Autoblog

At last, Caddy's back!


Great example of redesign.

Gone are the years of obviously unsuccessful search for a new style when designers stumbled over bulky and cheap-looking polysomething aprons ... they're still there, but more and more integrated into harmonious overall pictures of car bodies.

But then, there came Caddy's attempt to create sort of a new look - ending up in something more unsophisticated than the bluntest sorts (besides pretty ones) of conservative retrosomethings. The later-nineties Seville had paved the way, and something already too neat entered the new millenium turning into something like good model pupil on concentration-supporting pills. A tidy grille in a slightly desperately friendly face with bars so easy to count even Adrian Monk must have felt forced to yawn. And with matching headlights: as unexpressive as can be, their kind of edgy shape at most telling "Before stepping in, please put off your shoes, I just vacuumed my interior." The efforts to make it all not too prefectly rectangular resulted in a quite dull image, not hot at all.

So, it's even more astonisthing that so little changes of the shapelines - perhaps a little bit inspired by the better reshaped classic elements of Caddies in the early nineties - produced a striking sight like this. It's not just (what the recent models perhaps should have become but failed) somewhat sharky, making occuring disproportions more tolerable. No, it's impressingly hot! And, though no really staggering huge full-size car like Caddy streetcruisers in past decades, it also is far from that inharmonic look of several awkwardly downsized US "compact" limos in the eighties. No, it looks convincingly powerful, even mighty.

Caddy's back again. So well-shaped it can easily cope not only with selected aspects of predecessors from round 1990, but even with the solidly sculpted ancestors - on more wasteful-sized wheelbases - like Sevilles before the early seventies, Fleetwoods before the mid-eighties and even Eldorados. It's brilliant and unique - carry on like this!