Had General Motors introduced the Cadillac Cimarron one to two model years before they introduced the Chevrolet Cavalier, would public perception been any different ?
While it's an oversimplification to say that the 1975 Cadillac Seville was nothing more than a Chevrolet Nova with a leather interior, had GM come out with a Chevrolet version of it, along with Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Buick versions, would there have been the outcry at the time of the debasing of the Cadillac brand? Probably and especially if all the other versions been introduced at the same time as the Seville was. But GM didn't come out with other versions of the Seville for their other brands and the Seville sold very well, despite being the most expensive Cadillac available at the time, and is held in generally high regard by Cadillac cognoscenti to this day.
It's amazing how much things changed in Detroit in the seven years between the introduction of the Seville and the Cimarron. The Seville was very conventional save for it's un-Cadillac like small size. The Cimarron was even more un-Cadillac like being that it was half the size of the Seville but it had the type of forward thinking engineering innovation that had made Cadillac Cadillac in the past.
Was the Cimarron that bad of a car? It certainly wasn't any worse than any of the other "J-bodies" (the platform name it was built on) and it came with an upgraded interior, Cadillac cache and presumably superior service. Cadillac didn't help matters by charging double for a Cimarron what Chevrolet charged for a Cavalier either. So, outside of the car, GM didn't do anything right with the Cimarron. Say what you want about how primitive and crude the car was. The spinmeisters at GM screwed this one up good.
Cadillac's advertising lingo at the time, - that they used across all their models - "Best of All It's A Cadillac", meant that they were cashing in their image chips rather than hedging their bets on breaking automobiles.
Had they introduced the Cimarron first by a model year or more, chances are they may have had another Seville on their hands.
Timing is everything.
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