Caddy Hangs On to Luxury Bragging Rights

By JOHN O’DELL

Feb. 25, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

He Spoke Too Soon: “We will outsell Cadillac for the first time in our history” to become the nation’s leading luxury brand for 1998, Lincoln marketing manager Jim Rogers told reporters at an early December news conference.

But it was not to be.

Despite the popularity of the Navigator, Lincoln’s leather-lined luxury sport-utility vehicle, General Motors’ Cadillac division surged ahead in the final weeks of the year to outsell Ford Motor Co.’s high-end division by a scant 222 units. Final score for ‘98, with Caddy pulling out all the stops in the final, ahem, 35 days, was Cadillac, 187,343; Lincoln, 187,121.

(Both Caddy and Lincoln decided that the last month of the year should extend through the New Year’s weekend, so they counted sales from Dec. 1 through Jan. 4. Who says ingenuity is dead?)

Officials at Cadillac, which was trailing Lincoln by 6,783 units as December began, used a combination of lease incentives, rebates and even fleet sales (imagine, Cadillac as a fleet car!) to take the lead.

Cadillac sold 5,008 Seville sedans in the 35 days, after moving just 730 in December 1997.

Because They Can: Cadillac also sold a hefty number--3,642, to be exact--of its new Escalade sport-utility vehicles, which says something about the sense if not the sensibility of luxury-SUV buyers.

The $47,000 Escalade is a re-badged and upgraded version of the $43,000 GMC Denali, itself an upgraded model of the mechanically identical $34,000 Yukon.

That’s about $13,000 for leather seats, wood trim, Caddy badges and a few other visual bells and whistles.

Any more questions about why, exactly, car makers seem to be in love with big SUVs?

The Times, They Are a-Changin’: When the Specialty Equipment Market Assn. put together a three-day trade show in Pomona last year for companies that make performance parts and goodies for the Accords, Eclipses, Celicas and other import models that young enthusiasts love to beef up and accessorize, the plan was to keep it closed to all but the trade.

But after receiving scores of calls from car club members who had heard about the event through the grapevine, SEMA officials decided at the last minute to open the doors to the public for one day.

With little advertising or promotion, the inaugural SEMA Import Auto Salon drew a paying audience of nearly 4,000 people.

SEMA Vice President Sam Jackson says that several grizzled performance equipment makers--who were firmly grounded in the belief that success lay in making big Detroit V-8s go faster--were stunned by the scores of mostly young, mostly male visitors who attended the show and said later that they had sorely underestimated the market for hot-rod Hondas, nasty Nissans and super-tuned Toyotas.

This year, the import salon will be held March 26-28 at the L.A. County Fairplex in Pomona in a set of buildings fittingly located next door to the National Hot Rod Assn.’s NHRA Museum.

More than 300 exhibitors will be on hand. The show will be open to the public from noon to 6 p.m. March 27 and all day March 28.

And at Last, a List: Everyone who reads newspapers or magazines knows by now that the Toyota Camry was the best-selling car in the U.S. in 1998, with 429,575 of ‘em sold or leased.

But did you know that the Ford Explorer sport-utility vehicle outsold even the Camry, with 431,488 units moved during year? Or that the Honda CR-V outsold the venerable Jeep Wrangler in the mini-SUV category?

So that you can win that next automotive trivia bet, here’s a list of the top-selling models for 1998 (with the second-place finisher in parentheses), culled from numbers crunched by the Automotive News Data Center:

* Budget car: Nissan Sentra (Kia Sephia).

* Small car: Honda Civic (Ford Escort).

* Mid-size car: Toyota Camry (Honda Accord).

* Near-luxury car: Volvo 70 Series (Buick Park Avenue).

* Luxury car: Cadillac DeVille (Lincoln Town Car).

* Sporty car: Ford Mustang (Chrysler Sebring).

* Small pickup: Ford Ranger (Chevrolet S-10).

* Large pickup: Ford F-Series (Chevrolet Silverado, C/K Series).

* Minivan: Dodge Caravan (Ford Windstar).

* Van: Ford Econoline (Chevrolet Express).

* Mini-SUV: Honda CR-V (Jeep Wrangler).

* Mid-size SUV: Ford Explorer (Jeep Grand Cherokee).