Cadillac Lincoln Imperial

Cadillac: the myth

The Cadillac is one of the most famous cars ever and it is the symbol of “made in USA”. The story of Cadillac starts practically at the beginning of the history of car as a vehicle and it is marked by a series of innovations that have revolutionized more then once world’s car-making technology. We can mention such a “trifle” as electric starter (1912) or hydraulic tappet just to have something to start with. Maybe it is better to say more about these things then to talk about “fins” and torpedo-shaped bumpers...

Galleria Cadillac:

A famous story


Since the beginning of the century, the name Cadillac has represented one of the highest peaks of American car industry and it has earned its place on the Olympus of the great marks of the world. Only few people know that Cadillacs were the first serial made cars to be equipped with the electric starter (1912) and the first cars to have fully synchronized gear (1928).

Cadillac was one of the first car-making companies that started to use standardization of parts, by introducing the system of tolerances in the production phase.
In the first years of the century, the car production was a little more then craftsmanship. Each car was basically handmade and its various parts were frequently adjusted in the assembling phase to approximately meet the expected form. It was quite common that there were two cars of the same model and type that didn’t have interchangeable parts. It was impossible to replace one piston with another without making appropriate steps to adjust it to the shape of the cylinder.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the RAC (Royal Automobile Club) founded the “Dewar Trophy” in England as an award dedicated to the stimulation of innovations in the motoring field. It was surely something really new and courageous especially if you consider the fact that, before the First World War, a person using car was seen the society more as a “wicked” exhibitionist then a gentleman driver...
Cadillac managed to win one “Dewar Trophy” thanks to an exceptional innovation: a car part production system based on systematic and rigorous “standardization”.

Three Cadillac “A” models were sent to England to prove the effectiveness of this system. The three cars were disassembled, then reassembled mixing parts from different cars and tested on the Brooklands circuit. The perfect success of this demonstration won Cadillac its first “Dewar Trophy” (it will be awarded one more for the electric starter, in 1912). Since then, the story of Cadillac was made of a series of successes that lasted until the final affirmation of the brand after the WWII.

In 1930, Cadillac produced model 452, the first passenger car equipped by a 16-cylinder engine. Its 170+ Hp made it one of the world’s most powerful cars.
It was followed by a V12 configuration. Soon after the war, all these set-ups were abandoned and substituted by more simple but equally powerful V8.

Almost all the comforts that recently entered the world of modern European cars were already used in Cadillacs of the 50’s and 60’s. Lets have a look at some of them.

 

The great Cadillac of the 50’s

The first Eldorado: a 4 wheel dream

Its 1953 price of 7750 dollars was comparable to that of Rolls Royce and the figure alone indicates the category to which the first Cadillac Eldorado 1953 belonged.
This was one of the first cars with panoramic rear window made of bended glass. The electric operated front and rear windows were part of standard equipment. Front seats and the hood were power operated as well. Once opened, the soft-hood was completely hidden by a well-shaped metal cover that was well integrated with the rest of the car. There were no visible controls or levers, no uncomfortable covering curtain to be buttoned up, nothing fluttering or irritating. All you could see was the elegant body. But that’s not all... Here are some more comfort features available in the 1953 model: power-assisted steering, radio with pre-tuned memory, a two-way heating system (heating the rear seats as well) and naturally the automatic gearbox, the same type that was later used by Rolls Royce...

The 1953’s Eldorado is a car with high collecting value as there were in total little more then 500 of these cars and they were produced with a great care. It is along the ’57 Eldorado Brougham the “most desired” model of the post-war Cadillac.
In this period, Cadillac sedans already had the air-condition system available on request.

 

1957-1958 The exceptional Eldorado Brougham.

The 1957’s Eldorado Brougham is the most admired and sought-after post-war Cadillac mainly among the American but also all the other Cadillac collectors. This enthusiasm is justified not only by the fact that these cars are so rare (slightly over 700 exemplars, 400 in 1957 and 304 in 1958) but also because it is considered to be the last Cadillac designed “without compromises”. Additionally, the standard of its equipment is really surprising, even sensational if you relate it to the period of the production.

