Our mutual pal Jason Torchinsky certainly fits into that category of “hard to pin down.” I think it’s wrong to call him a contrarian, yet at the same time he does a pretty good job of fitting that description with his automotive opinions.
Water cooling? He doesn’t want to hear of it; air cooling is fine. Transverse engine spinning the wheels in front? He’d rather see a flat motor in the rear. And your conventional wisdom of needing at least a mid-sized sedan for a family of four? Nay, Jason can fit it all into his Yugo.
Last week I saw another example of this when the subject turned to the 1980-85 Cadillac Seville: the infamous “bustleback” sedan that people either love or hate, and it seems like the latter is the more popular opinion. Mercedes Streeter just wrote an excellent redemption piece on this car, and Jason brands himself as a fan of this much-maligned Cadillac as well.
Jason’s actually a fan of the 1980 Seville, and I told him that I had played with “unbustling” this car; taking the same car and putting a more conventional trunk onto it to see what that would look like. I even suggested doing the same things with the Seville’s similarly-angle-backed archrivals from Lincoln (the 1982-87 Continental) and Chrysler (the 1981-83 Imperial). Jason’s response was rather odd, yet somehow expected from him. “I think,” he typed quite confidently, “that if anything you should bustle more.”
This is going to get strange.
Did Something Fall On The Back Of Your Cadillac?
The origin of the bustleback Seville isn’t hard to trace. As we’ve mentioned earlier, GM uber-design-guru Bill Mitchell was ready to retire and wanted his swansong to be a statement piece. Sadly, a final magnum opus from a person who started his career nearly forty years before might be a bit out of touch with the current market. Or, in the case of the Seville, aimed at exactly the market Cadillac was trying to move away from.
But why a “bustle back”? Here’s how Jason described it some years ago:
The design inspiration for these designs comes from luxury cars of yore. Even in the ’80s, the source was a long-gone silhouette that once suggested opulence and luxury, a silhouette itself that derived from an earlier era before car trunks were actually integrated into a car’s body and were literally a trunk-mounted behind the passenger compartment.
The vertical shape of the strapped-on trunks became absorbed into the car’s body, and realized its optimal form in cars like the 1946 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith
Bill Mitchell loved the “elegance” of pre-war designs, and his application of these cues often resulted in great-looking cars such as the “boat tail” Rivera. Of course, those old Buicks were long, low cars with flowing lines that were quite dissimilar from the tighter-proportioned vehicles of the late seventies and eighties. By slapping on these thirties-era styles onto these crisp, angular cars you were no longer mixing peanut butter with chocolate; you were putting mustard onto an éclair.
Mitchell’s taste for the flamboyant naturally meshed well with the tastes of now-sixty-something buyers his own age. It did not work with the new generations. Ironically, after his retirement, Bill was apparently quite vocal in his dislike of the 1984 C4 Corvette as being too “bland.” Considering that the C4 was about the only GM car my forty-year-old dad (or pre-driving-age teenage me) would even consider buying then, that tells you all you need to know.
Yet a bigger, more troubling question remains: why did the other Big Three do this shit as well?
A Bustling Trend
Chrysler and Ford offered competitors for this controversial Seville in 1981 and 1982. With their release dates so close to the Cadillac, there is no way that the Lincoln and Chrysler entries could have been started after 1980. Despite secrecy and non-disclosure agreements, it’s obvious that spy shots were seen or some designers that jumped ship from GM told their new employers “you’re not going to believe what Caddy is doing.” It’s the response from the top brass of these competing companies that was most befuddling.
Let’s say you’re at Ford in the late seventies and you get this inside information on the bustleback Seville. What do you do? You or I would likely predict that this thing might be a white elephant that only the early-bird dinner crowd (if anyone) would like and respond by bringing over the European Ford Granada with its near-BMW-5-series-specs on paper as a new small Lincoln; it was really an underrated car. You’d grab the rising Boomer market, still get old buyers if you put a chrome grille on it, and eat GM’s well-catered lunch.
At Chrysler, Iacocca was at the helm and was famous for making a fortune for his former employer (Ford) by (badly) copying European designs with things like the American Granada/Monarch. Knowing of the new Seville, he could have chosen to put an ultra-Euro body onto an Aspen/Volare like coachbuilder Monteverdi did with their Sierra:
Or, he might have just put fake 450SLC Mercedes panels onto a Cordoba chassis to woo those under fifty years old:
Neither company took these possibly more prudent paths. Shortly after the Seville’s 1980 premiere, Chrysler released their 1981 Imperial with a prominent bustle on a shape even more angular than the Cadillac. The Frank Sinatra edition in a blue “similar to the color of his eyes” showed you the market they were trying to hit in a time when people your parent’s age were listening to Fleetwood Mac.
