This Cadillac DeVille Is the Performance Sedan Nobody Suspects

this is a 2000 cadillac deville but it's not just any deville this one has been modified by cadillac and legendary actor comedian and car enthusiast tim allen and it takes the standard deville and turns it up a notch a few notches actually and today i'm going to review it [Music] before i get started big news this cadillac deville is currently for sale it's being auctioned live on cars and bids which is my enthusiast car auction website this deville is currently owned by the peterson museum where it's been part of their collection but now it can be yours a very special one-of-a-kind car with some great history and impressive performance so once you finish watching this video click the link in the description below to head over to cars and bids where you can check out the live auction for this deville and you can bid on it and buy it only on cars and bids so let's talk about this car the deville was cadillac's flagship luxury sedan but it was all about luxury comfort aimed at more of an elderly demographic with virtually no thought about performance comedian tim allen decided he wanted to change that so he worked together with cadillac to create this a rather special high-performance version of the deville and today i'm going to review it first i'll take you on a tour and show you all of its interesting quirks and features then i'll get it out on the road and drive it and then i'll give it a doug score all right i'm going to start the crux and features of the tim allen modified cadillac deville with a little explanation of exactly what this car is you can see the badge on the back says dtsi and that's technically the name of this car the cadillac deville dts i and here's how it came to be back in the late 90s early 2000s cadillac was involved in le mans car racing with those big lmp cars hard to imagine now but cadillac was there trying to prove its value to the world in order to commemorate this cadillac teamed up with a car customizer in michigan to create a high performance version of its other luxury sedan the seville that was called the cadillac seville stsi these were intended to be pace cars they only made maybe a dozen of them but they had extra power and they looked cooler and more aggressive than a standard seville and it was the stsi now tim allen apparently saw this and decided he wanted to do the same thing but with the deville which would be a fantastically cool decision because these were mostly old people luxury cars bought by the elderly for comfort and luxury and to go slowly in the left lane with the turn signal on so modifying one for performance would be kind of a cool decision and they went for it general motors gave the project to john moss who was sort of an internal general motors hot rodder responsible for a lot of their performance cars in this era including the famous chevy impala ss in the mid 90s he worked directly with tim allen's company tim allen designs to create this one-of-a-kind car just for tint allen and you can see a lot of tad logos on the outside which stood for tim allen designs one is on the trunk you can see it right here next to dtsi letting you know this was a special cadillac you also have a tad logo here on the rocker panel and same place on the other side and you have one in the center console next to the shifter all these tad logos for tim allen designs but changes to this car went well beyond just a few little badges it got the full custom hot rod treatment and that meant for one thing more power this engine is the same one that was used in the standard deville but here it had a host of different upgrades including an engine port and polish custom upgraded headers an upgraded air filter and custom pistons that were designed to allow them to increase the compression ratio the overall result cadillac said around 400 horsepower which was a big increase over the standardville which topped out around 300 horsepower so this thing really had a lot more muscle none of it from forced induction supercharging or turbocharging it was just the same powertrain but turned up a few notches and indeed it was that same powertrain the northstar v8 which general motors and cadillac were very proud of at the time in fact you can see it specifically says on it made exclusively for cadillac by general motors to remind you that this special engine was special for cadillac now as you can imagine this powertrain big naturally aspirated v8 turned up for more power sounds pretty good and in fact one of the other upgrades to this car was a custom exhaust with quad exhaust tips and back as you can see helps it look more muscular and exciting and it helps get that sound out there take a listen to this car revving a little and beyond the extra power and the custom exhaust there were still a few more changes to this car including upgraded suspension for better handling this car was lowered compared to the standard devil to pull down its center of gravity and it also had improved suspension bushings and upgraded springs and an anti-roll bar to help keep body roll in check during hard cornering with the deville and changes went further than that this car had larger tires than the standard deville and wider ones which of course improved grip and that also meant it had larger wheels these were custom wheels that were only on the dtsi and you can even see little dtsi badges on each wheel in one of the spokes that added kind of a cool quirk and a little bit more coolness if you knew what you were looking at a special touch on a special wheel now behind the front wheels you can also see the brakes brembo brakes in this car obviously improve compared to the standard devil larger and better for more stopping power so this car was upgraded in quite a few ways it had more power for better acceleration it had better suspension for improved handling and larger brakes for more stopping power but it also had some subtly upgraded styling changes i already showed you the wheels and talked about the exhaust but there