Talk:Cadillac
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[edit] Title from Oldsmobile
If I'm not mistaken, Cadillac will take the title of the oldest surviving brand name of American cars from Oldsmobile in 2009. Is this right?? Georgia guy 16:17, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Diesel V8 section does not reflect NPOV
This section is a ridiculous apologia for General Motors and its lame LF9 Oldsmobile-developed 350 cubic inch passenger car diesel of the late '70s and early '80s, ridiculous enough to make one wonder if this is revisionism coming out of GM.
I am putting this (IMHO factual, even if it is written informally) screed up on the talk page to see what kind of reaction it gets from the community. If not too many people throw tomatoes, maybe I'll get off my duff and research it for a proper write up.
A large portion of Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and Peugeot sales during this timeframe were also diesels (and other manufactures sold plenty of diesels, although in a lesser proportion of sales than the makes I enumerated); they DID NOT suffer the same early-80s mass failures as did GM's diesel V-8s.
- When incidents of exploded Olds diesels were rampant (coincidentally, starting about a year after the '79 fuel shock and consequent hyper-popularity of diesel cars in the U.S. market) in the early '80s, an urban legend sprang up that a tanker of water-contaminated diesel fuel was imported from Brazil (its importation being necessary because a severe winter had upped demand for home heating oil and skewed the product mix coming out of U.S. refineries) and that water contamination wreaked havoc upon GM passenger car diesels. Interestingly, this load of double-dog-secret diesel fuel never caused a similar wave of catastrophic failures in other makes of cars. Had the fuel supply actually been at fault, it would have affected all user populations similarly, but it did not.
- The fact that this wave of GM diesel catastrophic engine failures fell when it did probably had more to do with age of, mileage of, and cumulative stress effects upon the '79-'80 diesel sales wave crest cars. Given that the mode of failure was usually a catastrophic failure of a lower end component (in the early 80s, a visit to an Olds or Cad dealer would allow you to see dead FE9s lined up in rows on the ground behind the service department, most with a piece of the rotating assembly having penetrated the side of the block - a no-kidding explosive failure of an engine), that points to some combination of inadequate design, substandard metallurgy, and substandard machining. GM had recurring serious problems with the latter two deficiencies in a variety of internal parts across multiple engine and transmission lines throughout its mid-'70s-to-mid-'80s decade of disastrous build quality, so these problems certainly wouldn't have been out of place in the crankcases of Olds 350 diesels. Also, the FE9 was 'dieselized' from the long and well-serving Olds Rocket 350 gasoline V-8, rather than being designed from the start as a diesel as is more common in the industry, making one wonder if the resulting design constraints didn't force GM to use less metal mass than they should. (In fairness to the practice, other 'dieselized' passenger car engines have worked out well, most notably Volkswagen's 1.5 liter inline four, which was as stout as a brick outhouse despite revving to the stratospheric [for a diesel] rev limit of 5800/minute, with its peak power at 5600/minute and peak torque at 4400/minute.)
- The statement in the article about GM diesels not having water separators is literally true, yet out-of-context and misleading. (And if lack of a water separator is a flaw, whose fault is that? In light of the fact that the diesel was a $949 option bundled with another ~$50 of heavy-duty electrics, a whopping percentage of selling price for a late-'70s family car, it's not like cost concerns were overwhelming.) No modern diesel passenger car marketed in the U.S. has a centrifugal water separator, although they are common in heavy truck and industrial diesels and are available on the aftermarket. GM's pleated paper fuel filter in between the low pressure fuel pump and the injection pump is conceptually identical to rest of the industry's approach and very similar in appearance under the hood to what you'd see from any other make. (Not to say GM couldn't have have made design errors in implementing industry standard practice, or made use of substandard filter materials.) If lack of a centrifugal water separator is what killed the GM 350 diesels, it should have been equally deadly for other makes, but it wasn't.
- GM caught flack for going with a Stanadyne (a manufacturer widely regarded as a poor second to Bosch and its Japanese licensees such as Diesel Kiki) injection system, and the rotary pump used was a new design. Maybe this pump was more sensitive to contaminated fuel than the rest of the industry?
