Cadillac aimed the Eldorado Touring Coupe directly at the buyers of European luxury cars, calling it “a different breed of Cadillac.”

To explain what the Eldorado Touring Coupe was all about, we could list the traditional Cadillac features that weren’t included: wire wheel covers, padded vinyl top, whitewall tires, two-tone paint, opera lamps, and V6 or diesel V8 engines. Nor were these items available at additional cost. The Cadillac product planners had a specific mission in mind for the Touring Coupe, a potential image changer, and they didn’t want it blurred. This Cadillac was aimed squarely at the the growing number of buyers for European luxury cars, namely Mercedes, Audi, and BMW.

The inspiration for the Touring Coupe, it’s said, came with the development of a Touring Suspension package for the Eldorado in 1980. Engineers were so impressed with its capability that they suggested a Euro-style sport-performance model could be built around it.  Another nudge reportedly came from Penske Cadillac on the West coast, which put together a dealer package called the Penske/RS with optional suspension, oversized tires, and blacked-out trim. In any event, the Eldorado Touring Coupe appeared in 1982 as a $1.950 option package for the standard Eldorado, to be added atop the base price of $18,716.

Cadillac was starting, of course, with the tenth-generation Eldorado introduced in 1979, a front-drive coupe that used the longitudinal Unitized Power Package (UPP) introduced on the ’66 Olds Toronado. The FE2 Touring Suspension featured stiffer spring rates (18 percent front, 14 percent rear) with 32 mm front and 26 mm rear antiroll bars. Damping rates were more aggressive, while power steering effort was increased 20 percent to increase road feedback. Aluminum wheels exclusive to the Touring Coupe carried Goodyear Custom Polysteel P225/70R-15 rubber. “If you love to drive, the Eldorado Touring Coupe is for you,” the copywriters proclaimed.

Visual items that set the Touring package apart included a slick top (no vinyl), blacked out rub strips, and pinstriping, while the traditional stand-up hood ornament was replaced with a flush medallion. Inside, the standard leather bucket seats and console were upholstered in the German style, far more subdued than the glitzy velour or diamond-pleated leather in the rest of the Cadillac line. But the Eldorado’s simulated wood paneling that ran the entire width of the instrument panel in glamorous polystyrene remained.

Reporting in the April 1982 issue, the editors of Car and Driver magazine were more than enthusiastic about the Touring’s road manners. The Euro-Caddy, they wrote, “made us doubt we were driving a Cadillac. . . the result is startling and wonderful.” However, they were “thoroughly disappointed” with the only available engine, the weak HT4100 V8 that offered only 125 hp. The Touring Coupe was four seconds slower than the previous 6.0-liter Eldorado in getting from zero to 60 mph and could barely top 90 mph, they reported.

Realistically, handsome and agile though it was, the Eldorado Touring Coupe was never going to change Cadillac’s brand identity. In the first generation’s 1982-85 product cycle, Cadillac produced 4,293 Touring Coupes. But meanwhile, the division was also churning out DeVilles, Fleetwoods, bustleback Sevilles, and Eldorado Biarritzes by the hundreds of thousands, a vision of padded roofs and fake wire-wheel covers not easily erased. Still, the Touring Coupe did earn a place in the Cadillac lineup through 2002, serving its final years with the name shortened to ETC.