This is truly a fascinating example of that time honored tradition of just how stupendously GM can ruin things that any other manufacturer would be able to sleepwalk through at least moderate success; especially regarding Cadillac. It joins the Cimarron using the worst J-Car as the base for the "3 series fighter" most expensive one, the 80s Seville/Eldorado looking like clones of the Grand Am, the XLR throwing out the LS1 for a Northstar for literally no benefit, and that trend GM had in the 90s where they would completely redesign their models from the ground up to be freshly competitive but then style them to look exactly like the outgoing ones.
But the Catera truly stands out as being an example that seemingly was designed in a lab to make all the wrong decisions. It covers all of the 80s/90s GM greatest hits of bad ideas that no one in the company seemingly had any idea to question. It (once again) looks almost exactly like a car built on the Grand Am platform:
It once again had GM adapt a car that was questionable as a base for what they wanted to do with it and then do absolutely nothing to improve it to make it fit the badge it was under and the market it was going for.
And while certainly it's not GM's fault that the E39 came out and overnight made the Omega irrelevant, it's absolutely GM's fault that they waited 3 years before bringing it to the US
even though they showed it off as a Cadillac concept when the Opel debuted and
even though the Omega itself was originally teased as a Cadillac in the first place. As is saddling it with an engine that had nothing to do with any engines GM proper used in North America, was notoriously unreliable, had to be imported from overseas along with the car further raising service costs; and the only thing it had to show for it was being as powerful as a contemporary Ford Taurus in a car that was significantly too heavy for that to be adequate. As is connecting that time bomb of an engine to a transmission made out of glass that also had to be sourced from Europe and only that as the option. As is building the entirety of your marketing for the car around childishly attacking the other cars in your lineup, including your flagship which had already been doing an adequate job to that point being competition for the European makes and was going to have a major model change just one year later.
If anything the Catera is the
worst of GM's incompetence with Cadillac. The Cimarron was at least the nicest Cavalier you could buy, for what that was worth in 1982; and GM didn't spend three years throwing it together. The Allante at least made a clean break and a preview for the new lauded design language that Cadillac would adopt the following decade. The XLR was at least a sharp car in its own right and a solid step up from the Corvette in a lot of ways despite the drivetrain downgrade. The Catera wasn't even the best version of something derived from the Omega that debuted in 1997; even before the awful marketing campaign, horrendous reliability record, the class action lawsuits, the numerous recalls, the collapsing resale value and decimated leasing plans.
There's an alternate universe where GM thought this through. They took the fundamentally sound Omega platform and mated it to the 3800 V6, already sold in the US in a longitudinal design in countless cars so the engine components could be sourced the US and the car would be cheaper and smoother and more fuel efficient and faster and dramatically more reliable. They attach it to a 5 speed with a no-cost option for the bulletproof 4L60E for parts availability across literally millions of GM cars sold every year. Maybe they offer a supercharged version of the engine for a sporty model like they already did in countless FWD applications of the engine; maybe they put the Camaro spec LS1 in it; or maybe they don't even do anything (after all the Seville was just about to be redesigned and ~285 RWD HP might be too close to the at the time still planned ~350 FWD HP for Cadillac's liking) and just have a stately, solid car with good bones and a decent drivetrain. Basically they'd have a direct sequel to the first generation Seville, but without as much of a luxury focus and as an entry level model. Maybe it's still not the best idea to sell it as a Cadillac, but maybe it does work to attract people to the brand just like the base spec 5-Series did for company cars in Europe.
Yes, this is basically just Cadillac selling the
also new-for-1997 Holden Commodore in the US as a Cadillac, and maybe that also ultimately is a flop like the GTO was just a couple years later; but for
damn sure if nothing else Cadillac wouldn't have had a car that became the multifaceted comprehensive fiasco that the Catera immediately was.