was a little more than that one these rocker panels they go a little lower than what you got in the standard deville which gave it sort of a lowered performancy presence that looked cool you also had a larger grill than what you got in the regular deville bigger wider allowing more air to pass through and just looking cooler and maybe most importantly the cadillac logo was stuck in the center of this grill compared to other deville models where there was a cadillac hood ornament popping up for the hood and no logo in the grill here you have the cadillac logo which also looks pretty cool but anyway next up moving on from some of the tim allen upgrades to this car which i will get back to later and on to some of the other quirks and features of the deville one of the most interesting is directly behind the grill and in fact behind that cadillac logo you lift up the hood and you can see there's like a camera there or some other sort of system that is the night vision system for this car yes that's right this car had night vision you control it on this little panel here under the dashboard on the driver's side there's a switch to turn it on or off and a dimmer that can brighten or dim the screen which was a projection on the windshield the way it worked was it would project images onto the windshield at night that used heat instead of just light to see what was in front of you so if a pedestrian was walking in front of you on a dark road you could easily capture it because their body heat would show up on your night vision screen now in this car the system does turn on but it's very faint i'm not sure if it's not working or if it's just not dark enough in this room even if i turn all the lights off and you have to be actually in dark but that was the feature night vision which was a big deal 20 years ago and is still kind of a big deal today not too many cars have this but it was especially surprising on the cadillac deville since it was aimed more at older elderly buyers who weren't necessarily up on the latest technology and the surprising level of technology continued on the inside of this car it has a touch screen back in 2000 a touch screen was a huge deal most other cars that had screens in the center control stack you still used buttons next to the screen to control them and that lasted for years on many high-tech european and japanese cars but this one had a touchscreen now it was tremendously rudimentary and basic and you realize that the moment you turned on the car when this cadillac logo appeared the quality there is obviously not particularly high and it gave you a preview of what you were getting into for example the navigation system this is the navigation map very small very basic but it works that is in fact where i am and it showed the vehicle and you could enter a destination in the navigation map but it took forever as you can see here now interestingly this touchscreen also incorporated the radio which is a big surprise for me because the older people who bought this car probably would have preferred just pressing buttons instead of a screen but there it is you can see all your radio presets changing the station fm am all that stuff is incorporated into the touchscreen now this was optional on the deville at the time and i recall it was a very expensive option but this car being the tim allen hot rod version of course it has all the features and night vision and the touch screen are included and in fact there are quite a few unusual quirky and interesting controls in this car another one was directly above the touchscreen where you had your climate controls on the left you can see this dial that would adjust the temperature for the climate controls over on the driver's side now the passenger side also had a temperature control but it wasn't a dial it was this switch for some reason so it wasn't symmetrical and the display didn't give a temperature readout but instead colors red was hot and blue was cold so the driver had a dial and a temperature number display and the passenger had a switch and blue and red why they did that i'm not exactly sure but the quirkiness continues onto the steering wheel where you have more controls for the climate control system you can adjust the temperature and the fan speed on the steering wheel with these switches here which is a feature i absolutely love ford and general motors did this in the 80s 90s early 2000s they had climate controls in the steering wheel and i have no idea why other automakers ditched it but they did but this car has it which is a really cool touch now this car also has a lot of other controls incorporated on its steering wheel over the right you can see volume and track selection for the radio and on the bottom you can see the cruise controls in the left and right lower spokes so there were quite a few controls on the steering wheel but i love that it included climate controls next up another interesting control on this car is over on the door panel you can see your mirror controls your window switches but you also had your heated seat control here strangely enough the smaller button you would push to turn on the heated seat and there were several different levels and the larger button you could push if you just wanted backrest heating and you didn't want any heated seat on your butt those are heated seat controls next up here's another quirky control of this car to the left of the gauge cluster you have a button that lets you switch from metric to imperial unit so you can press that and it'll switch your odometer and speedometer instantly to kilometers to miles to kilometers to miles kind of cool to have that feature in case you for instance go to canada in the us frequently you can just swap back no problem the drawback is it changes your speedometer from miles an hour to kilometers an hour but it doesn't change the maximum speed it stays at 140. so if you switch this to kilometers per hour your speedometer now tops out at 140 kilometers which is about 87 miles per hour it's not particularly fast especially