Cadillac Eldorado 6th Gen

The 1961 and 1962 Cadillacs carried a second fin low on the rear quarter, so the car showed four fins from behind. Bill Mitchell thought the tail looked like a rocket ship, and for 1963 the lower pair were gone. What replaced them is the start of Mitchell's sheer look at Cadillac: flat, taut sides with the sculpturing pressed out of them, a crisp shoulder line and fins trimmed back to a blade. The front fenders were pushed 4.625 inches further forward, which lengthened the nose and reset the proportions of the whole car, and the slightly V-shaped grille grew taller with outboard extensions carrying small round parking lamps. The Eldorado's own markings are deliberately quiet: the Fleetwood wreath and crest on the rear quarters, Fleetwood rocker mouldings, and the same rectangular grille mesh as the Sixty Special. For 1964 the grille became bi-angular, V-shaped in both planes and split by a body-coloured bar, the fins were redrawn as fine blades in their seventeenth consecutive year, and the rear wheel openings were opened up. Losing the skirts made the car look faster and made it look less like an Eldorado.

Cadillac ran no competition programme in 1963 or 1964, and there was nowhere obvious to take one. No series anywhere had a class for a 5,000 pound luxury convertible, the division's customers were buying silence rather than lap times, and Cadillac's engineering effort in these two years went into an automatic climate control system rather than a cylinder head. So the Eldorado never wore a number. Its transmission did. The three-speed Turbo Hydra-Matic fitted to the 1964 Eldorado, de Ville and Sixty Special was the first application anywhere of the unit the world came to know as the TH400, and it turned out to be one of the toughest automatics ever drawn. Its planetary gearset and its entirely mechanical control logic were strong enough that drag racers adopted it and then never let it go. Sixty years on, specialist builders still assemble TH400s for bracket cars and for Pro Modifieds making thousands of horsepower, and the reason given is always the same: nothing electronic to fail, and a gearset that does not care what you bolt to it. A luxury convertible with air conditioning and a six-way seat introduced the drag strip's default automatic.

The 1963 Cadillac has an odd little place in American art: it is where the tailfin officially stops. Cadillac Ranch, the row of ten Cadillacs buried nose down west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, runs from a 1949 Club Sedan to a 1963 Sedan de Ville, and the entire point of the piece is the rise and fall of the fin. The line ends on the model year this generation opens with. Bruce Springsteen borrowed the title for a song on The River in 1980 and opened it with parts rather than a whole car: Eldorado fins, whitewalls and skirts. Which is quietly funny, because the 1964 Eldorado is the one Cadillac deliberately built without skirts. The car itself is scarce on screen, and honestly so. Through the 1960s the de Ville is the Cadillac that gets cast, because the de Ville is the Cadillac everybody recognises, and the Eldorado of these two years looks so nearly identical to it that no set dresser had a reason to pay the difference. The badge mattered enormously in a Cadillac showroom in 1963. It has never mattered much to a camera.

The size is the first thing you live with. Two hundred and twenty-three inches of car on a 129.5 inch wheelbase does not fit a modern parking space, does not turn around in a suburban street, and drinks in proportion. Everything after that is ordinary 1960s American car ownership done at scale. Rust collects in the floors, trunk floor, lower quarters, rockers and body mounts, and on a convertible it is the area around the top well that catches people out, because a top that has leaked for thirty years soaks the structure underneath it. The top mechanism is hydraulic, driven by an electric pump, and cylinders and lines are a known consumable. So is the wiring, which on a car with power windows, power vent windows, a power seat and a power trunk lock has plenty of chances to go intermittent. Pot-metal trim pits and costs real money to replate properly. The mechanical side is the easy part: the 390 and the 429 are understressed, the drums work well when adjusted and freshly shod, and the Turbo Hydra-Matic in a 1964 is close to indestructible. Nothing here is mysterious. Nothing here is quick either.