership for 15. So naturally, a number of his core customers were Cadillac owners. I also am somewhat of a J-car historian, given that my first car was an ‘89 Z24 convertible. Put those two factors together….and I’VE never even seen a Cimarron in the wild.
My grandparents inherited a Cimmeron from my great grandmother after a few accidents. Also my neighbor sold a minty super low mileage one identical to the one in the video a few years ago. Otherwise, can't say I've seen one.
My grandmother had the Buick Skyhawk coupe version of this car. I absolutely loved it because of how it looked with the covered headlights whose doors spun down underneath the headlight assembly versus popping up. No power steering, no clock in the radio, no air conditioning, no rear window defroster, a 4-speed manual transmission. Interestingly, the one option it did have was cruise control. I always thought it was the best looking out of all the J cars. It was my first car as well, and I would get 37 miles per gallon in it. I miss it. Despite its cheapness, it was a good and durable little car.
Part of the reason I love this channel is that I get the same feeling of anticipation that I get watching a False Swipe Gaming video. How BAD was the Cadillac Cimarron ACTUALLY? "Unfortunately..."
We never had this in Europe. But…we had Opel Ascona which is the same exact car with smaller engine, different front/rear fascia and interior. It was basically Europe’s Chevy.
I knew an old couple that had a stick shift version! I believe the transmission was made by Isuzu. It was geared pretty low and had some pep. I remember we raced it against an 80's square-body Maxima and was surprised it was faster. It was literally the color of legal paper, and hilarious.
My uncle had one of these. Even when I was 10 years old, I could tell that driving this tarted up shit box meant his life had peaked a lot lower than he had hoped. He’s dead now. Not because of the car, more the alcoholism. Which also tracks for a divorced middle-aged salesmen.
I unironically love all GM J-body cars. i have never owned one but something about them just attracts me to them. i 100% plan on buying one as a side car soon just for the history alone. Id LOVE it to be a cimarron too
I remember this car when it debuted even though I was a kid. Even though I knew it was awful. Originally it had 88 hp. I didn't know they ran quite as long as they did. since that time no platform has been shared by Chevy and Cadillac until the Escalade
My glorious Cimarron fever dream is a late model with the aero headlamps and a 5-speed manual, onto which the arse of a Cavalier wagon is seamlessly grafted such that it looks factory-built. I would drive that to every Cars & Coffee I could and make up a new fake origin story for every venue.
I had a 6 month old 86 1/2 Cimarron. It was a 4k mile dealer demo... we got a great deal on it and I was 17. It was a nice car... navy blue, silver cladding navy leather and cloth seats. By 1986, this wasnt one of the worst cars ever made but maybe just the worst Cadillac....
Moved to Gallup NM 20 years ago. Neighborhood I was in was built in the early 1950s and was the first development in the little city of 20,000. Next block over from my house was a Cimarron in chocolate brown with a tan lower body and windows too tinted to see what the interior color was. It had the aluminum wheels and proudly advertised the 3.0 V6 on it's trunk lid. It was sitting in front of a house where the residents remembered WWII as the event of their high school years. I lived there 4 years and patiently waited for it to come up for sale. It moved just enough to prove that it was driven but was so clean you could have set up computer chip manufacturing on the hood. Sadly I was never blessed by seeing a "for sale" sign on it.
Happy birthday Roman! I've been listening to your documentaries on the podcast while transporting lately, Fordlandia and the Saab one were amazing. Cheers guys.
For a pimped up Cavalier, the Cimarron actually seems like a nice car, especially nowadays with the fuel crisis hurting land yacht owners. (Not like these are economic anyway.) The Cadillac Cimarron could be a great budget luxury car for younger enthusiasts and others.
That was the idea, but this thing can't hold a candle to any Mercedes 190E, BMW 325is, Audi 4000 or the Volvo 240 this Cimarron was intended to draw buyers away from
My Grandma bought a Cimarron brand new back in the day. She actually loved that car, but she had to trade it in on a new Cadillac or she would disappoint the rest of the mall-walkers in the Chicago suburbs
Back in the early 80s Chrysler made a budget Limo they called the Executive which was basically a stretched front wheel drive LeBaron with a glass partition between the driver and passengers in the back seat. If Cadillac stretched the Cavalier body 2 or 3 feet to give more interior legroom and added a turbo to the engine to give it more power it might have stood out more than it did, but it's a Cavalier no matter how you look at it.
I have a Cadillac ATS, which I love, and I can probably thank how bad this luxury shitbox was for how good my ATS is. I am sure that the Cimarron was in the back of their minds when they were designing the first small Caddy in like 3 decades.
I used to attend the “Snowbird Nationals” in South Florida in the early nineties. There was a racer running a 1987 Cimarron and 1987 Seville in the Stock Eliminator class. The Cimarron was running mid 14s and the Seville was running high 13s in the 1/4 mile.
It's crazy how many variants of the J type there were. The Mk2 Vauxhall Cavalier was about to be replaced in the UK by 1987, and in the USA they were making a Cadillac on the same platform. Would love to get hold of one of the Pontiac variants with a Trans Am style front end and graft it onto a British Cavalier, for reasons of Smokey and the Bandit. Great video, and car 😁
14:00 “The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the red zone.” “Don't you tell me which zone is for loading, and which zone is for stopping!” “Listen Betty, don't start up with your white zone sh!t again.”
The first car handed to me was a 1990 Cavalier--no A/C, no tape deck, no passenger side mirror and for a very short while not even a heater core or blower motor. Even at 17 I recognized that humble J-body for what it was--a generically engineered lump of mediocrity that was only designed to move its similarly uninspired occupant from A to B. Even with the Iron Duke I-4 and 3-speed auto that thing would overheat and ping like a bitch under fairly modest load. That car was not designed for the 2.8L underhood at all, yet Z24s of that generation have them and were reliability nightmares. That said... mine lasted me a good 4 years in college and 40k miles over the 85,000 already on it. It had been fairly well cared for and wasn't a bad runabout for what it was--the passenger room was generous for a compact car and the all-metal body was sturdy enough for teenage abuse. It still needed to be torn apart to solve its HVAC issues in true GM fashion when we first bought it, and again at 117k. When the ignition finally shit the bed we hotwired the thing so my dad could drive it for four hours back from college and to a scrapyard. Long story short... I can't imagine that J-body serving as an aspirational vehicle in any way. But I could see owning one of these Cimarrons solely for kitsch's sake. Just don't ever drive the damn thing unless you want acid reflux. This was Generic Motors in its purest form. Happy Birthday Roman.
