1982 Cadillac Eldorado Touring Coupe Is Conflicted

From the April 1982 issue of Car and Driver.

Your eyes do not deceive you. You are looking at a Cadillac Eldorado with no stand-up hood ornament. Its lower body moldings are made of a gray plas­tic. It has no chrome side moldings. It has no chrome headlight moldings. Its wheels are not shod with ersatz wire covers. Its tires are fat and black. No, this is not a Car and Driver project car. This is the new 1982 Cadillac Eldorado Touring Coupe.

Having sent the radical-for-Cadillac Cimarron out to woo a market it never had, Cadillac is now entering phase two of its recovery plan: bring back the tra­ditional big spenders who’ve been lost over the past several years to the quali­ty- and performance-oriented European luxury cars. Cadillac thinks it has a chance with this new breed of Eldorado. Its secret weapon? A high-performance handling package that made us doubt we were driving a Cadillac.

The heart of the package is the tour­ing suspension, added to Cadillac’s op­tions list in February 1980. Almost im­mediately after the specially tuned suspension was developed, forward thinkers in Cadillac engineering saw that it had the potential to transform the Eldo into a European-style luxury driv­er’s car. Thus inspired, the engineers developed two project cars around the suspension—both with fat tires, both with no chrome—and tried to sell the Touring Coupe package to manage­ment. Meanwhile, perennial racer Rog­er Penske was putting together his own special-edition Eldorado for his dealer­ship in Downey, California, calling it the Penske/RS. Penske started with a fully optioned, megabuck Eldo with the tour­ing suspension, removed or blacked out most of the outside brightwork, and lowered it over the biggest set of meats he could squeeze into the fender wells. Fitted with Goodyear 60-series CTs four sizes larger than the tires supplied by the factory, the low-slung Penske/RS had a clear purpose.

It remains a mystery why Cadillac’s taken so long to showcase the excellent touring suspension, but one can imag­ine that it took a while for the design staff to choke out the words, “Take off the chrome.” It doesn’t really matter who did it first, or which looks more sin­cere (Penske’s does; it also costs anoth­er $950). What does matter is that both Penske and, finally, Cadillac management recognized the Eldorado as a logi­cal base upon which to fashion a car with the potential to compete techno­logically with BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes.

At the top of the Eldorado’s list of technological highlights is its front­-wheel drive. General Motors opposed the conventional wisdom of the day by switching its big E-bodies (Eldorado, Oldsmobile Toronado, Buick Riviera) to front drive way back in 1965. After sixteen years of refinement, the El­dorado’s front-drive system is so unob­trusive that it’s hard to tell which wheels are driving the car. In addition to a flat floor and a spacious trunk, front drive provides the Eldo with excellent footing over bad roads. Our test Eldorado had no problems schussing around the ski slopes that Ann Arbor roads turn into after a blizzard, while conventional rear­-drive Bimmers and Mercedes fishtailed nervously even down our beginner hills. Along with the advantages of front­-wheel drive, the Eldorado also has a fully independent suspension system. The front suspension consists of un­equal-length control arms, torsion bars, and an anti-sway bar; the rear uses a combination of semi-trailing arms, coil springs, and an anti-sway bar, with a pair of self-adjusting air shocks to keep the ride level. What’s more, there’s a disc brake at every corner.

With these pieces the Eldorado has long had the potential to be a world­-class driver’s car. In the past, however, the critical components have been tuned more toward preserving the deli­cate equilibrium of the driver’s toy poo­dle than toward offering any hint of driving fun.

Not so in the Touring Coupe. The suspension has been tuned toward max­imum aggression (our favorite setting). The diameter of the front stabilizer bar has been increased from 30 mm in the stock Eldo to 32 mm, the front suspen­sion bushings are 16 percent stiffer, the front torsion-bar rate is higher by 18 percent, the rear stabilizer bar is larger by 18 percent, and rear spring rates are higher by 14 percent. The steering ratio is still a quick 2.9 turns lock-to-lock, but the Touring Coupe benefits from a 20 percent increase in steering effort. More aggressive Goodyear P225/70R-15 tires replace the 75-series stock rubber.

