Goodbye to The Cadillac

On Monday we said goodbye to a good friend, our old 1986 Cadillac Fleetwood. This wasn't your standard Caddy; this one was the "real deal," a rear-wheel drive monster of a car that rode smoother than anything I've ever driven.

The Caddy came our way in 2004 when Grandma Jan needed something to run errands. We went out looking for a simple four-door with a small engine, and ended up becoming enamored with this car on a lot in Shoreline. It was a triple-black beauty with a leather interior. The smallish V8 and Automatic with overdrive meant the gas mileage was amazingly good for a car that weighs more than my truck. The ride was smooth, steering effortless, and the seats comfy. While longer and heavier, it had a tighter turning circle than my truck (figure that one out!). To be truthful though, with 140k miles the Cadillac was somewhat quirky:

• Radio would randomly drop its settings and go straight to a frequency where there was just scratchiness.
• Automatic Climate Control worked about half the time, and only on defrost
• The driver's seatback leaned back so far that I had to prop it up by wedging a 2x4 underneath to make it more level.
• If you wanted great gas mileage, it needed Premium. Put Regular in this car and its efficiency was dismal at best.
• Headliner drooped so badly that I had to cut it out, which left the inside roof covered in sticky foam.
• If the car sat for more than a month the battery would get sucked dry by the Eighties-era electronics.
  

On trips the Caddy would get 20mpg, so long as you fed it Premium fuel. A person could drive it all day...it was that comfortable. I drove it to Leavenworth and back in the summer of 2005 without a lot of drama; in fact, the car fared better than me, because when I got home my appendix burst. In the end the Caddy was in better shape than me at the time.

One day David and I were leaving the drive-thru ATM, when an elderly man in a Lincoln backed into the quarter panel. I looked at the damage, popped the trunk, pushed the dent out with my hand, and said "Have a nice day." The man was ever grateful. When it developed a massive fuel leak, the car got parked. It was than that we realized just how much work the car needed to remain stable. So we started taking Grandma Jan on her errands and decided that the Caddy needed a new home. But what do you do with a car that needs so much work?

One option we had were to sell it on Craigslist and endure the appointments, questions, and low-ball offers. We decided instead to donate the car to Northwest Center, who gave us a receipt for $500 value (which is what I would peg the actual value at anyway). Pictures of the car - and subsequent trip on the Big Truck are HERE.

So goodbye old friend! I hope it brings as much happiness to someone as it did to us.