I don’t know what reliability issues you suffered. I had a 1993 Sunbird with the 3.1L V6, and it proved very reliable. 250,000 miles and never had the engine apart. I did overhaul the trans once, as it apparently didn’t like being neutral slammed from 6,000 rpm EVERY DAY, but that was my fault, not the car’s. Aside from the trans, I did one heater core, one water pump, and one alternator. And I took it to a drag strip once and it ran 16.08 in the 1/4 mile. Not blistering by any stretch, but not bad for what it was supposed to be either. Unfortunately, that car succumbed to Midwest rust and I got rid of it in favor of a 1998 Seville SLS, which was a wonderful vehicle. Cadillac Cimmaron isn’t a bad car, either. It just never should have sported a Cadillac badge, as it was too expensive to be a J-Body.
@@paulwindisch1423 It may have been problems specific to the 2.8L or throttle body injection then, or resolved later in the J-body's lifespan. All I know is that the engine bay was cramped with an I-4, I can't imagine how much of a bitch it would've been to work on the V6 models. The alternator on mine died too, but that was around 105k in so you could do worse.
TAPE:- "If your cimmeron is equipped with the butt buster 9000 - you can attach this also to the passengers seat so they too can feel maximum enjoyment of being shafted!"
Well, if my understanding is correct, the j-body development was led in the United States and was primarily the Chevrolet cavalier which then became the Vauxhall cavalier. Any other development came from the cavalier itself so that's why the cars are so disappointing no matter what nationality or brand they are. They're cheap, nasty Chevrolets. Not real Opels.
I had a friend who drove one of these as her first car in the 90's. Was gonna share this video until I got to the part where he's calling the people who had these locals, fools and peasants. Glad I didn't ruin my friendship by sharing this.
It was an 87 Chevy Cavalier I took driver ed in. I can remember the instructor yelling to floor it down the hill so we could get up the other side. I would have been pissed to do this with a Cadillac.
I always thought of these as Cadillac's equivalent to "new" Coke. No one asked for it, and everyone was glad to see it go. 12:55 also, I was not expecting to hear what it's like to give Mr. Regular a B.J. Interesting. 🤔
I own that Cadillac Cimarron tape. Got it in a box of tapes my grandpa had after he died. Also had Johnny Paycheck's "Take This Job and Shove It" in there
As a kid I distinctly remember sitting in the barbershop chair looking at the Cimmeron commercial playing on the wall mounted tv. “Testimonials” from “customers” who had compared Cimmeron to BMW and Audi and gone for the Cadillac. My family had owned several BMW’s at this point. At 12 years old I thought...yeah, give me break. Who the hell are these people? I would drive one today just for the nostalgia value.
Thing is, while the Cimarron never deserved s Cadillac badge, the car itself near the end of its run was actually half decent. Like many GM failure stories (ie: Fiero), they killed so many cars just once they started to get them right.
You didn't play the owners manual cassette to the end did you?...I had one and at the end it says that in the trunk of your new Cadillac you will find a bottle of Kingsford lighter fluid and if you don't like your new purchase please do not return it to the dealer simply light it on fire.
When I was a kid in the 80s one of my mom’s friends had a Cimarron with a manual… My mom had the Audi 5000!! Not much better!! I don’t remember hearing my mother’s friend complaining about the Cimarron.. However my mom had many little issues with her Audi 5000…. My parents traded the Audi for a 1991 Acura Legend.. They were so happy with the Acura!!! Problem free. To this day they still only buy Honda products. ( side note) my parents had a 1984 Volvo 760.. they actually kept it for many years after the Audi came and went, it was my first car to drive in high school… way better car than the Audi, but probably not as reliable as the Acura. I honestly just always get a Honda…
God, my aunt had a first gen Legend, black on tan leather interior, five-spoke thick alloys with gold accents, gold-plated badges. It's still an incredibly good looking car and would love to find a manual transmission one day.
The fact that a 35 year old cassette plays so well in a 35 year old delco head unit is impressive.
The sound from the speakers sounded amazing
None of these tapes ever got worn out, I guarantee it
One of the few quality parts installed in these cars.
There’s only a few stations that still have it, but I think this radio had AM Stereo. I know Chrysler’s K-cars did.
@@AMthefox pretty much the reason why every GM vehicle had an aftermarket radio installed. these things were straight TRASH
That widow impression was way too spot on. Also Jerome totally had another family in Vietnam.
*korea
@@jdl9679 german
@@GrindingGearsZero Japan
@@aregularperson7573 I'll never forgive the Japanese!
France
A friend of mine was shopping for a used car back around 2000. The salesman said, "I have just the car for you", and directed us to a lemon yellow Cimarron. I must admit that, body-wise, it was pretty flawless. It was definitely the "widow" car. This thing even had matching yellow floor mats. My friend wasn't knowledgeable on cars, but my first words were, "Oh God, no." The salesman saw my face and knew this wasn't going any further.
It's the best contraceptive for males ever.
There’s one on auto trader right now for nine grand
@@2steaksandwiches665 crackheads
Ha ha ha!
@port nut Totally. It’s that… I know what I have bullshit mentality. I have a fondness for cars that nobody likes. But I would not pay nine grand for that car. Maybe four grand just for the funny factor. But you also have to find your audience. I have a Saab in very good condition, a 9-5 wagon from about 15 years ago. Kelley blue book it’s worth like 1000 bucks but they sell on forum specialty sites for six grand plus. You just have to know your target audience.
As someone who owned an 84 Cavalier, I can confirm that this is absolutely the same car with different badges and leather seats. GM seriously did not give a shit in the 80's, and then had the nerve to wonder how Toyota and Honda surpassed them in the 90's.
All through elementary and middle school, my best friend's grandmother "always wanted a Cadillac" but couldn't afford it. When her husband died, she finally bought her first Cadillac with the life-insurance money in 1984. I about fell off my chair laughing after you said "widows" as the first category for Cimarron buyers.
The “don’t run the engine in the red part of the tachometer” tells you everything about the people who bought these
The most impressive thing about this is the lack of rust on a 35 year old J body.
This is probably more rare than many Ferrari models.
I have a j body older than this and zero rust. Is it uncommon?