for the high performance version but at least it had the ability to switch units which is cool now another very cool button to the left of the screen is marked display mode if you press that once a digital readout of your speed pops up in the center of the gauge cluster which is pretty cool but the coolest part is press it again and everything in the gauge cluster blacks out except for that digital readout so if you're driving like on a dark road at night you don't want all these lights from the gauge cluster shining on you you can black out your entire display like old school saabs used to do with their night panel and that is a pretty cool feature stealth mode and next up another rather interesting quirk of this car you can see over on the driver's door panel there are a few buttons for seat memory one and two and there's a setting button which is no surprise but you also have a button there marked exit if you press that before you get out of the car the driver's seat would automatically move back and the steering wheel would move upwards to allow for an easier exit out of the car again this vehicle was more designed for elderly drivers and so easy entry and exit was a big deal so it had an exit button to make it easy and how about this for a rather interesting quirk you're driving along in this car you put on the turn signal and of course it starts to flash front and back but in addition to that a little light came on right here in the direction that you were signaling this was called a cornering light and the theory was if you were signaling to the left you probably wanted more illumination on the left side of your car since that's where you were about to go so that light would come on and provide more illumination in the direction that you were signaling and it would turn off the second you turned off your signal because you no longer needed to see extra over there kind of a cool idea not widely adopted at the time but more and more automakers are using it today and next up another interesting quirk in this interior the glove box you open it up and you can see it's rather small very small in fact because the six-disc cd changer takes up most of the space in the glove box this was fairly common of course in this area if they had a cd changer they had to stick it somewhere some cars put it in the trunk which was very inconvenient here more convenient in the glove box but then it takes up space now to help account for that you did have a couple of storage pockets in the inside of the lid in the glove box as you can see which is rather uncommon not too many cars have storage there but this one did but anyway next we move on to the back seat in the tim allen cadillac deville and i gotta say it is very nice back here large and luxurious which is no surprise this was cadillac's flagship luxury model it wasn't quite a competitor to an s-class or a 7-series but it was sort of a budget-priced alternative to those so it had a big comfortable roomy back seat and it had some nice amenities back here for instance there was climate control for the rear passengers you could adjust where the air was coming the fan speed and the temperature in back which was not common even for luxury sedans in this era you also had heated rear seats you can see here the same control you had up front you can turn them on or you can direct the heated seat to adjust the backrest which again was pretty cool to see heated rear seats also pretty uncommon for luxury cars in this era now aside from that stuff there's not all that much interesting in this roomy luxurious backseat except for this little piece here mounted on the ceiling which interestingly contains the parking sensors here's how this worked when you put this car in reverse and you got close to an object it didn't beep at you like modern cars do instead it would display how close you were to hitting something and the theory was the driver would look into the rear view mirror and see the little display showing up with dots telling you how close you were to bumping into something and that was your parking sensor in this cadillac deville mounted on the rear ceiling which is kind of unorthodox but that's what they did and next up we move on to the trunk in the tim allen cadillac deville which isn't particularly interesting except for the fact that it is a rather large trunk which was what buyers wanted of this vehicle old-school american luxury sedan buyers wanted a big trunk for their golf clubs and anything else they might want to put back here the only other interesting thing in the trunk is this piece here this is where you inserted your navigation cds back in the days when cars had like seven different cds for different parts of the country and you had to stick one in when you crossed state lines and that's where you put it in the deville now the other interesting thing worth mentioning about this car is the way that it looks on the outside rather dull rather boring which was just how deville buyers wanted it again these were old people elderly buyers they didn't want some cool exciting edgy modern design which of course cadillac later went to this was kind of the last of the old-school looking cadillacs and that was perfect for the old people and it was perfect for this performance model because it was a car you would never expect a high performance version of the devil whose average buyer age was probably around 80 years old one interesting exterior item worth mentioning in this car though is the taillights it has massive leds you can see they're used as brake lights and when you put on the turn signal they become the turn signals as well now in 2000 using led exterior lighting was a huge deal and cadillac was one of the very first automakers to do it especially for a relatively popular car and for such a large light and i was 12 when this car came out and i still remember seeing these around and thinking wow that is a big bright very immediate lighting up brake light because it was one of the first uses of leds which of course has now become widespread