Let’s say you’re Cadillac in the middle of the eighties. Your customers are getting older, your image is stale and you’re losing luxury sales to the likes of Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Jaguar. So what’s the plan?
Simple. Build a two-seat luxury roadster to take on the Mercedes SL.
Less simple?
Send unfinished cars on a 3,000-mile round trip to Italy and back… by plane. Every single one. For years. A proper American fly-drive.
Enter the Cadillac Allanté: part grand tourer, part frequent flyer, all-American optimism wrapped in Italian tailoring. The car was Cadillac’s most ambitious (and most expensive) moonshot, aimed squarely at the sun-drenched boulevards of Beverly Hills and Palm Beach – a front-wheel drive rival to a rear-wheel drive icon. What could possibly go wrong?
Mad men with a map
It started with good intentions. Cadillac wanted a halo car – something to tell the world it was still a player. And who better to style it than Pininfarina, the Italian design house responsible for Ferraris and Alfa Romeos?
But Cadillac didn’t stop at design. No, it sent bare platforms to Italy via Alitalia 747s, where Pininfarina added the body and trim, before flying them back to Detroit for final assembly. This became known – only semi-ironically – as the Airbridge.
If it sounds inefficient, that’s because it was. But it made a cracking story. God, we miss the eighties.
More flair than firepower
For all its transatlantic drama, the Allanté wasn’t exactly a barnstormer. The first versions had a 4.1-litre V8 making 170bhp, front-wheel drive and a four-speed leisure-matic. It did 0-60mph in around 9.5 seconds – fine for cruising, but a bit too relaxed when you’d just spent $55,000 (about $145k in today’s money).
Handling? Not bad. Praise was faint but positive: decent ride, sharp-ish steering and quiet at speed, even with the roof down. Which was helpful, since the soft-top leaked. A lot.
But this was a Cadillac that said “GOOD MORNING” on startup and “HEADLIGHTS SUGGESTED” when it got dark. Luxury, 1980s-style.
New money vs old money
The Allanté was designed to steal sales from the Mercedes R107 SL – a car that had been on sale since 1971 and was still shifting 10,000+ units a year in the U.S. by the mid-’80s. Cadillac’s sales forecast? 6,000 cars. The reality? 1,651 in year one.
Even J.R. from Dallas had one, ditching his Merc for an Allanté. Sadly, not enough people followed him. Mercedes kept outselling Cadillac six-to-one.
It got better. Too late.
By 1993, the Allanté had a Northstar V8 with 290bhp, proper suspension, a new gearbox, better brakes and actual performance. One magazine called it the best Cadillac ever made. Another reckoned it finally outgunned the SL and XJS.
Then Cadillac killed it.
Brilliant. Mad. Doomed.
The Allanté wasn’t a bad car – it was a good one, with a great story and the wrong timing. It was built on ambition and optimism, powered by a complicated logistics chain and a slightly underwhelming V8.
If you love the idea of a Cadillac that flew across the Atlantic just to be finished by Italians, you’re not alone.
And if you want the full, beautifully over-researched story – complete with specs, stats, quotes and a few soft-top horror stories – you’ll find it in Classic.Retro.Modern. magazine, issue 31.
