By the late 1970’s the personal luxury car market was booming and as more and more automotive manufacturers sought to come up with new luxury car designs, exclusivity became the key word of the day. It was during this time that boutique coachbuilders thrived in the personal luxury car market with their ability to build truly one-off designs that buyers were sure would make them stand out in a crowd. One of these coachbuilders was Coach Design Group in Westlake Village, California, who produced a comparatively small number of custom coachbuilt Cadillacs for the Hillcrest Motor Company of Beverly Hills and Ogner Motors of Woodland Hills, both premier Cadillac dealers. Their basis was the new Cadillac Seville, which had been introduced in 1975 and had already become hugely popular. This 1977 Cadillac Seville San Remo Coupe is one of those examples built by Coach Design Group and was converted into a coupe from the standard four-door Seville sedan and features a rear half vinyl roof with chrome wrap over molding and electric sunroof by American Sunroof Corporation, opera lamps, and a modified fixed quarter window in place of the rear doors along with a modified rear fascia with Eldorado taillights grafted in. Power for the San Remo comes from a 5.7L fuel-injected V8 engine which produces 180 horsepower and is mated to a Turbo-Hydramatic 400 3-speed automatic transmission while standard features for the ’77 Seville included power steering, front and rear power disc brakes, cruise control, automatic climate control with air conditioning, dual power seats, power windows, power locks, dual remote rearview mirrors, and automatic level control, among others. The black exterior of this San Remo shows excellently with a mirror finish and few flaws while the vinyl roof and sunroof are in great shape. Inside the cabin the San Remo features gray leather upholstery and the seats, carpet, floor mats, and headliner are in excellent shape as well and the coupe rides on a set of steel wheels with Cadillac wire spoke hubcaps mounted with Vogue Tire Custom Built Radial 205/70R15 thin whitewall tires with a stylish gold accent stripe. Although Cadillac produced more than 45,000 Sevilles in 1977, the San Remo Coupes are extremely rare with only 400 built that year, with this car being identified as the 9th Coupe produced according to the brass plate affixed to the glovebox door. Overall this 1977 Cadillac San Remo Coupe looks and runs great and is a wonderful example of an oft-forgotten era of American motoring when ever increasing demand for the most distinctive and luxurious cars brought about a resurgence in the coachbuilder market and even now, this San Remo Coupe is as distinctive and elegant as it was in 1977.
