Cadillac
A
luxury automobile that, during the first few decades of its existence, had as its
advertising slogan "Standard of the World." At the time, and
through the mid-fifties, that slogan was the
unalloyed truth. The
marque fell on hard times in the early seventies, and the subsequent two decades saw the once-proud Cadillac crest applied to some truly shitty cars, and just a smattering of good ones.
The turnaround began in 1992, with the introduction of that year's Seville. Although build quality wasn't quite up to the standards set by Cadillac's German (and, more recently, Japanese) competitors, it was considerably better than previous models' and represented an important step in the right direction.
The current DeVille, especially in its high-tech DTS incarnation, competes on equal footing with similarly priced BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Lexus sedans. The blanket condemnation often applied to Cadillac by misguided
liberals and members of the financially challenged community speaks more about their ignorance and prejudices than of the quality of the car.