When Cadillac moved the Fleetwood name to a front-wheel drive platform in 1985, they continued producing the old rear-wheel drive body-on-frame car as the Fleetwood Brougham. After a couple of confusing model years at Caddy dealerships where unrelated Fleetwoods and Fleetwood Broughams were sold side-by-side, they ended the confusion by dropping the Fleetwood part of the name from the older car.
The 1987 Brougham in the picture, finished in Chestnut with a Buckskin vinyl roof, has the ultra-luxe D'Elegance package, with such niceties as rear seat reading lamps.
Standard equipment under the hood would be a Oldsmobile-sourced 5.0L V-8 with a four-barrel Quadrajet carburetor. This 307 cubic inch engine sent 140 SAE net horsepower to the rear wheels via a 4-speed automatic transmission.
Like the other big RWD full-size cars from GM, these things soldiered in the catalog long after they were intended to be axed because sales stayed strong and the tooling was long amortized, so they were pure profit centers as long as they remained popular. A friend's mom in high school bought one after getting rear ended while riding with a friend. After that experience she no longer wanted to drive her Fiat Spider 2000 and went shopping for the biggest slab of sheet metal she could find.
This one was photographed with a Canon EOS 40D and an EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens in April of 2023.