The result is startling and wonderful. The first noticeable feeling is just that: feeling. The Eldorado Touring Coupe provides that reassuring feeling that there is a road down there, the physical sensation that something is happening be­tween that road and the steering wheel. At the same time, the Eldo doesn’t give up over tar strips and expansion joints like the less forgiving BMW and Mercedes sedans. The Touring Coupe’s fine-tuned suspension strikes an admirable balance between road feel and no feel.

Speaking of no feel, Cadillac could have increased the effort of its wimpy power steering by another 20 percent with no complaints from us. Not even the improved steering of the Touring Coupe can be trusted to sound a warn­ing when the limits of adhesion are about to be breached—a situation char­acterized by massive understeer.

Having taken turns trying to unsettle this Caddy’s newfound composure, we’re most impressed with its behavior under duress. Sherman’s specialty is high-speed lane changes that will de­posit an unbelted front passenger into the rear seat. Ceppos has a favorite stretch of road that Chrysler should plaster-cast for reproduction as a tank-­testing track. Csere simply drives home in typical Hungarian fashion. (We would like to take this moment to thank Cadillac’s interior-design staff for its small but significant contribution to the cause: the inclusion of the Cimarron’s supportive driver’s seat and leather­-wrapped wheel. We would also like to reassure closet fake-wood freaks that nothing else in the heavily forested inte­rior has been touched. Some things are sacred.) What we found is that the only remaining trace of the rollicking, fat-cat Cadillac ride is a brief whoopsy-daisy in the nose over good-sized dips. A touch more shock damping in the front would take care of the problem.

Yes, the touring package is very good—the body sticks close to the chas­sis, the chassis sticks close to the road, the driver sticks close to the seat, and the jeweler can still cut a diamond in the back seat, or whatever it is Cadillac peo­ple do back there—but there’s more to a great car than tight springs and stiff anti-sway bars. We were thoroughly dis­appointed in the performance of the new throttle-body-fuel-injected 4.1-liter aluminum V-8 (the base engine for all Caddys but the Cimarron and the lim­ousine, and the only engine available in the Touring Coupe). The new engine worked well enough; there just wasn’t enough of it. Or else there was just too much car. Whatever, it’s clear the en­gine engineers had one goal in mind: to produce the lightest, most fuel-efficient engine they could. They succeeded in saving 200 pounds over the weight of the 1980 6.0-liter V-8, which significant­ly improved curb weight and the front­-to-rear weight bias. And fuel economy is 3 miles per gallon better on the EPA city cycle than the 6.0-liter’s 14-mpg rating. But the price in performance is dear.

Comparing acceleration statistics with last year’s 6.0-liter-powered Sedan de Ville (heavier by 400 pounds), the 1982 Eldorado is almost 4 seconds slower from 0 to 60 miles an hour, slower by al­most 2 seconds in the quarter-mile run, and will barely break 90 miles an hour after 65 seconds of trying. The new alu­minum V-8 produces 15 less horsepow­er at a higher rpm level, and 70 less pounds-feet of torque than the 6.0-liter engine. It produces so little power that almost any driving condition other than steady cruising will cause the new four­speed automatic overdrive transmission to downshift from fourth. You quickly come to expect a downshift with each and every throttle motion.

Both engine and car are tentatively scheduled to be downsized in 1984, and the inside word is that no further work will be done on either until then. We can only hope that two more years will be enough time for Cadillac’s power­train and design staffs to come up with a truly innovative showcase for the talents of Cadillac’s suspension engineers. Now that we’ve been titillated by a second provocative demonstration of Cadillac’s ability to build a real driver’s car, we will not be satisfied until it delivers one.

Technical Highlights

The Eldorado’s new HT4100 aluminum engine is unusual in its modular construc­tion and in its use of cast iron in critical areas. The latter feature is undoubtedly intended to preclude any repetition of the problems of General Motors’ last alumi­num engine, the infamous Vega four­-cylinder.

The block is an aluminum die-casting with an open deck, wet iron liners, cast­-iron main-bearing caps, and a separate valve-lifter carrier. The wet iron liners of­fer a conventional cylinder-wall surface, good heat transfer, and manufacturing simplicity, while the separate lifter carrier and the open-deck design reduce casting complexity. The iron main-bearing caps, coupled with the block’s deep skirts, en­sure sufficient crankcase rigidity.

