Oh, no! C'mon. Not another Cadillac! Ugh.

You done? Good. Now. Let's get to it. My fascination with Cadillacs, ewld Cadillacs, stems back to my tortured, misguided, befuddled youth back in the concrete wilderness of Western Long Island a mere twenty minutes (without the soul crushing traffic) from Times Square. Which, for the record, was a stinking, overflowing cesspool back I was a wee little nipper. My parents loved Cadillacs.

When I was a little nipper Cadillacs were T-Rex big and had a T-Rex sized appetite for fossilized T-Rex'. This, THIS was a Cadillac. Well, at least according to the harbingers of much of my youthful angst, my parents. This is a 1978 with T-tops. Driving one is akin to that feeling you get when you get "gassed" at the dentist. Oh. Did I just drive into a brick wall? Didn't feel a thing!

When I came of driving age GM had already started whacking off inches off their cars in an attempt to improve gas mileage. For the Cadillac Eldorado in 1979 it was a beautiful thing for not only did the car lose more than one thousand pounds (whoa!) the Eldorado was a much better car to drive and was really handsome. It even had a fuel injected Olds 350! Holy smokes! Cadillac muffed up the power train in the following years but by and large the 1979-1985 Eldorado has a spot on my super hard to get on list of cars that would make it into my make believe Jay Leno sized car barn. Just make sure it's white with red leather and it has the gasoline fired Olds 350. Thanks!

Not content to leave well enough alone the General further sawzalled my beloved Eldo in 1986 into the one of the greatest (worst) disasters in the history of the company.

Sales completely crumpled for the Eldo and not even a fairly handsome restyle of the front and rear ends in 1988 (like our car here) could revive or resuscitate the suddenly infarctioned Cadillac icon.

Truth is this "little Caddy" is actually quite a smart driving car. With 180 horses from a fuel injected V-8 with barrels of INSTANT TORQUE and much improved handling even compared to my much loved '79-'85s these cars were quite fun to drive. Fun in a Cadillac? All things being relative. Yes. Fun.

My parents, nonetheless, were not impressed with these little Caddies and honestly I still think they're odd looking. Like a person who's been heavy most of their life who suddenly loses a ton of weight. Yeah, they're better ultimately for it but there's something odd about the way they look. A drive in one 25 years ago and they were impressive. Problem was folks turned off by the looks of this thing walked into BMW and Mercedes dealerships. Ruh roh. And then Lexus came. Game changer!

Cadillac re skinned this little Eldo in 1992 into one super attractive cruiser that has a parking spot in my make beleive garage. A mid '90's Touring Coupe with the 300 horsepower Northstar to be exact. Nice ride. GM yanked the sluggish selling Eldorado for good after 2002.

Cadillac didn't set out to build a bad car that would nearly strangle the division. Just like no one goes to work with the intent of screwing up and one can only truly get a handle on that perspective through painful introspection but looking back, like we do, "the little Caddy" certainly didn't help. Needing at least a solid hit in the mid '80s when they redesigned the Eldo, Caddy struck out.