Кадиллак Катера: История немецкого люкса с американским характером.

The Cadillac Catera is a four door, five passenger, rear wheel drive luxury sedan marketed from 1996 until 2001 by Cadillac over a single generation in the United States and Canada. As a rebadged variant of the Opel Omega B, the Catera was manufactured by Opel in Rüsselsheim, Germany, and was underpinned by GM's V body platform. Approximately 95,000 units were built and sold over five model years.

The Catera was previewed at the Detroit Auto Show in 1994 as the Cadillac LSE concept, proposed by Cadillac as an entry level model that would compete with sedans from Acura, BMW, Infiniti, Lexus, Jaguar, Volvo, and Mercedes Benz. In 1996, an early production model was shown at the Detroit, Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto auto shows. The model's engine was a L81 54° DOHC V6 manufactured in England at GM's Ellesmere Port facility, using an FR layout. The GM 4L30 E automatic transmission was manufactured at GM's plant in Strasbourg, France.

Catera launch marketing used the tagline "the Caddy that zigs," with advertising featuring supermodel Cindy Crawford and a small animated bird named "Ziggy," a reference to the heraldic merlettes (adaptations of the martin, without legs or beaks) featured in the various iterations of Cadillac's logo from its inception through 1999. Ziggy was featured in Catera marketing through the 1998 model year, with Cadillac saying:
"Like Catera, Ziggy was hatched in Germany and has the sole mission of bringing fun to the luxury of Cadillac. He was one of six mythical, beakless, footless martins or 'Merlettes' in the Cadillac Crest before we gave him big feet, a giant beak, and turned him around. He's quite a departure from his five brothers who have been part of the Cadillac Crest since the days of the crusades when the crest was the proud symbol of Le Sieur Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac's Family." In 1997, John Tinker, a producer of television medical drama Chicago Hope, was inspired by an inadvertent pun in a Catera commercial, saying "Who is Lisa Catera? "—in response to the Catera tagline "Lease a Catera." He introduced a character named Dr. Lisa Catera, played by Stacy Edwards. Coincidentally, the main demographic of Chicago Hope viewers were exactly the same demographic Cadillac hoped to attract with the Catera, and Cadillac/General Motors management responded extremely positively to the reference, becoming the main advertiser on the show and giving Edwards a complimentary three year lease on a Catera. In one episode, Edwards' character said "when you can't zig, you zag," a reference to the Catera's original marketing tagline.

In Europe, the platform underpinned the Opel Omega, marketed as an executive car. Rebadged variants of the Omega were marketed worldwide. In addition to the Opel version, the car was sold in Great Britain as the Vauxhall Omega and South America as the Chevrolet Omega. As with the Rekord which preceded it, re engineered versions of the Omega were manufactured in Australia from 1988 as the Holden Commodore (and its derivatives) since 1999. Commodore based cars were in turn exported to South America as the Chevrolet Omega and to the Middle East as the Chevrolet Lumina. A relative of the Catera, utilizing modified version the same Opel platform, continued to be in production until 2006. In the U. S. market, the platform was used for the Pontiac GTO, which was an almost identical derivative of the Holden Monaro coupe. Both were manufactured by GM Holden in Australia. These performance coupes were themselves derived from the sedan platform that originated in the Australian market as the VT series Holden Commodore in 1997.