Topping off this composite block are very compact cast-iron cylinder heads. Like most iron heads, they have integral valve guides and seats, but Cadillac engi­neers minimized the use of heavy cast iron by designing much of the intake port into the runners of the aluminum intake manifold and using a separate, die-cast-­aluminum rocker-arm support. Long bolts, extending into the crankcase web area, attach the heads to the block and provide firm clamping at both ends of the free-standing cylinder liners.

In most other respects, the HT4100 is contemporary but not innovative. Throt­tle-body fuel injection (a two-barrel unit unique to Cadillac engines) meters fuel to compact, fast-burn combustion chambers. The valvetrain is of conventional Ameri­can design, with pushrods and hydraulic lifters. In the interests of fuel efficiency, friction has been minimized with low-ten­sion piston rings, a low-drag water pump, and special bearing clearances.

The resulting engine is approximately 200 pounds lighter than its controversial V-8-6-4 six-liter predecessor (which in earlier incarnations had been as large as 8.2 liters). Unfortunately, its power has also been downsized to 125 net horse­power, which leaves the HT4100 too limp to motivate Cadillac’s current 3800-to-4000-pound offerings with any degree of alacrity. However, this engine is destined to turn into a V-6 in 1984 (the tooling is already in place at Cadillac’s Livonia, Michigan, engine plant), when it will find a new home in smaller Cadillacs. With any luck, that combination will correct the power-to-weight imbalance of today. —Csaba Csere

Counterpoint

A few years ago I would have laughed at the notion of a Cadillac masquerading as a BMW, but I now understand the power that artistic engineers have to change a car’s personality. And since Cadillac Divi­sion seems to be making an attempt to lure buyers back from the showrooms of the high-priced German competition these days, I dared hope for something special here.

Unfortunately, the Eldo Touro suffers from the same malaise as the Cimarron—a lack of management commitment. You can almost see the budget committee shaking their heads “no” when some hopeful engineer lobbied for the bigger Caddy 6.6-liter V-8 or for Trans Am-level steering effort—two things that would really bring off the transformation. In­stead, they okayed body-color moldings and surprisingly effective suspension calibrations.

It’s too bad they didn’t go further, but understandable. It reminds me of the Six­ties, when parents just couldn’t compre­hend what their pinko-Commie-hippie kids were saying. This Eldorado certainly shows there’s hope, but until the old guard understands the new guard, Cadil­lac seems destined to keep on making cars for another era—the one just past. —Rich Ceppos

My initial exposure to this Cadillac con­sisted of a couple of routine runs back and forth between home and office. These consisted of about three miles each way, two-thirds winding two-lane with plenty of potholes and frost heaves, and one-third parkway with a 45-mph speed limit. I was absolutely knocked out by the car. I came back to the office singing its praises as the first Cadillac in years that I could actually take pleasure in owning. I applauded its firm ride. I was comfortable with its interior appointments. I liked the sleek, unadorned look of its exterior. It seemed to have a pretty decent engine. Then I made a 50-mile trip on the Inter­state. Uh-oh. . . There is some craziness at work in the relationship of torque and horsepower curves to transmission set­tings and converter lockup. Try to cruise at any speed between 50 and 75 and the converter locks and unlocks—always with a thunk—and the transmission just can­not seem to make up its mind. Even at 75, when I thought I’d finally gotten past the critical point, I started up a very moderate grade and damned if it didn’t unlock again. I dunno. This is the nicest Cadillac I’ve driven in years, but it cries out for a 1969 driveline. —David E. Davis, Jr.

It seems to me that any car as big and heavy as the Eldorado should give back something in return for its size. Some­thing like a whole lot of space inside. I love the Mercedes-Benz 380SEL and the BMW 733i and the Jaguar XJ6. They’ve got so much usable room inside. The 380SEL has room for a small convention. The 733i has room for a board meeting. The XJ6 has room for entire governments in exile. The expense of these cars has nothing to do with their roominess. The philosophy behind them is solely responsible.

This brings us to the philosophy be­hind the Eldorado. Clever people at Cad­illac are delving into electronics and con­venience features and trick suspensions, but I’m a little puzzled as to why less clev­er people at Cadillac would choose space­-efficient front-wheel drive only to saddle it with a uselessly long nose and so little room behind the wheel that my just-un­der-six-foot-long body can’t find enough space to work in.

This unpleasant squeezing makes it dif­ficult for me to work up any enthusiasm for the trick suspension. And I’d say it’s no better than okay, anyway. —Larry Griffin

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com