@@germancavallo8277 Very. Most of the 1st and 2nd gen Js rusted out in the rockers and sometimes up the rear wheel wells. Firewall was also prone to leaking, which would rust the floor out.
@@germancavallo8277 I'm guessing that you live in snow-free climate and thus avoid the road salt exposure. Correct? There's no way your J-car can make it through 35 to 40 winters if you're in the Rust Belt.
You know some disgus kept this garaged and washed and babied until they could no longer drive.
"affluenza ridden peasants thirsty to drink from life's pimp cup" Sometimes you turn a phrase so well I have to rewind multiple times just to appreciate how good it is
I was scrolling and saw this comment right as he said it 🤣
Best part about the Cimarron: No worse than a Cavalier.
Worst part about the Cimarron: No better than a Cavalier.
More disappointing than bad.
Arguably worse than a cavalier because you're paying more for a cavalier
It's worse cause you could have just bought a Cavalier and a used Caddy for the same money
Worse because it has all the notoriously bad 80's GM bells and whistles that break in 8 years or 100K miles. Then when you take it back to Kunkelman Chevy, Olds, Cadillac, Kia they tell you EVERYTHING is off warrenty and on YOUR dime.
My mom had 86 Cavalier and the interior was pretty much identical other than having nicer seats 🫣.
I wonder why they didn't use the A body platform. I guess "smaller". My Dad had a Celebrity and got like 15 years out of it. He lived where there was rarely road salt. It was a pretty good car, for how he used cars.
When I saw this vid come up, I was like, "Yesssssss...." I knew this would be gold. I'm familiar with the reputation of this car through automotive folklore.
Cadillac had a bad reputation in my family. My dad bought a used 1978 Fleetwood sometime in 1988, as he had just become a realtor and it was a good people mover for showing houses in style (kinda). It had a massive engine (it was the 425). Damn thing could nearly chirp tires on the highway. But it had seen a rough life by the time he got it, and it was as reliable as a politician. In 1990 he traded up to a 1988 Fleetwood. You'd think, "Well then, that would have been a quality and reliability boost eh?" Mmmmmm... no. By 1992 it had what was described as a floppy piston (that's my recollection as a kid). He took it to the local GM dealer. They said they'd take a look (it would take a few days). Meanwhile they gave him a Pontiac Firefly as a courtesy car, after they had originally agreed that if he bought this car, as a realtor he would need a mid-size sedan as a loaner for when he got oil changes or any work done. So that was strike one. His office was right down the road, so when they called him to say it was ready to go, he drove onto the lot and did what I probably would have done (he had already lost some trust with these guys), and check the tires. He had marked them to see if they even moved the car from where it was parked. It hadn't moved. Someone probably got in, started it, shrugged, and said it was fine. I kinda doubt they had handheld diagnostic devices back then. You generally had to pull the car into a bay and do it there.
So into the service department he marched. Our neighbour, a Brit with the stereotypical name Mick, worked there. Super great guy. He only worked on foreign and exotics (I one got to sit in a 1976 Lotus Esprit that was parked in his driveway - that was rad). He saw my dad coming in hot and quickly exited stage left (I don't think he even worked there for much longer, mostly out of disgust). My dad chucked a wobbler and probably ruined the day of a few people. That became strikes two and three.
Side story on the Firefly "courtesy" car: While stewing in the driver seat of that go-cart with doors, he drove to the Ford dealer. There was a 1992 Lincoln TownCar parked on the lot. It had 100 or so km's on it. Basically brand new given that some new cars on a lot will get test driven enough times to get to that point. Well, this wasn't that. It had been owned by an elderly guy who probably drove it to church a dozen times and then he up and passed away, so the car returned. This of course meant it had to sell at a discount, and my dad was there for it. The dealership, looking at his Firefly situation, offered to let him use the TownCar as his surrogate courtesy car (that's such a hilarious power move, by the way). He would buy that car shortly after. It became the car he owned the longest out of any car, and he had gone through many. I think he had it from 1992 until 2006 when he traded it for a 2005 TownCar.
I don't normally write comments this friggin' long, but I thought it was a fun story to tell.
That's a cool story
I have a 1997 Town Car. Your dad made a good choice. Mine still runs as sweet as a nut.
Solid story. Thanks for sharing.
Great story. Your dad did well springing for the Town Car. These are true workhorses.
Amazing story, as a town car owner of 5 years, that’s a great decision. I began with a 2011, and now have a 2009. Rebuilt the 2012 from an accident and my friend drives it now. Has 252K on it currently.
Mercedes S class 1987, "When a Mercedes was a Mercedes."
Cadillac Cimarron 1987, "When a Cadillac was a Chevy."
This would've competed with the 190E but your point stands.
@@nlpnt Truly painful to consider as the Cosworth Mercedes 190 models are some of the greatest sports sedans of all time, IMHO.
Those were dark days indeed at Generic Motors.
@@amerigo88 Well Buick made a pretty wicked turbo 6 in 87. The Cutlass was the best selling car in the US for a few years. Dark days for some, coke and IROCS for the rest of us.
@@ericharrison619 Yeah and where is Oldsmobile now?
@@amerigo88 And indeed, GM had nothing at all to compete with *those*, which themselves cost substantially more than a standard 190E.
My dad had the 5-speed manual Cimarron. He adored it. Everyone else hated it. Really reliable. Far more reliable than the 5 Northstar STS he bought after it. He then sold it to my uncle. My uncle gave it to his son. I learned how to drive stick on a Cimarron.
Honestly, you could do worse than a GM 60-degree V6 mated to that HM282 5 speed for reliability. Only real weak point was the lower intake manifold gaskets, which were a bit of a bitch, but most GM techs could do them with their eyes closed by 1990. And you can’t break one of those 5 speeds. That’s the preferred transmission used in V8 Fiero conversions. Upgrade the clutch and axles, but you can mate those to 400+ HP small blocks bone stock and they won’t even blink.
I’m trying to process the idea of a manual trans Cadillac, especially back in the ‘80s.
It was the first manual transmission Cadillac since 1952.
I don’t have the time or space to keep one, but someday I would love to own a Fiero GT with a SC3800 and 5-speed conversation. I’d love to at least drive one as that is the car GM COULD/SHOULD have made.
Mr. Regular, an idea for a road test?
