Flint Photos: Mystery Cadillac

This slide indicates it's from Flint, but there's no other information. Any detectives out there with ideas about the location?

Cadillac Style in San Francisco

Photo by Bhautik Joshi via sfist.com.

The Bench Seat Gets Benched

The bench seats many Flintoids grew up with are fading fast. John Pearley Huffman of The New York Times reports:

The 2013 Cadillac XTS comes with only front bucket seats, unlike the DTS it replaced, leaving only one new passenger car in the United States with an available front bench seat. That car, the current-generation Chevrolet Impala, will go away in a few months, too. 

Front bench seats — essentially a door-to-door couch — were the default seating mode for most of the American car industry’s history. Benches were cheaper to make than individual chairs, and they provided space for the most passengers. The column-mounted gear shifter, which freed space for a third passenger in the middle of the front seat, was a breakthrough when it appeared on Cadillacs and Pontiacs in 1938. 

But as affordable European sports cars arrived in America after World War II, individual seats gained cachet; they spread to sporty American cars, including the first Chevrolet Corvettes, and contributed to the glamorous image of luxurious performance cars like the 1959 Chrysler 300E. In the ’60s, most American brands offered sporty trim packages, like Chevy’s Super Sport option with a bucket-seat upgrade. In the decades since, buckets spread to cars of all sizes and types.

Color Commentary

Designer turned marketer Chris Webb talks about how G.M. chooses colors for the Volt. It's basically a commercial for the internet age, but it's surprisingly interesting and offers a nice contrast with the yuppie extravagance of the Reagan-era Cadillac advertising I posted yesterday.

It did remind me a little of the color analyst scene in Roger & Me. And the part where Webb explains how G.M. uses three layers of color instead of two was somewhat reminiscent of the famous amp scene in Spinal Tap. (watch below)

All kidding aside, it seems like G.M. is finally figuring out how to market a car to a wider, more diverse group of consumers. (And no, G.M. did not pay me to say that.)

If you want a chance to fly to L.A. and test drive a pre-production Volt, go here to enter the Chevy color contest to name the strange green planned for some of the Volts. (Are they too broke to actually give a car away in the contest, as I mistakenly posted earlier? Apparently so.) Alas, there are no plans to re-introduce the "Bamboo Cream" of my grandma's Buick Electra.

UPDATE: If you scroll toward the bottom of this page, you can see some of the names people have submitted. And as some of the comments indicate, figuring out how to actually enter this contest is a real challenge. Perhaps I was a bit premature in declaring that G.M. has improved at the marketing game.

Cadillac Style: Let's Go! Let's Live!

My favorite part is when the polo-playing dude douses himself with water while sitting on the hood of his Caddy and two women jump up and down in excitement. You used to see scenes like that all the time in Flint. The two dim-witted housing developers who almost blow themselves up is also pretty cool.

Loyal customer

With a few more customers like Joseph Macko, G.M. would be doing just fine.

There are loyal customers, and then there's Joseph Macko. The 84-year-old Flint man has bought or leased a new Cadillac every year since 1955, the year Disneyland opened in Anaheim, Calif. "You only live one time. Money is to spend," he told The Flint Journal. "I spend it once I get it."

Macko, a retired General Motors Corp. worker, used to buy a new car every year, but he's been leasing the last few years. Last week, he drove home this year's fresh set of wheels — a black 2009 Cadillac DTS — from the Al Serra Auto Plaza in Grand Blanc.

"He looks forward every year to buying a new car," said Gordon Taylor, who has been Macko's salesman for 22 years. "He wants that same vehicle."

Marcella Macko said her husband isn't the spendthrift he might seem — he saves up all year to pay for a new car.

But, she said, she just doesn't get excited anymore about the annual ritual.

"He does, but I don't," she said.

Pimp my Model K

March 5th marked the 100th anniversary of an obscure, yet significant, day in Cadillac history. Phil Patton of The New York Times looks back at the important journey made by three Model K Caddys:

The cars were first driven 25 miles from London to the Brooklands racetrack, where each one was taken apart inside a brick shed. Three piles of parts — some 720 parts per car — were jumbled together. Then they were reassembled from the resulting shuffle and driven another 500 miles.

This was only possible because the Cadillacs were made from interchangeable parts — a first in the auto industry and an important step leading to the development of the modern assembly line.

The idea of building automobiles with interchangeable parts is usually associated with the Ford Model T — celebrating its 100th anniversary later this year — and the assembly lines used to build it. But it took several years before the Model T could be put together on a line and without fitting files and other tweaks. Before the assembly line made sense, parts had to be machined with enough precision they could be easily swapped one for another.

Those Model K's are a far cry the Cadillac's we have come to know and love, like Snoop Dogg's 1974 Snoop Deville, celebrated on Ridin' Dirty, a blog out of Detroit dedicated to hip hop rides.