A bogus car story from the 2025 book Speak, Memorably

 

 

 

 

 

There are lots of recent books about public speaking.  Currently I am reading one from 2025 by Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva titled Speak, Memorably: the art of captivating an audience. It is not awful, but it is not great either. At the bottom of page 87 and top of page 88, in a section mistitled The Cadillac of Analogies, they tell the following bogus story about the Cadillac Cimmaron (shown above) and the similar Chevrolet Cavalier (also shown):

 

“In 1982 Cadillac wanted to capture the middle-class car buyer who aspired to own a Cadillac. The model they built was called the Cadillac Cimmaron. On paper it sounded like a good idea, but it turned into a debacle that damaged one of Detroit’s most iconic luxury brands. What they should have done was build a new car from scratch. But they thought they could take a shortcut and merely add some quasi-luxury touches to the down-market Chevy Nova and pass it off as a Cadillac. It was a colossal failure. The consumer, whom they clearly underestimated, saw right through it. The historic blunder, however, did lead to something spectacular. Acknowledging the value of creating something genuinely new, GM created not just a new model, but a whole new category: luxury SUVs. The Cadillac Escalade was the phoenix that rose out of the ashes of the Cimmaron. It was a mega success, undoing the damage done by the Cimmaron and then some.”

 

Their story was superficially researched and wrong in two different ways.They referred to the Chevy version as the Nova. But Chevy built a Nova from 1962 to 1979 and then revived that name from 1985 to 1988 for a NUMMI version of a Toyota Corolla.

 

The real reason that the Cimmaron failed is that there was a series of five very similar looking J-Cars, one from each GM division: the Chevrolet Cavalier, Pontiac J2000, Oldsmobile Firenza, second generation Buick Skyhawk, and Cadillac Cimmaron.

 

Second, GM and the Cadillac Escalade (first produced in August 1998) did not create the luxury SUV category – it was preceded by Ford’s Lincoln Navigator (first produced in May 1997).

 

I know about the J-Cars because in 1985 I looked at the Chevy, Pontiac, and Buick versions. Instead I bought a 1984 Toyota Corolla from Avis used car sales, and drove it till I got a 1993 Saturn SL2 sedan.   

 

Images of a 1983 Cimmaron and a 1984 Cavalier were adapted from Wikimedia Commons.