Funny! My mom had an '82 4-speed manual Cimarron. I learned to drive a stick shift on it in a parking lot. It was beige with blue leather. I remember it well. I liked the smell of it. The sound of the Neil Diamond cassettes not so much. We didn't keep it for long.
OMG! I remember my neighbor bringing home his new "Caddy Cimarron" and he was soooo proud.....but my sister had just bought a new Cavalier that looked suspiciously just like it, it was hilarious! It was so hard not to laugh every time we saw it......
Happy Belated Birthday Roman!
That’s so funny. The same happened in the 00’s in Europe when Chevy rebadged south korean Daewoo’s as Chevrolets. Daewoo Evanda for example. I heard that some guy was proud to be driving his new ”american” car so he was quickly told the truth and for some reason he went all quiet…
@@kobbetop Yeah, I remember when the Daewoo-Chevrolet thing happened. The first few times I saw a 'Chevrolet Matiz', I thought it was just a bunch of local Daewoo Matiz owners being cheeky and slapping a 'cool American' badge on their cars.
@@vulpesinculta3238 it was doomed from day one. That Matiz was as bad as badge-engineering can get. And then after few years of making nothing but loss, Chevrolet pulled out of Europe. I heard Cadillac could be coming back. Maybe it’s time for a new Cimarron…
So, the second category?
Thank you! Soon, I'll be Cadillac Years Old.
I'm old, but I remember this car like it was yesterday. My good friend's family owned a Cadillac/Oldsmobile dealership in eastern PA. His mother got a brand new Cimarron every year starting in 1983 through 1988. I recall quite well all of the rides to his house on the buttery leather, impressed by the Cadillac badge, looking forward to time in his pool with his older sister looking after us. What caught me off guard was when my aunt picked me up in her brand new '87 Cavalier and the 10 year old me came to the realization that GM was full of shit.
I suspect the Cimarron was the insult to the intelligence that had more than a few buyers permanently swearing off buying GM cars at all, never mind Cadillac.
Hahahaha that was hilarious! Even your 10 year old self could tell that something wasn't right.
As someone who works in the car business, that conversation with Janet was painfully real. How dare you lol
Agreed
I was having flashbacks
"scale model of hopelessness" - possibly my favorite RCR line ever.
I love these bad 80s cars, they’re just so weird.
@D Moll Define simple
@D Moll They were a joke back then too.
Bulk of them by the Big 3
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." - L. P. Hartley
Explains at least half of RCR.
It was a time of great change in the automobile industry. These cars were hated by us young gear heads, we lamented we missed owning and driving the cool cars of the Post War Boomers by a generation.
I cannot get enough of the audio on the tape. It's such a perfect time capsule of what corporate America believed spoke to 51st and higher percentile. It also syncs so well with a lot of the audio cranked out by Disney at the early years of EPCOT Center (a different obsession of mine) which again was such a target of the 51st+ er's.
My grandma had one of these. My grandpa bought it for her birthday back in '88. He passed in '92 from a heart attack.
But, my grandma is 82, and still going.
One time, when we were sitting in the garage, she told me how often she would take the car for a ride around the lake. Then, she walked over to her current car, (2015 Chevy Trax,) and she opened the trunk. She pulled out the last remaining thing from that old Cadillac: one of the floor mats.
Now, she uses it as a trunk mat to put boxes of plants on top of, when she visits my grandfather's grave.
That's actually really wholesome
@@noobeenaut I thought so too. She really loved my grandfather.
That’s beautiful actually. It’s amazing the little sentimental things that have no value to anybody else but have amazing value that to us. I had my grandfathers pocket watch and a very old revolver. They’re not for sale. When I touch them, I still feel his energy. Take good care of your grandmother. It’s hard when they’re gone.
Wow she sounds just like my grandma who has I think an '84 or '85 Cimarron that my grandad bought new for her sitting in her garage as I type. She's 97. I don't think the car has more than 30k miles on it. She stopped driving sometime in the early 90's. Probably is virtually worthless today and I don't think me or any family that visits has opened that garage in a decade or more. This video is probably going to make me drive over there tomorrow and take a look.
That's awesome...
The late ones like this with a V-6 weren't terrible, and the suspension was firmed up a bit. I had a housemate in the mid 90's who had one and loved it. On the other hand, I had a h.s. friend who had a 1st or 2nd year model. Those had a very loose suspension, and a wheezy 1.8 4-cyl, made in Brazil I think. He had a lot of problems with it and it was very low on power.
Respect to John Manoogian at Cadillac for designing this thing in only 9 months out of a Cavalier whilst only being allowed to alter front fascia and taillights. “Rare Classic Cars” did a good video about the Cadillac Cimarron and why it failed.
Um no. I would respect him more if he had quit instead of creating this monstrosity.
after he made it, what'd he do the other 8 and half months of the 9? Polish up his resume?
The Australian Holden Camira looked a lot nicer than all the American ones.
The most interesting "what if" with Cimarron was that Cadillac wanted to develop the car on the A/X platform, which would have made it a larger car and had a V-6 out of the gate. According to Adam, Cadillac had to use the J platform because the Assembly plants were at capacity building the A's and X's.
@@stevevarholy2011 also the X platform was hot trash and would have damaged Cadillacs rep even more then this did.
I owned a 94 cavalier for a few years, 4cyl auto, four door, actually a very reliable car. I put over 200,000 miles on it in four years, and it had nearly 200,000 on it when I got it. Not fast but the AC always worked.
This intro hit so hard! Nailed how depressing the car was!
Has there ever been a feature in ANY car with as cool a name as "Twilight Sentinel"?
Other than that, I like the look of this car. It looks cheap but clean, like it's wearing a Burlington Coat Factory suit that was fitted by their in-house tailor.
My 95 Roadmaster has that, and a sticker proudly stating “PROTECTED BY THE SENTINEL” on the rear passenger window. Hilariously pretentious! I wish modern cars were more campy like that
My girlfriends former 96' Buck Park Avenue had "Twilight Sentinel" on the lights, took me a moment to realize they were auto lights. They actually had a adjustment to how sensitive they were to dark, most auto-lights are just on or off, the manufacture determines how dark it needs to be before turning them on.
Quite a novelty for the time. Its just now starting to become common on cars. I had a 2007 Saturn, 2009 Jeep, and my wife had a 2012 Mitsubishi, none of them had it, but my 2018 Ram does.
I thought Chrysler's "TorqueFlite" transmission was a cool name.
My '99 Buick LeSabre has it too!