It wasn’t over. The new-for-1982 Fox-based Lincoln Continental sported a shape remarkably similar to the controversial Seville as well.
Neither of these rip-offs did rather well in the market, but in hindsight we were seemingly just lucky that the Big Three didn’t, as Jason would say, bustle more. But what if they had done just that?
Trickling Down The Bustle
It’s alternate reality 1982, and you walk up the stands at the auto show. You aren’t prepared for the shock that’s about to greet you at the luxury divisions of the top three American auto brands. With gas prices at nearly five bucks a gallon (adjusted for inflation) and interest rates on car loans hovering at close to 16 percent, the small car was having a heyday in the States back then. The Big Three was ready for the emerging class of “small luxury car” that was basically owned by the Europeans; they were going to add a truly American twist to this category.
Cadillac Castilian
The little Castilian might have a bustle like its bigger Seville brother, but on this car that bustle is part of a hatchback for extra versatility. The 1.6 liter four-cylinder standard engine would have offered less-than-spectacular performance, especially with the mandatory automatic when loaded up with options like power windows and locks, but with the optional 2.8 liter V6 the performance of 0 to 60 in under 9 seconds would have won a few drag races in this Malaise era. That 1.8-liter Isuzu diesel was also considered but nobody could get the car to move under its own power.
If the doors and proportions look similar to something, that’s because there’s a four-door Chevy Shove-It under that skin; even the roof stamping is the same as that bottom-feeder Chevy. Same wheelbase but new quarter panels, a longer hood, and front fenders give the look of timeless elegance; “timeless” if the world were to end tomorrow, that is. Or yesterday.
Imperial LaSerra
Iacocca actually put no Chrysler branding on the 1981 Imperial, so it was clear that he might have been eyeing making a whole new sub-brand. The LaSerra is as “sub” as you can get, being a tiny four-door sedan with front wheel drive. Actually, with the 2.2-liter four-cylinder under the hood, it would have offered a fair turn of speed. If they’d added a turbo it might have Gone Like Hell.
We know this because the car underneath the fru-fru is a Dodge Omni; the C-pillar profile is identical and even the doors are the same with different skins (but with an opera light on the B pillar). Headlamps are exposed; concealed headlights would be reserved for the upper-level Imperial coupe, but you still would have gotten that damn bustle.
Yes, whatever you say about Malaise cars, those gas mileage figures for the base Omni are staggering, aren’t they?
Lincoln Mark I
Ford was all about “World Cars” in 1981, but there’s nothing “World” about the Mark I. With chrome trim and the prominent bustle, the only “world” it alludes to is the era before Keith Richards even took his first drink (maybe).
Fuel injection gives the “high output” 1.6-liter engine nearly 90 horsepower, so even with options like automatic headlamps and power front seats you might be able to get up relatively steep hills. If you’ve ever driven a stock automatic early Ford Escort, you’ll know that it sort of gained momentum instead of accelerated.
Yes, look again. That’s a 1982 Escort below the fancy exterior. Unlike on the Castilian and Imperial LaSerra, Ford would have gone all-out with ditching the hatch and making modifications to the “C” pillar in a manner similar to what the Blue Oval did in creating the notchback Orion overseas.
Bust(le) A Move
We can scratch our heads at the bustling of American luxury cars, but if you remember a Members Only jacket on your dad and your sister in moon boots then you should know that questionable fashion tends to spread with pandemic-like speed no matter what you think of it in hindsight. I bet they’d sell more of these baby bustles than you think to well-heeled old people who had gone to the same luxury car dealership for twenty years and just need a smaller second car that’s easier to park around Boca Raton.
Jason appears to be happy with these odd bonus bustles, so at least this rather bizarre task was not wasted on everyone. While their existence seems far-fetched at first, a look at history says that it might not have been that distant from reality. The fact that the 1980 Seville was actually built in the first place, and that the competitors rather blindly copied it, says that maybe we just dodged a bullet.
I Made Our Daydreaming Designer Imagine An Oldsmobile For Actual Old People – The Autopian