Hoovie: 1993 Cadillac Seville STS

[kevm14]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHaSfkKP6Yk

Oh boy. You can tell he's pretty into this car.

After the video I added my 2 cents:

Couple things.
1. No variable valve timing until the heavily redesigned LH2 for the 2004 SRX and 2005 STS. This engine is solid.
2. I have heard the green coolant Northstar does not have nearly the prevalence of head gasket issues as the 96-99 years.
3. I do not buy that reliability of the Northstar was the big Cadillac issue. People have purchased much more expensive and still unreliable German cars all through this period. Reliability is not the smoking gun.

Also please do a thorough service of the cooling system soon.

And this guy gives some decent advice, as well:

-New stat to control the temp, to prevent softening of the heat-bolt aluminum threads.
-New overflow tank since the metal ring where the radiator cap gasket contacts it, will crack and leak coolant, lowering pressure, causing boiling in the motor, and excess heating.
-Replace the flimsy little belt running the water pump.
-Replace the water pump, since they croak around 120k.
-Pray, pray, pray.
We owned a few of that era SLS and sevilles, overall very comfy and powerful, but lessons learned made the subsequent one last longer.

Best seats in the business.

So that overflow tank thing....the theory goes that more than a few of these cars have gone to the junkyard over this issue and not actual head gasket failure. They definitely DID have a problem but over heating symptoms are not always caused by head gasket failure.

But yeah back to my #3. The theory of "people bought them, they were garbage, so people stopped buying them" is waay too simplistic and also only works in a vacuum. Now, perhaps the expensive German competition of the time didn't have this particular head gasket issue but certainly they were plenty expensive to keep on the road post-warranty. Probably more so than any Seville was. And yet people continued to buy those. So reliability cannot be the major, or at least not the only, driver for this kind of thing. I look at Lexus as successful because they were significantly more reliable, and initially, a lot cheaper, than the Germans. Let's say Cadillac was cheaper but not more reliable. Unless you already desire that brand, buyers will not look past any flaws to own the vehicle. Frankly Cadillac was seeing sales declines since the 1970s. The 80s didn't help but I think the 90s was actually a turnaround, not a decline. I think the 80s did far more damage to the brand than the NorthStar did. They had multiple engine lines with major issues in the 80s. It was really bad. The Northstar, unlike those, is actually a good engine for that one flaw (citation: The Car Wizard). The 80s crap was bad kind of all around. Didn't even make any power. They were miserable brand new. And despite all of this, I think a buyer would have had a better experience with a 90s Cadillac than an 80s one. This isn't too hard to imagine - any buyer probably had a better average experience with ANY 90s car than a typical 80s one. Those were just the times.

We'd have to look at it more in depth but I do not accept any thoughts along the lines of "the NorthStar is why Cadillac has a bad reputation." Many of them got fixed - they were only throwaway cars when they hit 15-20 years old. Not back in the 90s when the reputation supposedly was sullied. And can we honestly say someone's 1999 Cadillac suffering a head gasket failure in 2016 is of any real relevance to new car buyers? I'll answer: it is not.

[Bob]

This popped up today on Charlotte craigslist. Is this the worst era?

https://charlotte.craigslist.org/cto/d/ ... 73572.html

[kevm14]

But yeah back to my #3. The theory of "people bought them, they were garbage, so people stopped buying them" is waay too simplistic and also only works in a vacuum. Now, perhaps the expensive German competition of the time didn't have this particular head gasket issue but certainly they were plenty expensive to keep on the road post-warranty. Probably more so than any Seville was. And yet people continued to buy those. So reliability cannot be the major, or at least not the only, driver for this kind of thing. I look at Lexus as successful because they were significantly more reliable, and initially, a lot cheaper, than the Germans. Let's say Cadillac was cheaper but not more reliable. Unless you already desire that brand, buyers will not look past any flaws to own the vehicle. Frankly Cadillac was seeing sales declines since the 1970s. The 80s didn't help but I think the 90s was actually a turnaround, not a decline. I think the 80s did far more damage to the brand than the NorthStar did. They had multiple engine lines with major issues in the 80s. It was really bad. The Northstar, unlike those, is actually a good engine for that one flaw (citation: The Car Wizard). The 80s crap was bad kind of all around. Didn't even make any power. They were miserable brand new. And despite all of this, I think a buyer would have had a better experience with a 90s Cadillac than an 80s one. This isn't too hard to imagine - any buyer probably had a better average experience with ANY 90s car than a typical 80s one. Those were just the times.

So....look at this. I got my hands on some 1985 to 2018 sales data. First I applied a linear trend just to get the basic point across.

Cadillac Sales 1985 to 2018.png

Then I applied a 3rd order polynomial trend to sort of smooth and capture the longer term trends.

Cadillac Sales 1985 to 2018 3rd order poly trend.png

So what does this show? Well, for one thing, it actually seems to support a lot of what I have been saying. Sales were declining at a fairly steep rate coming into the 90s, and as I claimed, the 90s product began to really turn that around. Things flattened by the end of the 90s (and I'd argue still before any widespread head gasket issues, and don't forget about the recession around 2000), and began to accelerate with the next big push (CTS, Escalade, other new product). Then it flattened out again as the economy took a big dump. Sales started to recover and then they began their next declination era sort of post-2014.

Now, how exactly are you going to link Northstar head gaskets with any of this? I don't think the linkage is there. And I think people like Hoovie like to repeat popular memes which are popular with people who are born in the 1980s, began any tangible interest in cars in the 90s, and may also think the 90s was a "boring car" era when the products were pretty much superior all the way around. It just irritates me which is why I can't let it go.

And yes, there was some market share decline relative to overall sales that began in the early to mid 90s. First, that was way before head gasket stuff. Second, I'd argue it was primarily influenced from the onslaught of new competition. Think of all the activity in that time frame with the Japanese luxury upstarts alone. You can't look at stuff in a vacuum.

[kevm14]

And remember I'm just searching for correlation. Causation takes significantly more evidence to prove.

[kevm14]

And here's some interesting data. I kind of figured looking at Lincoln would be good since they could have captured some of Cadillac's sales, if some conquest activity was really happening. So we can look at this market share comparison and see what Lincoln was doing during this timeframe, having zero Northstar head gasket failures obviously...

Cadillac and Lincoln Market Share 1985 to 2018 linear.png

Cadillac and Lincoln Market Share 1985 to 2018 3rd order poly.png

[Bob]

What about 3.8L head gasket failures at Lincoln?

[kevm14]

This Mercedes graph also does not really support that reliability was a major influence of general luxury car sales.

Maybe Lexus was starting to eat their lunch in the first few years (and by the way that argument would have been based on A) lower purchase price and B) overall luxury value like perceived build quality, refinement and features, NOT reliability because there was no data on that) but look how it took off in the latter half of the 90s. This is in spite of all of the high purchase price and maintenance cost of these vehicles. I mean, data on Lexus reliability was certainly available by the mid to late 90s and if reliability was #1, I don't think you would have seen this spike. I guess I should plot Lexus next just to see what that looks like.

Mercedes sales and market share 1985 to 2018.png

[Bob]

I think reliability is much more important to used car buyers than it is to new car buyers, which is one reason you see wildly different resale values for vehicles that started with similar MSRPs and new car transaction prices.