If you liked the Chevy Volt but demand fewer doors and more swank, then the car for you could be something like today’s Nice Price or No Dice Cadillac ELR hybrid. That is if its price doesn’t prove too shocking.
Speaking of shocks, I was truly taken aback at the response to last Friday’s 1968 Ford Torino. I thought it presented well and offered a reasonably unique bit of automotive history. The general consensus in the comments, however, was a resounding “meh.” That was only exacerbated by the seller’s $10,950 asking price, with the end result being a 68 percent No Dice loss.
With just 3,000 sold over the course of its non-contiguous two-year model run, today’s 2014 Cadillac ELR could easily take the laurel for being the Cadillac Least Likely to be Seen on the Road by its classmates.
Seriously, though, have you ever seen an ELR outside of a car show or on the Interwebs? I’ll bet many of you have likely purged your memory of this car’s existence, and it’s only ten years old.
That’s because it was a car that missed the market. Based on the Delta II platform and Voltec drivetrain of the Chevy Volt, the electric ELR brought a two-door coupe body style to the party at a time when few car buyers were showing much interest in two-door coupes.
Perhaps another reason for the model’s failure is a historical jinx. The last time a Cadillac shared a platform with a small Chevy model, the Cimarron was the result. That car became little more than a punchline.
But look at this Crystal Red Tintcoat over baseball glove leather hybrid. It’s pretty doggone cool looking. And why wouldn’t it be? The ELR did arrive as the production model of a show car, in this case, the Cadillac Converj. I bet we’re all thankful Cadillac stuck with the show car styling but not the name.
Underneath the swank duds sits a 119-kilowatt DC motor, electrified by a set of 16.5 kWh lithium-ion batteries that are packaged in a T formation down the center spine and back behind the rear seats. A 1.4-litre EcoFlex four engine runs in series with the electric motor and is a range extender. The ELR was rated at about 37 miles under batteries alone and 340 when emptying both those and the fuel tank.
Full electrics and hybrids have been all the range for some time now, right? Well, apparently, Cadillac buyers didn’t get the memo. The company only sold about 1,400 ELRs in the model’s first year. Sales were so poor, in fact, that the car skipped the 2015 model year entirely, moving about 1,000 left-over ’14s until the slightly massaged 2016 models hit the street. High prices and first-cousin Volt’s move to a refreshed model eventually doomed the ELR, with 2016 being its final year.
Now, it’s a bit of an eclecticism. It has the hybrid chops and a luxury appeal missing in many other tree-hugging offerings. There’s got to be somebody out there for which that odd mashup holds an appeal.
This one comes with 88,000 miles on the clock, and it doesn’t look to have led a tough life in the least. That cherry paint shows off the car’s lines to good effect and pairs well with the twisted spoke factory alloys beneath. The nose has a bit of a cartoonish, or maybe its unfinished appearance. That’s owed to the blanked-off grille and dead-eye headlamps. Out in the back, things look similar to the contemporary CTS coupe, but actually with more success as the ELR is, in fact, more rakish and less Igor-ish.
The interior appears appropriately upscale and a bit avant-garde with its interesting choice of upholstery color. The center stack and instrument pod owe a lot to the Volt, although everything here is two steps up from Chevy’s look and feel. The wood trim and carbon fiber-look accents are nice touches, too.
Doors are big and open with electric poppers rather than mechanical handles, ala the Corvette. The back seat is a purgatory, as you might expect, with packaging so tight and a style so bold. Everything looks to be in excellent shape, with only the blight being an aftermarket cell phone holder on the dash.
These cars cost an eye-blistering $75K when new, and the seller claims this one was somehow optioned up to six figures. The 2016 models were adjusted down about ten grand, but that still proved too high, even with the Government incentives piled on. This one now asks $16,757, which is an odd but maybe oddly compelling number. Is it worth that kind of cash, considering its rarity and uniqueness? Or is that price tag just too dear for this misfit toy of a car?
You decide!
San Francisco Bay Area, California, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
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