I knew from reading up on it beforehand that the engine ECU in the Caddy could do cruise control, if only the physical controls were available, and the relevant settings toggled. Controls wise, my era of van would have had a separate stalk on the left hand side for this purpose, but I decided it would be nice if it were a bit more modern, with the controls on the steering wheel itself. Furthermore, the stock steering wheel was rather a horrible plastic affair that I wasn’t a fan of.
It seemed like a good idea to kill two birds with one stone and upgrade to a leather one with built in controls. Eventually I found one that I liked out of a T6 from an eBay scrappy (a round one, not a flat bottomed one; what’s that about?). As is frequently the case with eBay scrappies, the condition of the received item left a little to be desired.
I found a random leather refurbishment kit on Amazon, and got to work. The basic idea is that you sand the leather back, fill it with what appears to be for all intents and purposes acrylic varnish (I don’t know this for certain, don’t @ me), then when a satisfactory surface has been achieved, dab black vinyl paint over it.
My expectations for the results were, if I’m honest, quite low, but it turned out really well!
Now for the cruise control itself. It turns out that newer MFSWs (multi-function steering wheels) don’t speak the correct protocol to activate cruise control on a Caddy of my era, though all the other controls operate as expected. There was a solution though, through a certain piggy back module that translated the MSFW messages to something the Caddy could understand. It doesn’t appear to be available for sale any more, I suspect because it had a certain support overhead in many, many people not properly reading the instructions or understanding how to install it, which to be fair probably isn’t for the faint of heart, requiring soldering.
In my case I also needed to re-pin the wheel a little, as in its stock configuration the horn would peep whenever I turned the cruise control on or off; not ideal. Anyway it all turned out well, though I use it less that I anticipated I would. If you get a quiet road it’s fantastic, but if there’s anybody in front of you they are inevitably unable to keep to a constant speed, so you’re better just using the traditional right foot as opposed to constantly toggling the cruise control on and off.
