Caddy Wagon Meets its Family
CTS-V Attends Memorial Day Weekend Station-Wagon Meet at Arizona Biltmore
For decades
Cadillac was the only
General Motors division that did NOT build a station wagon. Now it’s the only one that DOES (at least in North America). I spent my Memorial Day weekend in Phoenix at the wagon-themed, Westward Ho Grand International Invitational Meet of the Lambda Car Club. As I am temporarily in between owning my own vintage wagon (I’ve owned a ’69
Chevy, an ’80 VW Dasher diesel, a ’73 Chevy, a ’59 Dodge, and a ’57 Plymouth), I sweet talked Cadillac into loaning me the meanest wagon currently available on the U.S. market–the CTS-V–and took it to meet its forebears.
There’s no mistaking the family resemblance between our Crystal Red Tintcoat Caddy and this similarly hued 1976 Chevy Vega Kammback Nomad. You may remember that car as having blazed the trail for aluminum-block engines like the V’s 556-horse 6.2-liter. The early Vegas were notoriously unreliable, but by 1976 cooling system revisions made them roadworthy enough to consider long trips like this one made. It also shares the same space-robbing steep backlite angle and top-hinged tailgate. This design was once relegated to only midsize and compact wagons, though some–like a cute 1963 Buick Special that attended the meet–also featured a roll-down window within the hatch.
Don’t remember the Vega Nomad? This extensive trim package was dreamed up by Jim Wangers (of Pontiac GTO fame) and built by his Motortown Corporation in Detroit, but offered as factory-orderable option ZR5. (Motortown also did the Pontiac Can Am, Mustang Cobra II, and other factory specials.) In all, some 1500 Vegas and 1000 Pontiac Astres got the Nomad treatment, which included the vinyl roof, fiberglass B-pillar and door filler panels to simulate the slanted pillar, and rub strips on the decklid.
In the late 1950s, GM wagoneering didn’t get much fancier than this 1957 Buick Caballero. Look at all that chrome! As the four portholes and pillarless “hard-top” construction attest, this is Buick’s swankiest grocery getter, wearing top-of-the-line Century-grade trim and options. In those days,
cargo access was typically via a split rear, with the tailgate folding down and the rear window swinging up like this. Buick offered no 9-passenger option that year, but Chevy and Pontiac did.
Here we are snuggled up next to a 1958 Olds Fiesta for the evening taillamp glow car show.
The Super 88 Fiesta was the ne plus ultra Olds wagon, featuring the same pillarless hardtop construction and nearly as much chrome as found on the Buick Caballero. One fun feature on the Olds: In those days car companies liked to make life difficult on the service-station attendants who pumped your gas by hiding the fuel filler. To reveal the Olds’, you push inboard on a section of that chrome blade leading to the top of the taillamp on the left side. Cool.
Chevrolet’s horizontal gull-wing fins for 1959 were tame by comparison with Cadillac’s soaring vertical numbers, but they juxtapose nicely with the crisp origami folds of the modern CTS-V. This stunning Parkwood model is the 6-passenger version of the 2nd rung Bel Air trim series (Kingswood being the 9-passenger Bel Air grade, and Nomad connoting the top-spec Impala-grade wagon, though for 1959 all wagons were four-doors). By 1959 the rear glass retracted (manually by crank or electrically) into the tailgate, but that gate still only folded down, making entry to the usually rear-facing third-row seat anything but graceful. Rambler and others offered an optional left-side-hinged swing-out door option, but then you couldn’t carry long lumber home on a tailgate. These were your choices until Ford unveiled the Magic Door Gate in 1966. After you rolled down the rear window, it could either open down or to the side.
By 1969 you didn’t even have to roll the rear glass down on a full-size Ford wagon to swing it open by the side hinges. GM tried to one-up this design with its complicated “clam-back” wagons of 1971-1976, wherein the tailgate dropped down under the floor while the glass motored up into the ceiling. This idea was great for providing access while a trailer was attached, and 9-passenger versions featured front-facing third-row seats, but the heavy and trouble-prone design never caught on. By 1977, all GM and Ford wagons (like the too-similar looking Olds, Buick, Ford and Mercury here) featured the three-way gate.
Oddly enough, GM’s final swing at the full-size station wagon took a side-step back toward the 50s with an up-swinging rear window, though the tailgate still opened down or to the side. These “orca” design wagons like the Buick Roadmaster and Chevy Caprice Estate shown here never sold very well but they WERE powered by a Corvette engine, like the CTS-V is (well, sort of–the LT1 Small Blocks used in the full-size sedans and wagons wore iron heads and were down-rated a bit on power). They didn’t accelerate like our CTS-V, but they sounded Corvette-y while trying!
After three days of quietly rubbing fenders with wagons of all stripes our CTS-V was ready to lay a few stripes of her own, exercising those 556 horses and 551 pound-feet in a cloud of tire-smoking glory, but alas in the Arizona heat, with the A/C on and four well-fed club members and luggage onboard, there was no tire smoke to be had–but plenty of gut-wrenching g-forces (and a 10.6-mpg weekend-average reading on the
trip computer!).
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