CADILLAC CONCEPTS

This issue we are focusing on Cadillacs, with a few concept cars mixed in with some equally fantastic production models.

El Camino

The El Camino name was used by General Motors on a series of car- derived pick- ups wearing Chevrolet badges from 1959, but it had first appeared on this concept car from Cadillac built for the 1954 Motorama. General Motors had started to hold shows they called Transportation Unlimited Autorama from 1949, usually in conjunction with the New York Motor Show, where they would pull in the punters with concept cars and special models, but from 1953 the event started to travel round the country and was officially called the GM Motorama. Unlike many of the concept cars, this two- seat Coupé was a fully functioning vehicle with a 331ci (5424cc) V8 engine. There was also a sister car with a convertible body called La Espada.

▶ Eldorado Seville

The Eldorado most definitely was a production model though, the name being used for 50 years between 1952 and 2002 and applied to 12 generations of car. We are not Cadillac experts and are happy to be corrected, but we think from the sweep of the front wheelarch that this example is from the third generation of 1957-58, and from the first of those years as for the 1958 model year it gained four headlights instead of two. The Eldorado Seville was the hardtop version while the convertible was called the Biarritz, a naming convention used by GM from 1956 until 1960 when the hardtop model was dropped for 1961.

◂ Le Mans

This extravagant two- seat beauty was one of four prototypes built for the Motorama in 1953. Like most of the concept cars it had a fibreglass body, and despite having only two seats, this one was a whopping 16ft 4in long. (For comparison, the Jaguar XJ6 was 4½in shorter at launch in 1968.) As for the Le Mans name, that was in honour of the two- car entry in that event in 1950. One of those cars with a standard body finished 10th, while the second – with a streamlined body that was so ugly the French called it Le Monstre – came home in 11th after losing time buried in a sandbank. As for the Le Mans Cadillac pictured here, it never went into production.

▶ Eldorado

For the second of our Eldorados, we are fast-forwarding from the third generation pictured on the previous page and dropping in on the 10th generation, current from 1979- 85. This featured the same longitudinal engine placement with FWD as had been introduced on the 8th generation Eldorado in 1967, but overall length had dropped from 221in to 204in, and the biggest engine option was down from 500ci (8.2-litres) to a mere 6-litres. There was also a 4.1-litre Buick V6 offered from 1981, and – a real sign of the times – a 350ci (5.7-litre) diesel V8.

▶ Allanté

Here's an interesting one to finish on. The Cadillac Allanté was current from 1987-1993, and was intended to bring some European panache to the Cadillac line- up. As such it was designed by Pininfarina, who also built the bodies. Those bodies were flown 56 at a time from Turin to Detroit in specially equipped Boeing 747s. Once in the USA they were united with their American running gear and built up into complete cars, making for what was dubbed the longest production line in the world. The V8 engines were all mounted transversely and drove the front wheels. Some 21,430 were built in total.

◂ Cyclone

You surely won't be surprised to learn that this is another concept car rather than a production vehicle. It was built in 1959, and clearly takes a great deal of its inspiration from aircraft and rockets of the era. There were some useful nuggets of technology under that futuristic skin however, tech which did actually anticipate future developments, such as collisionavoiding radar housed in two front nose cones. Those pointed cones themselves definitely did not anticipate future pedestrian crash protection legislation, though!

◂ Series 62 Carrera race car

This is not an original, but a replica of the privatelyentered Cadillac Series 62 that was campaigned in the 1954 La Carrera Panamericana road race. It was built by GM's Performance Division in Warren, Michigan in 2006, using period photographs to recreate the 1954 look perfectly. The Series 62 was another long- running fixture in the Cadillac portfolio, this being the fourth generation from 1954-1956. This was the Coupé variant which featured a dramatic wraparound rear window to complement the sharply curved windscreen.