- As far as buyers and dealer service staffs not knowing how to take care of these cars, that's bunk. Each car came with an owner's manual, and the factory published service manuals and offered mechanic training programs. If they weren't good, whose fault is that? I'll concede that owners often don't read the book and follow manufacturer's recommendations, but I don't think GM buyers are worse than anybody else. Why did these problems afflict GM but not its competitors in the diesel trade?
- As far as the unsuitability of the general U.S 'gas and go' population for diesel ownership, the author of this section is probably right, and I'll agree with the section author's implicit message that diesels benefit from having gearheads (rather than your mothers-in-law) for owners. However, possibly with some exceptions for the long-established diesel product lines of Mercedes-Benz and Peugeot which did inspire small followings of diesel freaks (and who largely got priced out of the market as these brands went upmarket around this time - very few eccentric college profs traded their '61 180D finwagens for 300SDs; they went over to gasoline or bought Izuzus), the general U.S. population wasn't any more unsuited to own other makes of diesels than it was to own GM products. Buyers of Japanese makes and Volkswagens are a particular case on point - they were into diesels for economy, and not for brand cachet or because they'd liked their previous diesels from the same manufacturers. If the U.S. motoring population (which in fact does take generally poor care of its fleet) was at fault in widespread failures of GM diesels, they should similarly have killed off other makes as well.
- I'd like to see the author of this section document widespread survival of significant numbers GM 350 diesels for "for hundreds of thousands of trouble free miles". Even if they had the mechanical longevity to do so (which is not the typical case), because their reputation was so thoroughly shot by about '83 that they had near-zero resale value, a large fraction of the diesel survivors were converted to gasoline engines. Conversions to gasoline engines were easy and common, both after the original diesel grenaded or had injection problems too expensive to fix and as a way for the owner to restore some resale value to his still-running GM diesel, and it was not unknown in the mid-'80s to see GM rear-drives with diesel badging running under spark-ignition power. The Olds 350 diesel project engineer (interviewed in a big cover story in Popular Science when the engine was introduced, featuring a cross-country run in an Olds 98 Regency coupe) stated that GM was not promoting their automotive diesel as longer-lived than other engines and stated a target durability of 100,000 miles (which was at the time the assumed economic lifespan of a car).
- Most damning for me is the publicity (propaganda) campaign surrounding the Olds 350 diesel. The tanker-of-Satanic-fuel-from-Brazil story came out in a story in either Popular Mechanics or Popular Science after Olds 350 diesels started ventilating their blocks in large numbers using bits and pieces of their lower ends. It read like an apologia for GM at the time because it didn't contrast the GM experience with the generally satisfactory service record amassed by the rest of the (then-substantial) diesel car market. A few years later, right as GM was about to introduce its many-times-delayed-due-to-development-difficulties new front-drive generation of full-sized B- and C-body cars (Buick Electra & LeSabre, Olds 88 & 98, and Cadillac DeVille and Fleetwood), GM put in a full-page ad in magazines such as Popular Mechanics appealing to middle-aged gearheads who stereotypically might be in the market for a big domestic luxury car. It was a page of fine print; the essential story line was 'we're sorry we're behind schedule introducing the new 4.3 liter V-6 diesel in our new big front-drives; we know that we utterly blew it with our 350 diesel V-8, and we're taking the time to get this new V-6 right; please give us another chance to sell you a diesel car'. In one of the strangest pieces of advertising I've seen, GM admitted to selling underengineered and undertested junk built with near-nonexistent quality control and humbly begged the buyer to forgive past sins and put his money on the table again. (As far as I know, they sold very few [if any - I can't remember ever seeing one in the metal] of the diesel V-6. I suspect that most buyers who would consider a diesel either had been bitten by the V-8 or had at least heard of its disastrous reputation and didn't want to give the V-6 a chance, corporate mea culpa notwithstanding. Also, generally falling fuel prices through the latter half of the '80s and Detroit's rediscovery of horsepower probably made diesels a much less attractive proposition regardless of what the buyer might think about their prospective reliability and longevity. Nonetheless, if I ever run across a V-6 diesel front-drive Caddy in decent shape, I'll buy it just for the novelty of a six-passenger car which can approach 40mpg on the highway.