1993 Cadillac Allanté

Cadillac's Allanté debuted for the 1987 model year as a two-seat convertible intended to do battle with cars like the Mercedes-Benz SL class and the Jaguar XJ-SC cabrio. With the fall from glory Detroit had suffered during the Malaise Era, an ultra-luxe droptop coupe from Caddy in the mid-'80s was a bold move.

The body was crisply styled by Pininfarina and built by them in a special facility just outside Turin before being loaded, 56 Allanté chassis at a time, on Boeing 747 cargo planes and flown to Detroit to have the powertrain installed and final assembly performed.

The car struggled with legitimacy at first. It was competing with traditional rear wheel drive open-top grand tourers, but doing so on a new V-body chassis that, while it was unique to the Allanté, was still a stretched GM FWD E-body at heart.

Further, the powerplant at launch in '87 was the HT-4100 Caddy V-8. This was a compact OHV mill that had been introduced five years previous as a lightweight replacement for the old Cadillac big iron under the hoods of new downsized FWD cars. The version in the Allanté had an upgraded block, a hotter cam, and multiport fuel injection, but it was still a small pushrod V-8 making 170hp, as opposed to the 5.3L DOHC V-12 in the Jag and the 5.6L SOHC V-8 in the R107 SL Benz. The base price, at just short of fifty-five grand, undercut the other two, but that's not very prestigious.

Improvements were made over the years and the 1993 Allanté debuted with Cadillac's all-new flagship powerplant, the Northstar V-8. The 4.6L L37 Northstar was a fully modern DOHC 32V aluminum V-8 with variable valve timing and multiport EFI, putting out 290 SAE net horsepower, which was a respectable total for 1993.

Car and Driver published a three-way test of the new Northstar-powered Allanté against the Jaguar XJS convertible and the Mercedes-Benz 300SL and the Caddy handily showed its taillights to the spendier competition. Sixty miles per hour arrived in 6.3 seconds and the quarter mile flashed past in 14.8 seconds at 95 miles per hour. Top speed was 144 mph and it even managed 0.77g on the skidpad.

At the time, these were acceleration numbers more normally associated with Camaro Z-28s and Mustang GTs rather than plushbottom Country Club Taxis.

Alas, the model year of this Black example is easy to place, because while '93 was the first year for the Northstar, it was the last year for the Allanté. Sales had never been stellar, and the transatlantic flight didn't exactly help with the profit margins on the now-$65k car (about $141k in today's money.) Even for a halo car, a manufacturer can only take so much of a haircut for so long.

1993 was the best year for Allanté sales, accounting for 4,670 cars out of the 21,430 total sold, and 329 of those were Black, like this one. It was photographed in June of 2015 using a Nikon Coolpix P7000.