Even though the price of the Brougham was astronomical, more then 13000 dollars in 1956, it has been calculated that Cadillac lost couple of thousand dollars on each sold model.
It has never been very clear what has pushed Cadillac or General Motors to come up with such a “business”. It seems that the decision was made for prestigious reasons in a reaction to what Ford was doing with its Lincoln Continental III (the only real competitor of Brougham), but in fact the two projects started almost at the same time and not one as an answer to the other. Probably the most likely theory says that in the 50’s it was possible to find a person ready to risk a lot “just” for the motives of prestige and image even in such an industrial giant as the GM. And the Eldorado Brougham is a demonstration of such thinking: it was a failure from the economic point of view but a great hit as far as the image is considered. The Eldorado Brougham was the best-equipped car of the era and one of the first cars to have self-adjusting air suspensions. And some of the concepts used in Eldorado for the first time could not be found then in any luxury car for another 30 years.

Just think about the memorization of the seats position. Six-way power seat – was the system of 6-direction power controlled regulation of the seats. In Eldorado ’57, it was integrated with an exclusive brand new system of memorization of positions. In 1957, nothing similar existed in Europe and, as we said already, it took almost thirty years for this device to become part of the standard equipment of some of the more prestigious European sedans. It had a V8 engine of 6000 cc. and the horsepower of no less then 300 Hp, brought up to 310 in 1958.

But even this 4-wheel masterpiece had its Achilles’ heel. The system of air suspensions, that wasn’t properly tested before entering into production, was subject to endless failures. Proud owners of the Brougham often lost their enthusiasm when they saw their cars “brought to the ground” by empty suspensions. In the end, many of them have replaced the pneumatic membranes with helical springs. The result wasn’t fantastic but it at least increased the reliability.

Just very few exemplars of Eldorado Brougham from 1957-58 are still equipped with the original system of air-suspensions. Although the restoration of this system is a titanic effort, some of the car lovers have succeeded in this challenge, put back the “inflating pillows” and reconstructed the whole set of air pipes that cross the car. Here we would like to bring your attention to Vic Brincat’s web site relevant to this problem at www.eldobrghm.com. This man succeeded in the perfect restoration of his car and has also published some directions on how to carry out the right adjustment of the complicated pneumatic system of the Brougham. We invite you to visit his extremely interesting site if you want to learn more about this motoring legend.

 

1959-1960 The second Brougham

You may say that the Eldorado Brougham was produced from 1957 until 1960, but you risk making an error in judgement, as the Brougham made in the last two years had nothing to do with the previous model, except of the name.

The 1959 was the year of the biggest growth of the Cadillac’s fins; almost everyone knows the famous Eldorado cabriolet. But it was also the year of the Cadillac with the lowest fins ever, the new Brougham. Richard M. Langwort wrote in his book “American cars of the 50’s”: “Not all the Cadillac of the 1959 had the giant rear fins but you needed as much as 13025 dollars to avoid them”.

The Brougham was a car with much more sober and elegant look then its contemporaries and it was decided to order the design of its body from no one less then the Italian Pininfarina, just to emphasize its elitish character.
This is how things worked: the bearing chassis was made in Detroit and sent by a ship to Genoa, Italy. Subsequently, Pininfarina handmaded the body and sent everything back to the United States, where they finished assembling the electric parts and made other finishing touches.

Despite this incredible procedure that lent Brougham an aura of extreme exclusivity, the constructional quality of this car was much inferior then in 57-58 models, entirely made in Detroit. Paradoxically, the choice to make the bodies in Italy also had economic motivations. As it was proved by the previous model, the price of a body made in the U.S. in so few exemplars would be prohibitive. Additionally, many of the car parts of this model were basically the same as these used in the serial made Cadillacs and therefore the body wasn’t that sophisticated.
In practice, Brougham of the 1959-60 was much more similar to the other Cadillacs then its ancestor. Some experts even call it “bucket of bolts” when asked to compare it to the first Brougham...

Even if it wasn’t more elitish then its ancestor, Eldorado Brougham of this period was produced in just 200 pieces (99 in 1959 and 101 in 1960) and this surely makes it a tasty bit for the collectors. We can again find the air suspensions here as well as a series of exceptional gadgets, like the device that automatically pulls back the rear screens everytime the rear doors are opened.

In 1961, the production of Eldorado Brougham was stoped, forewer.
Cadillac’s pullback from the segment of super-luxury cars was the begining of a slow decline of its constructional quality. It will later have negative consequences in the competion with the European carmakers, as R. M. Langwort puts it: “There is no doubt that this decline begun exactly with the dissapearence of Eldorado Brougham”.

 



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