1987 Cadillac Brougham 43.5K Survivor – Sold?

Originally used for a single horse-drawn enclosed carriage for two to four people, the term “Brougham” owes its name to British statesman Henry Brougham.  Cadillac first used the name in 1916 to designate an enclosed five to seven-passenger sedan body style.  By the 1930s, Broughams referred to a formal body style with an open chauffeur compartment, enclosed rear quarters, and a metal roof. By the 1980s, Cadillac used the term to rename what was the Sedan DeVille once Cadillac moved that brand name to its new front-wheel-drive, transverse-mounted engine chassis.  Many consider the 1987-1990 Cadillac Brougham the last true, six-passenger, body-on-frame, rear-wheel-drive traditional Cadillac despite featuring V8 power supplied by either Oldsmobile or Chevrolet.

This 1987 Cadillac Brougham, originally listed in August 2022 on Craigslist in Boynton Beach, Florida, reports being a very clean, 43.5K original mile survivor the seller describes as “100% perfect.”

Currently offered for $28,500, Classic.com, the analytics and search engine for the collector car market, confirms the ask is well above the one-year rolling average of this guide’s summary for Cadillac Broughams between 1987 and 1992.  By clicking on the green dots in the graph below, you can navigate to each comparable car sold as a way to help you evaluate the price of the truck featured here:

After 1937, Cadillac did not apply the Brougham to any of its offerings for the remainder of the pre-World War II period.  The Brougham name eventually reappeared on the 1955 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham show car, which preceded the four-door Eldorado Brougham hardtops of the 1957 to 1960 model years.  The 1957 Cadillac Series 70 Eldorado Brougham joined the Sixty Special and the Series 75 as the only Cadillac models with Fleetwood bodies, although Fleetwood script or crests did not appear anywhere on the exterior of the car,  and so this would also mark the first time in 20 years that a Fleetwood bodied car was paired with the Brougham name.

After a five-year absence, the Brougham name reappeared as an option package on the 1965 Cadillac Sixty Special.  The following year, the Brougham became a subseries of the Fleetwood Sixty Special.  This continued through 1970.  Starting in 1971, the Sixty Special was only available as the well-equipped Fleetwood Sixty Special Brougham.  When Cadillac retired the Sixty Special Series in 1977, the Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham took its place as Cadillac’s largest owner-driven sedan model through 1986.

The single name “Brougham” began to be used as a specific Cadillac model in 1987 when the term “Fleetwood” was dropped from the former Fleetwood Brougham. It was otherwise the same as the 1986 model. The reason for the change was that Cadillac had introduced a new front-wheel drive model in 1985 and named it simply the Fleetwood. Compounding the confusion, the optional “d’Elegance” package (introduced in the upscale Fleetwood trim line in the 1970s, offering even more luxurious appointments, including button-tufted seating and rear-seat reading lamps), was available on and appended to the names of both models, resulting in a traditional body-on-frame/rear-wheel drive “Fleetwood Brougham d’ Elegance” and a unibody/transverse engined “Fleetwood d’ Elegance.” The solution was dropping the term “Fleetwood” from the rear-wheel drive model, leaving just the “Brougham.” Since it was body-on-frame, it was popular among coachbuilders who manufactured stretched limousines, along with the similar but somewhat smaller Lincoln Town Car and traditional Cadillac buyers who preferred the familiar combination of exterior size, heft, and rear-wheel drive. This was the last Cadillac produced without airbags.

The 1987 Brougham was built at the Clark Street Cadillac Assembly Plant in Detroit, Michigan, as the Fleetwood Brougham had been in 1985-86. Before the shift to the Arlington Assembly plant in Arlington, Texas, some early model year 1988s were produced at Detroit Assembly in late 1987 before the plant’s December closure. Construction continued at Arlington through 1992.

The Brougham wore a cross-hatch grille in 1987 and 1988, an identical re-cast of the 1981 Fleetwood Brougham/DeVille grille. The Brougham received a new vertical-slat grille for 1989, which was equal to the 1982-86 grille with 3 horizontal sections.

The BigRob Chicago PL YouTube Channel features this 1986 Cadillac Brougham promotional video:

The seller lets their excellent pictures do the talking as their description does not provide many details.  Equipped with a Chevrolet-sourced 5.0 Liter V8, Cadillac enthusiasts overlook that nuance as the engine has proven to be much more reliable than the brand’s HT4100 4.5 Liter V8 of the same period.

Here’s the seller’s description:

Show or go: What would you do with this 1987 Cadillac Brougham survivor?  Please comment below and let us know!