14:22 - The GM “cup holders” in the glove compartment may be the most useless feature ever designed into a car. Classic GM. Think of a useful feature, then do it poorly.
Wrong, cups back then were only 2 inches tall.
That was an industry standard going back to the '50s, it was so your cups would stand steady in a parked car in the drive-in. Obsolescent by 1987 (it's the original J-car dash designed in the late '70s) but what the people who actually bought them expected. And it's not like the Germans were doing any better.
@@nlpnt Then again, it took until the turn of the millennium for German carmakers to actually integrate cupholders into their cars and not use some aftermarket looking thing that were all but useless.
My 88 Volvo has them. Even the glove box I swapped it with from a 90, has them. Good for when you're at somewhere like a Stewart's or sonic.
@@MiamiZombie2012
That's precisely what they are for.
They were never meant to be used while the vehicle was in motion. They were there to provide a flat space to place a beverage while parked, such as a drive in resturaunt or theater.
My parents drove Devil's back then, I remember the dealership tried pushing this thing.
My mother could NOT stop laughing, then went on to tell them they had escaped Buick and Oldsmobile and weren't going back!
Yeah I’m gonna need the full Gold Key cassette uploaded. Holy crap. That’s rare.
Damn that bit about the widow is so true. I’ve worked as a bike shop salesman and they’ll go on and on and on about stories like that and you just have to be like “mmmm uhuh yeah…anyway let’s move on”
To be honest, if you were giving away a 1987 Cimarron I'd be way more likely to enter than for a Corvette. Thank you for your superb content as usual, Mr. Regular!
...Really?????? HMMMMMMMMMM
@@RegularCars Absolutely. Been a subscriber of yours since 2014 and originally I subbed for the rare and eccentric 90s cars. And of course your humor. Also I can't praise you enough for your literary mastery. Some of the advice that comes out though your content has changed my life.
Same, honestly.
A legit free Corvette would make a nice 24 Hours of Lemons car to me though, HAHHAHAHA
Same honestly
@@BlueTrane2028 $500 my @$$! (Why you ruin classic?!)
I saw one of these in a junkyard and wanted to steal the Cadillac badge off the trunk but when I opened the trunk an angry raccoon was in there and it attacked me, I've never slammed a trunk faster in my life.
happy belated birthday Roman!
Suffice to say none of this ever happened, you sad attention seeker. You don't need to open the trunk to take off the bage and why would a wild forrest animal do in the closed trunk of the car? How did it get there in the first place? Do you really need attention this much to make up this pitiful excuse for a story? I pity you and people like you.
My grandmother's hairdresser had one of the last model years with the digital gauge cluster. Believe it was a hand-me-down after her mother went permanent horizontal. I can still remember Tom Petty playing on the speakers one Saturday morning when Lindy came to pick us up for grandma's weekly hair appointment. Just something strange about the car perfectly matched the vibe of her hair salon's purple neon lights and ambient hair spray smell. The rear leather seats were slippery and hard as hell on the outside, yet had lots of soft cusion lol.
“Permanent horizontal” 😅
I think I found my dream car. It's the embodiment of mediocrity and haplessness, the kind of car that not even people were interested in scrapping during the Cash for Clunkers program.
My first car was an 88 cimarron. My grandpa bought it new, drove it for about 10 years and then it sat for a year or two before he "sold" it to my dad for $1 for my first vehicle. I had fond memories when I was young riding around in that car, and loved driving it. It was red with the... "adult film" red leather interior, and the sound system was actually really good. Only problem I had with it was the fuel pump and one of the windows didn't always go all the way back up so you had to push up on it while you held the switch to go up.
And ran for a week with no alternator.
I worked for a BMW dealership in the 80s. We would occasionally get these things as a trade-in, usually with very low miles. GM made such little effort to disguise the Cavalier. It's amazing that anyone bought one of these.
My hypothesis is that the only reason it sold at all was because some people still thought it was a big deal to drive a Cadillac back then. For my parents it was a big deal. After the Cimarron, they switched to imports.
Happy belated birthday Roman!!! The perfect automotive example of the aggrogence of America exceptionalism immortalized in steel & plastic. Is there a Razzy award equivalent in the auto industry? Cadillac Cimarron, most likely to have an existential identity crisis. Love you guys!
Thanks! I'm quickly approaching the ideal age range for this car.
@@LimitedTimeRoman You'd be a GOD in Florida!!
Been waiting for this one for a long time! As someone who thinks of badge engineering and "aspirational goods" as bougie bullshit, thinking the whole concept of luxury brands as obnoxious, I love this car. It is GM/Cadillac unintentionally parodying their own nonsense. Making it plainly clear what Cadillac, and luxury brands, really are. Trying to make cars feel more valuable (and accordingly charging more for them) by putting a different name on them.
Its amazing how different the same basic platform can be between markets. In the UK and Europe we got the J-Body as the Vauxhall Cavalier MK2 and the Opel Ascona C. We never got an outright "luxury" one (just a high trim Cavalier) but we did get the SRi which got 130bhp from a 2.0 four cylinder 8v unit (though the 1.6 and 1.8 models were much more popular). The later MK3 Cavalier/Vectra A got more rounded styling and both the 2.0 16v Red Top (150bhp) and a 2.5 V6 (170bhp).
Vectra -> SAAB 93 -> Caddilac BLS
Mazda 3 - Ford Focus -Volvo S40
@@jareknowak8712 or Camira -> Vectra -> insignia/Commodore
@@jareknowak8712 I've got a Focus MK2 1.8 petrol (Mazda MZR), a mate had a Volvo C30 1.6 (Ford Zetec-SE) and my other mate has a Mazda 3 MPS (Mazda 2.3 Turbo). I'd have loved to have tried those three back to back
cause UK and Europe aren't that stupid, not to mention the small car market there is a whole lot more competitive.
I love that no matter how long I watch your videos even through all these years they are never boring and always have some nice story’s and deep looks into why people like the cars they do. Thank you Mr.Regular and Roman for being awesome and for spreading the PA sense of humor not many get to see
I had a friend who swapped his cavalier front end and rear end with a Cimarron. It was kind of cool.
Someone's gunning to be a GM exec!
I once saw a "Buick" El Camino. In black, of course for the whole "GNX" vibe. Homemade "badge engineers" can get creative!
