Cadillac Eldorado 7th Gen

1965 is the year Bill Mitchell's sheer look finished its work at Cadillac. The fins, a fixture since 1948, were flattened into a downward-canted edge that most people simply read as gone, and the quad headlamps stacked vertically, which let the grille run the full width of the nose and gave the car its wide-eyed stare. Side glass curved for the first time in the division's history, frameless on the convertible, so the car looks lower with the roof down than any Cadillac before it. The Eldorado's own identity here is made by subtraction: no bodyside moulding at all, wide bright rocker trim, Fleetwood crests on the hood and deck lid, and a rear grille of its own. Park it next to a de Ville convertible and the empty flank is what gives it away. For 1966 the grille mesh coarsened and gained a thick centre bar, the cornering lamps became separate rectangles, the rear was freshened and the whole car wore less brightwork. One curiosity sits behind the generation. GM Styling and Fisher Body built XP-850, a 1965 Fleetwood Eldorado fitted with a flush Infora top and a powered glass window, chasing Lincoln's flush roofline. It never reached production.

Cadillac entered nothing, and by 1965 there was nothing in the catalogue to enter with. The 429 came one way only, a single four-barrel and 340 hp, and had done since 1964; the last Eldorado you could order with more carburettors than a de Ville was a 1960. Add a 224-inch body, drum brakes at all four corners and an automatic with no manual alternative anywhere in the range, and no class in North American racing had a box this car fitted into. The clearest measure of where the engine stood is who was not buying it. In exactly these years European constructors were shopping in Detroit for V8s, and they came home with Chevrolet and Chrysler. Iso's Grifo and the Gordon-Keeble both took the 327, and Jensen's 1966 Interceptor took the Chrysler 383. Nobody built a grand tourer around a Cadillac 429. What did go racing was the hardware being prepared to replace this car. Hurst's Hairy Olds, an exhibition machine carrying a supercharged Oldsmobile 425 and a Toronado transaxle at each end, ran at Bakersfield in March 1966 specifically to show off Oldsmobile's new chain-driven front-drive package. That package became the 1967 Eldorado's.

The 1965 body is one of the most recognisable American shapes of the decade, and almost none of that recognition belongs to the Eldorado. When a film needs a mid-sixties Cadillac it casts a de Ville, sometimes the same one twice. The cream 1966 Coupe de Ville that Michael Madsen drove in Reservoir Dogs was his own car, restored and repainted decades later to become Rick Dalton's in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The Eldorado's own screen record is thinner than that. The best catalogued sighting of a 1965 Fleetwood Eldorado is a background car in an episode of the Batman television series, identified by spotters from its bare flank rather than from any badge. That is the honest position, and it says something true about the car. In 1966 Cadillac had its best model year yet at 196,675 cars, and the Eldorado was 2,250 of them, sitting in showrooms beside de Villes it barely differed from. A name that had meant an entirely separate machine in 1953 now meant a very well trimmed convertible, and the public largely stopped being able to point at one. The nameplate got its distinctiveness back in 1967, in a way nobody could miss.

Everything about owning one starts with the dimensions. This is 224 inches of car on a 129.5 inch wheelbase, which fits no modern parking bay and turns around in about the space of a small roundabout, and the marque's own reference figures for fuel consumption run from 8 to 14 mpg depending entirely on your right foot. After that it is ordinary 1960s American convertible ownership carried out at scale. Rust settles in the floors, trunk pan, rockers, lower fenders, door bottoms, rear quarters and body mounts, and above all in the structure around the top well, because a roof that has leaked for years soaks the metal underneath it. The top is hydraulic, run by an electric pump, and the cylinders, hoses and pump are consumables rather than surprises. The level control system adds a compressor and a pair of Superlift shocks to the list of things that can quietly stop working. Power windows, the power seat, switches, relays and grounds all age, and chasing an intermittent circuit is the classic winter evening with one of these. The mechanical side is the easy part. The 429 is understressed, the Turbo Hydra-Matic is close to indestructible, and the drums are fine when properly adjusted.