balthazar

Cadillac only gained 26K in volume for '81.

Exactly. Look no further than the Corvette; an expensive 2-seat, blistering-fast sports car... the very mention of sales volume other than to state the fact, misses the point by miles. Because it's GM. Google pieces on the BMW 6 and see how often it's called a "failure" because they sell 200/mth or whatever the number is. Let me save you the time: none. Because it's NOT GM.

Not 'right to drive', but 'right to drive what I like'.

I have a feeling that eventually insurance companies will pull something like they do with home insurance... so that if you don't have updated electrical, they won't insure your house. At some point, this logic applied to "features" like ABS, TC, black boxes, etc. will make it difficult to insure a car with standard insurance... relegating older cars to limited mileage collector insurance. Is that somehow NOT a chipping away of personal freedom??

Of course, when insurance Cos 'don't pay more', they 'make more', but point taken. But whether they pay or not does not prevent accidents. Insurance companies should NOT have any access to these recorders. Anyone have a source as to what vehicles have had these since when?

^ This idea is exactly part of the 'sheep mindset', IE: {monotone drone] Big Gov't is a force for good, we love us some more Big Gov't [/montone drone}

Nice, & short WB. Rip off the bed and drive it as a cab/chassis.

I see NO REASON that granting access to privately-owned info (in the BB), should not be accompanied by charges & fees to those who want it, just like every company out there charges the private individual for any type of service. "'We' have received your request for access to 'our' BB's data collection. One-time access fee is $1000, payable in full before data dispersal. 'We' accept PayPal." Someone have an idea as to how Emergency services would find anything a BB collects to be pertinent to medical assistance?

lexus cars are in aesthetic lockstep with MB & BMW. Of course, BMWs & mercedees's are generally bland & non-distinct, too, so we would agree there. veloster is from the 'weird insect' school of car design, and while 12-yr olds may find it 'cool', in general hyundai's overwraught styling is going to age incredibly quick. Which must be why all hyundai dealers push the financing & cash back deals instead of the actual product.

^ Yea- guaranteed that if it's a federal mandate, defeating it will be a federal offense. Odometer fraud/ title fraud/ grand theft are all 3 minimal 3rd degree felony charges in FL, for example. They just pile on & pile on the charges and drown you. The slimebags in DC pedal it as 'helping you' and shove it thru, along with the penalties & charges, likewise to 'help you'. I need to find a clean '64 Cat coupe like NOW and squirrel it away for the ever-creeping Freedom Pinch.

Well that sucks. I didn't think the slow economy had spread to fender-benders. Good luck to you, something will come your way soon!

And the 'tin hats' were murmuring when the whole red light camera thing was pitched as purely safety oriented, too. Since then we've learned that municipalities allowed private companies to rule technicalities at the red light camera intersections irregardless of accepted safety protocols, merely to maximize revenue. Camino- you're dead right: this is another chip off the personal freedom block.

The EXP made a sizable splash with it's advertising, being strikingly graphic in print ads (not that kind of 'graphic'). I think the cars reflected/matched that to a solid degree... But it seems they disappeared relatively quickly; I haven't seen one in over 10 years.

Looks like the 2 could collide gently and inflict no damage.

I had one of these for a short while:

LOT of people seem to believe it's not radical enough. I don't necc. agree it needs to be. IMO, it's a nice stylistic addition to Cadillac, I 'like' it, but would have to see it in person to know if I need to modify that opinion either way. I really do like the current CTS, it still turns my head. Cadillac is a complex walnut for me- I've long been a fan (Cadillacs are what first pulled me into being a car enthusiast). I love so much of the marque's heritage... I think I give Cadillac more slack than perhaps I should WRT the current stuff. I don't know if I can 'trust' my own opinion here.........

^ Right, it should have been LTD III ! 10-4 on it being just 'LTD'. Yikes on the front overhang of the above! Awful- Ford should've moved the wheels out another 10 inches each.

Super clean, but SO stylistically non-descript. Cheers anyway. This is when the other divisions really began 'Cadillac-ing it up', which IMO led to the Fortune magazine cover circa 1985. I had to go look up what 'NightWatch' was: headlight delay for lighting your way to the front door.

WRT Ford cars, the last design that comes to mind that I like is the '63s (full-size & T-bird). I'm lukewarm to repulsed by everything else after that. Merc stopped appealing to me after the F/S '56s, tho a smattering of others are pretty nice ('63, 64, '67-69 Cougar, that's it). Linc Mark III is pretty nice, but the bulk of '70s-80s Mercs, T-birds & Lincolns you can fold into the crusher; horrible. But in the vein of the O/P question.... those '60s designs I never 'saw' regularly, so I didn't even bring them up. Ford current stuff is pretty appealing tho, but again- I'm still seeing them...

There was no FWD LTD. There were 3, all RWD...the fullsize, the midsize ('77-79 LTD II), and the Fox-body one ('83-86). I think a lot of people were misled by the ginormous frontal overhang on the LTD II :

Sixteen was not the greatest design, but it was helped as far as it did reach due to having some length to work with. Current CTS is a very nice, striking design, but it's angularity works with a smaller template. Ciel has numerous heritage-feel cues, but again is helped by being a decent-sized canvas to start with. Has a ton of fluidity the s-class for example, sorely lacks. I hope the Cadillac Omega follows the Ciel rather than the Sixteen in language. Next Impala is no stunner IMO, just run of the mill, but I don't expect leading edge design from Chevy. Small cars can have striking design, but productionizing brings it all back to the muddy pond of mediocrity. I didn't mean to imply retro cues are the only way to create a so-called 'new classic', but it has been the only way recently we've seen designs that have a distinct appearance. There are more obstacles to design today than at any other time in history, IMO. 'Progress' has been slower these last 20 years than any other 20-yr span, too.

Unfortunately, we haven't seen a so-called "new classic" in a good 30 years, and with ever-tighening restrictions on design WRT CAFE, .cd, packaging, and the push to smaller & smaller vehicles, I don't expect to. A given brand used to be visually distinctive, apart from everyone else, esp the luxury brands. No more. Now the average driver, if they even care, struggles to ID a mercedees from a toyota out on the road. Brands like BMW vainly cling to outdated front-end designs just to have a whisker of distinction- unable to ever break free and offer anything new/fresh. Size, trim, language are all compressed into tighter & tighter boxes. Homogenization is the guiding hand, not expression. There is no room nor allowance to 'take chances' anymore.

Trucks get shortened far more often than cars, but still :

They all also tend to place the rear wheels a bit too far forward. What these radically shortened jobs miss is the parallel line of the roof; they all slope immediately from the windshield header in a alien manner. They need a slightly longer greenhouse and a more upright backlight- in the case of the Plymouth, more in line with an early '50s roof/backlight. - - - Most of those '70s shortened Sevilles were poorly done IMO, and they should've been easy due to the sharp/straight edges of the design.

Saying retro is a 'cop out' fails to see beyond faint strains of familiarity to what is timeless beauty. Line, flow, proportion & detail is art, not retro. It's like looking at a picture of Rita Hayworth from 1941 today, and saying, 'we don't want to go there because we've been there'. Nonsense. Beauty is eternal, and achieving it in design should be a constant. Instead we get shapeless lumps with no detail & derivative cues, like the Bentley coupe, and try to self-affirm the concept of 'progress' by calling it 'gorgeous'.