Lore Here
5 years ago, a set of new designers at Cade made a car that was very strange and stylized, and marketed it with material that was was ugly, confusing, and sometimes bordering on obscene even by the very-liberal standards of the day. This move completely alienated Cade’s already-limited customer base, and only really appealed to people exactly like the designers; as it turned out, these designers were some very unique people.
Now, nearly out of money and with no customer base, the people of Cade got together to figure out what on earth they could do to survive (or if they even could at all). After some panic, they looked back at Cade’s history and realized that, prior to their arrival, Cade had always made the same type of car; the cheapest car possible. Never as good as its competitors, but always cheaper and reliable. None of these youngsters wanted to build this kind of car, but they had already run out of options; the econobox was their only hope.
But fortunately, these young designers were still very bright people, and their failure of a sorts car hadn’t been for completely nothing. They were able to recycle some technologies; most notably, the old I4 engine design, complete with the modern fuel-injection technology, could be transplanted straight in with only some re-tuning; primarily by shrinking its size to 1.4L. While they eventually planned to add an even smaller 3-cylinder option, the I4 helped carry the team to a quicker launch date.
They were also able to appropriate the 5-speed manual from the sports car, with adjustments almost exclusively to the gear ratio, and their brake tuning came from the same research they’d done last time. That’s not to say this econobox was remotely sporty, with its thin economy tires and 10+ second 0-60; just that they were able to put some some nicer technologies in the car without as much of a jump in engineering time.
And the time that this recycling saved allowed for greater attention to detail elsewhere; While the designers still had to hurry to make the chassis and body design as basic and easy-to-manufacture as possible, they were afforded a bit of extra time to think about things like weight and safety. They had time to add additional cooling vents, and to figure out how to install a catalytic converter without sacrificing too much power from the engine. Most of all, they focused a lot of time on the interior, as although they made it very stripped-down feature-wise to keep the car cheap, they didn’t want the interior to feel cheap.
Throughout its production run, several “special editions” of the car were made, which commemorated a variety of different themes; culture groups, autonomies, sports teams, and more. Shown above is the “Euskadi” edition, and in the below photograph, the most common “España” special edition.
The resulting 1400 was, on the surface, exactly what Cade had been known for for decades; a bottom-barrel budget city car. But underneath, the car was no longer the backwards, lazily-made failure from years past; it displayed care, and attention to detail, with modern technologies and almost a sense of forward-thinkingness (minus its boxy visual design). Some elements did feel rushed, but improvements to quality and rust protection followed over the first few years of production that helped iron out the wrinkles
Advertisements (very sedate this time) often compared the 1400 to a piece of chocolate, calling it variations of a “simple, lovable little delight.” This earned it the nickname “Cacao” among those who liked it, a nickname Cade itself eventually informally adopted. Unfortunately, this also opened up an opportunity for those who didn’t like it to call it the “Caca” (literally, “poo poo” in Spanish); but outside of elementary schools this joke didn’t end up catching on in Spain, as the car wasn’t as ridiculously far behind everything else on the market as its predecessors had been. Some people liked it, some people didn’t, but to most people, the Cacao was just a car.
Next weekend, we’ll find out how this little car’s exports fared in northern Europe.