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.204.39.149 (talk) 06:50, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm not exactly sure what the complaint is, but perhaps the content in the article has been revised since your post of 08-31-07. As far as "NPOV", I fail to see how pointing out the massive number of failures of the notoriously unreliable 'Old-Cad 350 diesel' poses an "unbiased" view. I spent 27 years in retail automtotive parts aftermarket ( sales-purchasing-inventory management ), catering almost exclusively to the DIY market, followed by 7+ years selling engines for a high-volume production engine remanufacturer in 7 states. We were selling head gaskets for the 350 Olds diesel in the early 1980's in considerable numbers: unusual considering (1) the engine had only recently been put into production and (2) individual sales of head gaskets to the DIY market were insignificant other than for the most common engines ( Chev & Ford Small Block V8's ( FelPro #7733PT and #8016PT, respectively ) ( note I still remember the part numbers after having been out of the business 19 years. ) In the remanufactured engine industry, the Olds 350 diesel was one of many 'problem child' engines: rebuilders either specialized in them, or ( more commonly ) refused to build them due to their rate of failure and the subsequent ill-will they created with clients. While some independent repair shop owners specialized in diesel-to-gas conversions, a far greater number ( at least in my own territory of 7 western states ) refused to work on them simply because the cost of engine replacement in most cases exceeded the value of the vehicles and more often than not resulted in unhappy customers and/or small-claims court suits. When a production engine rebuilding house that has won "rebuilder of the year" awards multiple times from industry trade organizations refuses to build a particular engine, that in and of itself has got to say something. The only other domestic engine design which comes close to the Olds-Cad 350 diesel in terms of unreliability and premature failure would be the early-production 4.1L aluminum-block Caddys. ( And yes, I did stop to reflect on the Pontiac 230 OHC 6, the Chevrolet L-4 140 "Vega", and the Ford 1600cc "Escorts" before I typed that previous line. ) Bias? Pointing out that a poorly-concieved engine design resulted in premature engine failures isn't bias. Thanks. Ski mohawk 09:05, 27 October 2007 (UTC)Ski_Mohawk
[edit] The Escalade
I am removing the following paragraph for inaccuracy and POV:
Despite Cadillac's attempt to create attractive smaller cars through the Art & Science model, sales of coupes had been sluggish and the make's flagship models, such as the Eldorado, continued their perception as large and unwieldy sedans that were the province only of the older buyer. Cadillac's fortunes changed dramatically, however, with the introduction of the Escalade, a large and ostentatious luxury SUV. The Escalade was initially a favorite of rappers such as Jay-Z, whose cachet added to the Escalade's imposing size and luxurious features to make the Escalade a desired mark of wealth and status. The Escalade has undeniably introduced the Cadillac brand to a younger generation of affluent buyers, and has re-established the Cadillac name as synonymous with luxury rather than geriatricy.
No Cadillac coupe ever used the Art & Science design (and therefore had no influence on sales of coupes), and the first Escalade arrived in MY1998, before A&S. So we start off with a flawed timeline of Cadillac history, and then the paragraph ends with the POV statements regarding what the brands name is synonymous with. While there may be some valid points in this paragraph, it really needs to be rewritten in a section that considers several influences on Cadillac's recent resurgence, rather than giving the Escalade full credit.--Scottr76 (talk) 05:44, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Trivia
It should be added to the trivia section that a Cadillac played a major part in the Seinfeld episodes "The Cadillac" and "The Money", in seasons 7 and 8 respectively. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.13.214.254 (talk) 23:47, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
There are easily 50 more pop culture references to Cadillacs. Why does this section exist at all? It should be removed. Vytal (talk) 01:39, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Vandalism
I don't know enough to correct it, I hope someone comes in and partially locks the site after a reversion is made —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.112.253.150 (talk) 02:23, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] History
Friend Gedstrom:
I understand his decision to erase my contribution to the history of Cadillac. Until now there was no other source of information as supplied by Murphy in his rationale for the name. After several years of research on my ancestors in the USA, I can give every one of the tests of how much he scored. Also I can give references from my book "Conspiracy in the South" published by Trafford Publishing of Canada. There is told the story of the brothers and the family Forto Cardellach New Orleans. You can also check the photographic archive of the book through Google Picasa photos and documents from one part of their country's history. I regret not being able to speak in English, but you should not be a problem with the translator of Google. You can contact me and him darétodas references you think necessary, but before blanking a contribution, given the volume of my contribution Vikipedia in Spanish, you could have requested a pre lasmpruebas. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jrmauri (talk • contribs) 16:01, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