I'd do that with a Cimarron, but I'd want to swap with an Opel Ascona or Isuzu Aska
Speaking of badge engineering. I was behind a Chevrolet SS the other day that had the Chevy Bow Tie replaced with a Holden emblem. Made me wonder if the Aussies swap out their Holden badge for a Chevy badge on their Commodore's.
@@marcusdamberger The Chevy SS WAS a rebadged Holden Commodore!
My dad owned a tow company and I was born in 1992. My mom had 1 of these till I was about 3. It was free and almost new bc somebody got it impounded and my mom took it. She put a z24 body kit on it over time and never had a license till she was in her 40s but still drove everyday. She finally got a ticket and had to get her license after being pulled over bc the muffler fell off. She traded it for a ASTRO van
When I was a kid, the adults played at this club called Club Cimarron. I was quite Cavalier to their activities at that time, but this video single-handedly put things into perspective, 25 years later.
Were there Skyhawks and Sunbirds in the trees? Did they serve you Pizza Firenza? Was it served by the three servers: Aska, Camira, and Ascona? Was it anywhere near Monza?
lol. J-Body K. J-Body K.
@@Doctor_Robert The entry code on the gate was “J2000”.
I am curious, in those shots you take of many cars where the car is just cruising along slowly while traffic whips by.... have you guys ever had to deal with road rage? I assume most people notice the camera car and keep control, but I know many people that cant control themselves, especially these days.
The Cimarron, or that time GM slapped Cadillac badging on a Chevy Cavalier and expected it to go against BMW, Volvo, Mercedes and Audi.
Right! Anyone could have easily done a better job Frankensteining a smaller sportier Cadillac together from the GM parts bin than just slapping a Caddy badge on a Cavalier.
Europeans must of been 💩ing themselves! 🤪
The funny part is the ATS-V and CT4-V Blackwing are legitimate modern 3-series competitors, while this thing had no chance of competing with the 3-series of its time, yet someone at late-'80s Cadillac was strung out enough to think that a riced-out Cavalier could ever compete with the 3-series.
I'm sad the great 80s effect showcase is cut out of the video now! This was a great episode.
Ok it was not a great idea, but as European i really like seeing a 4.5m long Cadillac.
Its shape looks more proportionate than the usual Cadillacs, but this is my opinion based on the fact that here a 5.5 m car is considered a wheeled cruise ship.
All i see here is an Opel Ascona tarted up to look a cheap hooker.
As a European, this is a rebadged Opel Ascona. I kinda like the design though.
@@vadim6385 yup
Over in the US, this looks stubby. Cadillacs and Lincolns are supposed to have hoods and trunks you can land a plane on. They're not just land yachts, they're aircraft carriers.
I will always thing of this as a missed opportunity. Imagine if GM had threw in the Cavalier Z24 engine, transmission, suspension, brakes, tires and priced it the same as the Z24.
Would it have been damned as being a halfhearted attempt to go after the three series? Probably. But it would've been better than what it was.
I love you for this one line alone
"It's GIF, GRAPHICS INTERCHANGE FORMAT!"
This would have been the perfect car for someone like my father in the 80’s. Wanting to live the complete yuppy lifestyle, but not really quite having the funds to do it correctly. Incidentally he was looking at one of these for a work car in the mid 90’s, an ‘85 model, but ended up getting an S-10 pickup instead, because that’s what you cross shop a Cimarron with.
Yuppies never drove Caddilacs, they drove expensive German imports like BMW and Porsche. Caddilacs were old people cars back then. But you're right about the pretentiousness aspect of it all. I had a coworker who used to own a Cimarron. She was divorced, didn't make a lot of money, and despite working two jobs was always broke because all of her funds went to the mortgage on a house in a nice neighborhood where she lived alone after her husband left her. She was a typical example of house poor. Yet, she was seriously convinced that she drove a prestigious car because it was a Caddilac.
The crack at Penndot got me dying, quality review as always. Happy birthday Roman!
Thank you!
My dad bought a used one in the late 80's as a commuter car, he commuted about 35 miles to work every day. He liked it for what it was, an inexpensive beater with comfortable amenities. But it was always kind of a joke of a car, we called it the Cadlette.
If I did a Top Gear esque cheap car challenge through the US I would definietly consider getting a decent condition Cimarron. They seem comfy and are dirt cheap. Alternatively I'd also pick something Eagle related from AMC, if not just an Eagle outright.
I just saw an AMC Eagle this past weekend, thought about how it might be cool to own one, my friends dad had one back in the 80's. I then thought about the upkeep or what might break. I hardly see them on the road anymore, then it's likely the parts are hard to come by. No modern junk yard keeps vehicles that long anymore, be lucky to see early 90's cars in any junk yard these days unless it just came in that week.
Speaking of Eagle, I'd try to find an Eagle Premier (originally designed as a replacement for the long discontinued Matador). Not that finding one in decent shape would be possible.
Wow actually never seen 1 of these in the wild. And i was a tech 4 years. GM in the 80s was crazy. The c4 got a targa top but had no reinforcement fot it as the execs requested it so late. Craziness. Also guy in passenger seat looks like James from AVGN
He was taking Mr. Regular back to the past, to drive the shitty cars that suck ass.
For some reason, GM was more focused on buying up tech and aerospace companies than building cars.
Lol, no he doesn't? Can you provide a timestamp?
I can top you on that. My dad owned an independent repair shop for 25 years, but prior to that, he was the service manager at a Cadillac dealership for 15. So naturally, a number of his core customers were Cadillac owners. I also am somewhat of a J-car historian, given that my first car was an ‘89 Z24 convertible.
Put those two factors together….and I’VE never even seen a Cimarron in the wild.
My grandparents inherited a Cimmeron from my great grandmother after a few accidents. Also my neighbor sold a minty super low mileage one identical to the one in the video a few years ago. Otherwise, can't say I've seen one.
My grandmother had the Buick Skyhawk coupe version of this car. I absolutely loved it because of how it looked with the covered headlights whose doors spun down underneath the headlight assembly versus popping up. No power steering, no clock in the radio, no air conditioning, no rear window defroster, a 4-speed manual transmission. Interestingly, the one option it did have was cruise control. I always thought it was the best looking out of all the J cars. It was my first car as well, and I would get 37 miles per gallon in it. I miss it. Despite its cheapness, it was a good and durable little car.
When I saw this video come out, my eyes lit up. I had to watch it now. I’ve been waiting for RCR to review this car...
