The Cadillac Cimarron is a 4-door sedan from Cadillac, built from 1981 to 1988, in the age of turbocharging and the first electronic engine management. Under the bonnet: 1841 cc GM 122 engine#L46. John Manoogian II, Irv Rybicki (1977) drew it.
How it came about
The Cadillac Cimarron is an entry-level luxury car manufactured and marketed by the Cadillac division of General Motors for model years 1982–1988 over a single generation, with a mild facelift in 1985. The first post-war compact car offered by the brand, the four-door was developed to compete with similarly-sized premium sedans marketed by European automakers in North America. The flagship offering of the GM J platform, the Cimarron had joined the project just eleven months prior to the J-Cars' arrival in showrooms, and Cadillac had very little involvement in the program.
Marketed with counterparts from Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick, the Cimarron was to become one of the most controversial examples of badge engineering in the American automotive industry, sharing much of its entire design, including its exterior, with the Chevrolet Cavalier and GM's other brand variants. Through its entire production, the Cimarron was manufactured at South Gate Assembly (1981–1982) and Janesville Assembly (1982–1988); both facilities produced the model alongside the Chevrolet Cavalier and its J-platform badge-engineered variants. In North America, the Cimarron was not replaced directly. The Cimarron is noted as a nadir of GM's product planning – for its low sales, poor performance, and ill-conceived badge engineering.
The hardware
Power comes from 1841 cc GM 122 engine#L46; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. It weighs 2639 lb. It shifts through a 4-speed Muncie M17 manual / 5-speed Getrag 282 manual / 3-speed Turbo-Hydramatic 125 C automatic. The layout matters: the engine drives the front wheels, the packaging choice that gives a small car a big cabin. The wheelbase is 101.2 in (2,570 mm). These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Family and rivals
Its family tree is legible: assembly was at Janesville, Wisconsin. Its contemporaries in the catalogue — the Mitsubishi Pajero, the DeLorean Motor Company DeLorean DMC-12, the Porsche 944 — show what else the money bought that year. Its Cadillac stablemates include the Cadillac 353 and the Cadillac ATS.
What it costs now
There is no federal ownership record for the Cadillac Cimarron — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.