#btw the northstar was cool when it worked and polo green is a GREAT color

[things-about-cars-in-posts]

twas a '98 polo green de ville. its so pretty bro

See? Shows what I know!

I went and checked, by the way, because that seemed exactly like the right car in the right period of time, and indeed, all De Villes made from 1996 were equipped with the Northstar V8.

I made roughly this face.

To make a long story short, someone at Cadillac saw the legendarily good LS V8 they freely had available as part of General Motors and thought "You know what we should do? Spend an absolute fortune to develop a V8 of our own that fulfills exactly the same purpose". And apparently the people sensible enough to run the place were all on vacation, because lo and behold, we got the Northstar V8, a Cadillac-only V8 that was supposed to tell the world that Cadillac is still bangin', babey! We're not just throwing GM parts together here, we're putting in effort and making something serious, something unique, something Cadillac! Something whose together-keeping threads just shear off after a while. Woo, Cadillac. You were so brave for this one.

But since I don't wanna be all negative, let me tell you about what "98 polo green" made me think about!

In 1996, the Volkswagen Polo was coming out with new colors! And they were like "Let's show the motor show audiences our new colors in a fun, captivating way!" and so they made a Polo out of pieces of all the new colors!

And then they got a FLOOD of dealers shouting WE WANT THIS NOW and they were like "Oh all these new colors are coming in-" and they were like NO we want THIS and they were like "Ah Sheiße" (fuck) and so they begrudgingly took a set of four cars of four different colors off the production line, swapped their body panels around to create the color combinations you see below, and kept repeating the process until they got one entire thousand of Polo "Harlekin"s.

Which vaporized off the lot before they could say "That ought to be enough" in German (and in German it's just 5 syllables so that's saying something), so they upped the production to around 3800 total, which were sold over two years without letting the customers pick the color combination they got.

They also did this to the Golf for the US market (now spelling it 'Harlequin'), but they only made 264 and some of them had to be un-harlequin'd by reshuffling the different colored parts back into four uniformly colored cars (and sometimes just straight up repainted) to be moved off the lot. And they say it's Germans who lack sense of humor.

But I know what you are wondering - or at least, what you will react to with "fuck that's actually a very good question" upon reading: what the fuck do these cars' documents say under "color"? The answer is actually pretty logical (these are German cars after all): the car was one single color when it rolled off the production line, and while they bolted parts of different colors onto it, that color remains in the non-replaceable elements like roof, sills, rear pillar, and all the inside parts like door seams, engine bay, underside and what have you - so that is the color the car legally is.

So yeah man there's your fun facts about the Cadillac De Ville.

Links in blue are posts of mine explaining the words in question - if you liked this post, you might like those!