I always wondered what might have been if GM had chosen the A-body platform as the "small" Cadillac. Called it the Calais even.
Words can’t describe how excited I felt when I saw this drop
Part of the reason I love this channel is that I get the same feeling of anticipation that I get watching a False Swipe Gaming video.
How BAD was the Cadillac Cimarron ACTUALLY? "Unfortunately..."
We never had this in Europe. But…we had Opel Ascona which is the same exact car with smaller engine, different front/rear fascia and interior. It was basically Europe’s Chevy.
I think this little caddy is charming, it also appears to be well looked after and clean. (other than some rust on the trunk)
When I think of Roger Smith's GM, this is exactly what I think of.
We all think of Roger Smith as this. Looks rich outside but a piece of crap inside
@@gdi9320 Great comparison.
There are only two good things that came out of Roger Smith:
1. Saturn
2. DirecTV
I knew an old couple that had a stick shift version! I believe the transmission was made by Isuzu. It was geared pretty low and had some pep. I remember we raced it against an 80's square-body Maxima and was surprised it was faster. It was literally the color of legal paper, and hilarious.
Wow! I had an '81 Maxima with an automatic and it was quick. Would have been embarrassed if I'd been beat by a Cimarron that's for sure.
I'm really loving that you're trying some new stuff. Loved the Kunkleman bit. Keep being awesome!
I like how the commercial states that the car is “functional”. Boy that’s something to aspire to. To bad it didn’t live up to this claim.
My uncle had one of these. Even when I was 10 years old, I could tell that driving this tarted up shit box meant his life had peaked a lot lower than he had hoped.
He’s dead now. Not because of the car, more the alcoholism. Which also tracks for a divorced middle-aged salesmen.
He must've been a real piece of work for you to speak of him this way in death.
I unironically love all GM J-body cars. i have never owned one but something about them just attracts me to them. i 100% plan on buying one as a side car soon just for the history alone. Id LOVE it to be a cimarron too
I remember this car when it debuted even though I was a kid. Even though I knew it was awful. Originally it had 88 hp. I didn't know they ran quite as long as they did. since that time no platform has been shared by Chevy and Cadillac until the Escalade
He said 1998 by mistake. It only ran til 88
@@sneakerfreak2002 I heard 1988. Even that is too long
Don't forget the Impala / Lacrosse / 9-5 / XTS
Originally it put out 88 hp, with the 1.8 L, yeah. Then they put a 2.0 L in it, so it made… _86_ hp.
@@kevinjokipii4260 True but that was before they came up with this turd. The late 70s Seville was based on the nova platform as well
My glorious Cimarron fever dream is a late model with the aero headlamps and a 5-speed manual, onto which the arse of a Cavalier wagon is seamlessly grafted such that it looks factory-built. I would drive that to every Cars & Coffee I could and make up a new fake origin story for every venue.
Mr. Regular, please please post an unabridged recording of this tape, both sides if applicable. It needs to be preserved.
I actually think the Cimarron has really nice styling.
I had a 6 month old 86 1/2 Cimarron. It was a 4k mile dealer demo... we got a great deal on it and I was 17. It was a nice car... navy blue, silver cladding navy leather and cloth seats. By 1986, this wasnt one of the worst cars ever made but maybe just the worst Cadillac....
Moved to Gallup NM 20 years ago. Neighborhood I was in was built in the early 1950s and was the first development in the little city of 20,000. Next block over from my house was a Cimarron in chocolate brown with a tan lower body and windows too tinted to see what the interior color was. It had the aluminum wheels and proudly advertised the 3.0 V6 on it's trunk lid. It was sitting in front of a house where the residents remembered WWII as the event of their high school years. I lived there 4 years and patiently waited for it to come up for sale. It moved just enough to prove that it was driven but was so clean you could have set up computer chip manufacturing on the hood.
Sadly I was never blessed by seeing a "for sale" sign on it.
Happy birthday Roman! I've been listening to your documentaries on the podcast while transporting lately, Fordlandia and the Saab one were amazing. Cheers guys.
Thank you! I'm so stoked that you're enjoying the videos/podcast.
The Chevrolet Citation will give you chills.
For a pimped up Cavalier, the Cimarron actually seems like a nice car, especially nowadays with the fuel crisis hurting land yacht owners. (Not like these are economic anyway.) The Cadillac Cimarron could be a great budget luxury car for younger enthusiasts and others.
That was the idea, but this thing can't hold a candle to any Mercedes 190E, BMW 325is, Audi 4000 or the Volvo 240 this Cimarron was intended to draw buyers away from
My mother owned one it was nice for a GM J-body but it was NO 190E/240/4000/325is competitor
Just hear me out here.... this car would make a great Bosozoku build
My Grandma bought a Cimarron brand new back in the day. She actually loved that car, but she had to trade it in on a new Cadillac or she would disappoint the rest of the mall-walkers in the Chicago suburbs
Back in the early 80s Chrysler made a budget Limo they called the Executive which was basically a stretched front wheel drive LeBaron with a glass partition between the driver and passengers in the back seat. If Cadillac stretched the Cavalier body 2 or 3 feet to give more interior legroom and added a turbo to the engine to give it more power it might have stood out more than it did, but it's a Cavalier no matter how you look at it.
I have a Cadillac ATS, which I love, and I can probably thank how bad this luxury shitbox was for how good my ATS is. I am sure that the Cimarron was in the back of their minds when they were designing the first small Caddy in like 3 decades.
I have an ATS as well. Have tinkered with the idea of getting a Cimarron badge from eBay and tucking it in the glove box for fun.
I used to attend the “Snowbird Nationals” in South Florida in the early nineties. There was a racer running a 1987 Cimarron and 1987 Seville in the Stock Eliminator class.
The Cimarron was running mid 14s and the Seville was running high 13s in the 1/4 mile.
It's crazy how many variants of the J type there were. The Mk2 Vauxhall Cavalier was about to be replaced in the UK by 1987, and in the USA they were making a Cadillac on the same platform. Would love to get hold of one of the Pontiac variants with a Trans Am style front end and graft it onto a British Cavalier, for reasons of Smokey and the Bandit.
Great video, and car 😁
Over here in Aus we got the Holden Camira. Definately not even remotely Cadillac in any way.
That tape is really something else, its amazing
Automotive shingles .. haha, how do you come up with this stuff!?! love it!