in almost every car and so those are the quirks and features of this rather special cadillac deville now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the tim allen cadillac now a little known fact about dog these are my favorite types of cars which is to say modified cars that the automaker did and don't look like stupidly modded but look like they should have come from the factory that way like this car if you look at it on the outside really looks like a cadillac that just was a performance version of the deville and i love like factory modded low production one-off type cars precisely like this and frankly i really want to get one they're unusual cars factory usually makes cars in mass but sometimes weird stuff happens like a celebrity comedian contacts cadillac and wants to build a high performance devel so i love this thing so inside the car driving around it sounds great i've driven these devilles that had the northstar v8 that didn't have a quad pipe exhaust and 100 extra horsepower and they didn't sound like anything this thing sounds cool it sounds like it means business and even from inside you can hear it there's no fake sound piped into this car you just hear the v8 rumble and i really like it it sounds cool it sounds good it's awesome what a neat vehicle now i gotta say the improvements in suspension are immediately obvious from the moment you first turn the wheel now you might be saying well how can you possibly tell you know from driving the car for just a few minutes and the answer is because the regular deville was so squishy and and wallowy that you can just instantly tell that this car is better now i should say the steering doesn't feel any better the steering feels about the same which is to say pretty lazy and over assisted and slow but like body roll and and cornering is so clearly already improved the standard deville uh a car just feels dramatically more athletic now that isn't necessarily saying a lot because at the end of the day these duvils were front-wheel drive cars they were large cars and they were luxury marshmallow cars and so there were you could easily improve it anything would have been an improvement basically now with that said it's you know still a front-wheel drive heavy front-end car and so it does have understeer when you're going a little bit harder around corners there's no doubt about that um but it's also just cool i think this thing is such a neat car i love the concept of modifying a car how the factory would have and of modifying a car to make it a sleeper without you know putting on big wings and giant wheels and painting it bright pink and all this stuff like it's cool that this car just totally blends in people around me have no idea they're next to this like one of one special cadillac now driving this car i will say it is reasonably comfortable in here although unquestionably it's a little bit harsher than a regular deville it doesn't quite have that same level of comfort but you do have the seats they didn't change the seats which i think they they probably should have done a little bit more on the interior to make it special but the result of that is you have these nice comfortable seats they're not going to keep you in place if you're going hard around a corner uh but they're nice and and you know soft and pillowy which is what people who bought these cars wanted i'm going to give it a little gas and we'll see what happens it's pretty quick i mean it's dulled by this transmission which was never designed to handle any sort of performance car it was always supposed to be like a comfortable luxury car but that does it does feel surprisingly fast once you get going and get high at the rev range and you hear that wonderful v8 truthfully this car is cool and the coolness of it is in the one of one tim allen and cadillac got together to make a hot rod cadillac it also is sort of the beginning of cadillac v like this car existed before there was v that came in o4 and this and the stsi models and cadillac's le mans program it was all sort of the beginning of cadillac moving towards performance and you can see some of that heritage in this car some like light modifications some extra power to really kind of you know begin going after a more performancy crowd and this kind of started that i love the fact that nobody around me knows that it's special but like a lot of people if they were told the story would be like that's really cool that cadillac went out and made from the factory like this special kind of hot rod individual one-off cadillac i think that's a cool story and i think this is a cool car and i love this thing i wish i had the kind of clout to have an automaker make a hot rod special car just for me i think that would be an exciting thing and so that's the cadillac deville from tim allen designs currently offered for sale on cars and bids i love the idea of this car take a deville something that everyone associates with old people luxury slow careful driving and turn it into a performance car sleeper that nobody would ever expect it's fantastic and now it's time to give the tim allen cadillac a doug score and the dug score is here 48 out of 100 which places the tim allen cadillac deville here against relevant cars honestly i like the tim allen deville i love the subtle upgrades to the styling i love the idea of hot rodding a big sedan nobody would ever expect and i love the added performance the drawback is that it's still a late 90s early 2000s american luxury sedan with a slow shifting automatic transmission and a big luxury car-ish overall size and it's hard to minimize that still this is cool and it was a spiritual predecessor to a lot of today's fast cadillacs [Music]

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 1,037,398

Keywords: cadillac deville, cadillac deville review, deville, deville review, cadillac deville tim allen, tim allen car, tim allen cars, cadillac deville modified, doug demuro, demuro, doug de muro

Id: 4X7qmLqnAHE

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 03 2022