14:00 “The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the red zone.”
“Don't you tell me which zone is for loading, and which zone is for stopping!”
“Listen Betty, don't start up with your white zone sh!t again.”
The first car handed to me was a 1990 Cavalier--no A/C, no tape deck, no passenger side mirror and for a very short while not even a heater core or blower motor. Even at 17 I recognized that humble J-body for what it was--a generically engineered lump of mediocrity that was only designed to move its similarly uninspired occupant from A to B. Even with the Iron Duke I-4 and 3-speed auto that thing would overheat and ping like a bitch under fairly modest load. That car was not designed for the 2.8L underhood at all, yet Z24s of that generation have them and were reliability nightmares.
That said... mine lasted me a good 4 years in college and 40k miles over the 85,000 already on it. It had been fairly well cared for and wasn't a bad runabout for what it was--the passenger room was generous for a compact car and the all-metal body was sturdy enough for teenage abuse. It still needed to be torn apart to solve its HVAC issues in true GM fashion when we first bought it, and again at 117k. When the ignition finally shit the bed we hotwired the thing so my dad could drive it for four hours back from college and to a scrapyard.
Long story short... I can't imagine that J-body serving as an aspirational vehicle in any way. But I could see owning one of these Cimarrons solely for kitsch's sake. Just don't ever drive the damn thing unless you want acid reflux. This was Generic Motors in its purest form.
Happy Birthday Roman.
I don’t know what reliability issues you suffered. I had a 1993 Sunbird with the 3.1L V6, and it proved very reliable. 250,000 miles and never had the engine apart. I did overhaul the trans once, as it apparently didn’t like being neutral slammed from 6,000 rpm EVERY DAY, but that was my fault, not the car’s. Aside from the trans, I did one heater core, one water pump, and one alternator. And I took it to a drag strip once and it ran 16.08 in the 1/4 mile. Not blistering by any stretch, but not bad for what it was supposed to be either. Unfortunately, that car succumbed to Midwest rust and I got rid of it in favor of a 1998 Seville SLS, which was a wonderful vehicle.
Cadillac Cimmaron isn’t a bad car, either. It just never should have sported a Cadillac badge, as it was too expensive to be a J-Body.
@@paulwindisch1423 It may have been problems specific to the 2.8L or throttle body injection then, or resolved later in the J-body's lifespan. All I know is that the engine bay was cramped with an I-4, I can't imagine how much of a bitch it would've been to work on the V6 models. The alternator on mine died too, but that was around 105k in so you could do worse.
TAPE:- "If your cimmeron is equipped with the butt buster 9000 - you can attach this also to the passengers seat so they too can feel maximum enjoyment of being shafted!"
That's an interesting interpretation of the verbage used on that tape. I wouldn't disagree with your analysis though
Only GM coud take an Opel Ascona, turn It into a Cadillac and somehow end up with a downgrade.
Well, if my understanding is correct, the j-body development was led in the United States and was primarily the Chevrolet cavalier which then became the Vauxhall cavalier. Any other development came from the cavalier itself so that's why the cars are so disappointing no matter what nationality or brand they are. They're cheap, nasty Chevrolets. Not real Opels.
I had a friend who drove one of these as her first car in the 90's. Was gonna share this video until I got to the part where he's calling the people who had these locals, fools and peasants. Glad I didn't ruin my friendship by sharing this.
Yay!!! back to truly regular car!!!
It was an 87 Chevy Cavalier I took driver ed in. I can remember the instructor yelling to floor it down the hill so we could get up the other side. I would have been pissed to do this with a Cadillac.
I always thought of these as Cadillac's equivalent to "new" Coke. No one asked for it, and everyone was glad to see it go.
12:55 also, I was not expecting to hear what it's like to give Mr. Regular a B.J.
Interesting. 🤔
I own that Cadillac Cimarron tape. Got it in a box of tapes my grandpa had after he died. Also had Johnny Paycheck's "Take This Job and Shove It" in there
I had an '87 Sunbird! It was simple as hell and cheap!
As a kid I distinctly remember sitting in the barbershop chair looking at the Cimmeron commercial playing on the wall mounted tv. “Testimonials” from “customers” who had compared Cimmeron to BMW and Audi and gone for the Cadillac. My family had owned several BMW’s at this point. At 12 years old I thought...yeah, give me break. Who the hell are these people? I would drive one today just for the nostalgia value.
I can almost smell this car. I love it.
Old cars are just magical, there's nothing like the smell of raw gasoline, man made fibres and slight smell of burning
Thing is, while the Cimarron never deserved s Cadillac badge, the car itself near the end of its run was actually half decent. Like many GM failure stories (ie: Fiero), they killed so many cars just once they started to get them right.
They made them with a manual transmission?! I'd be all over that! (Yeah, I'm one of those guys)
Later cars could be optioned out with the 2.8 v6 and manual shift but those are super rare
A pretentious peasant?
@@johndong7524 You must R-r-roll the R-r-rs, sir-r-r. Then, and only then, shall you be tr-r-ruly r-r-recognized as being "pr-r-retentious". Good day.
You didn't play the owners manual cassette to the end did you?...I had one and at the end it says that in the trunk of your new Cadillac you will find a bottle of Kingsford lighter fluid and if you don't like your new purchase please do not return it to the dealer simply light it on fire.
With the incredible new Lyriq and Celestiq, let's remind ourselves of Cadillac's darkest hour
Cadillac gone ghetto years ago.
When I was a kid in the 80s one of my mom’s friends had a Cimarron with a manual… My mom had the Audi 5000!! Not much better!! I don’t remember hearing my mother’s friend complaining about the Cimarron.. However my mom had many little issues with her Audi 5000…. My parents traded the Audi for a 1991 Acura Legend.. They were so happy with the Acura!!! Problem free. To this day they still only buy Honda products. ( side note) my parents had a 1984 Volvo 760.. they actually kept it for many years after the Audi came and went, it was my first car to drive in high school… way better car than the Audi, but probably not as reliable as the Acura. I honestly just always get a Honda…
God, my aunt had a first gen Legend, black on tan leather interior, five-spoke thick alloys with gold accents, gold-plated badges. It's still an incredibly good looking car and would love to find a manual transmission one day.
Thank you on the GIF pronunciation, I don't care if the inventor says it's JIF, he is WRONG!
I can't help it if he's a clever programmer but he's otherwise illiterate.