Cadillac Eldorado 9th Gen

The 1971 car was Wayne Kady's, and he says so himself: promoted in August 1968 to run a new advanced Cadillac studio under Bill Mitchell, it was the first car he was responsible for, and he has named it his favourite of everything he drew. The language is sharply crowned separate front fenders, a bevelled hood carrying a spring-loaded laurel wreath and crest, fender skirts back over the rear wheels, and a fixed opera window in the coupe's rear quarter that Detroit then copied for a decade. Kady's own reservation is the most honest line anyone has offered about the car: it grew bigger than the studio wanted, and the narrower proportions of the earlier Eldorado were lost. After that the regulations did the styling. The 1973 facelift brought a massive eggcrate grille with new bumpers, decklid, rear fenders and tail lamps; 1974 added a rear bumper built to the five mile per hour standard; 1975 squared off the headlamps; 1977 laid the grille flat under a brushed chrome moulding and moved the tail lamps into the bumper tips. By 1978 there was nothing left to change but the grille.

Cadillac raced nothing in the 1970s and had nothing to race with: by 1975 the 500 cubic inch V8 made 190 net horsepower in a car weighing more than two and a half tons, and no series anywhere had a class for it. The nameplate does appear at a racetrack in an official capacity exactly once, and it landed on the darkest race meeting the Speedway has ever held. A Cotillion White Eldorado convertible paced the 1973 Indianapolis 500, driven by Jim Rathmann, who had won the race in 1960. It was only the second front-wheel-drive pace car in the event's history, after a Cord L-29 in 1930, and the first Cadillac-badged one since a V-12 in 1931. Cadillac built 566: two ran on the track, 53 were track and festival cars, the rest went to dealers as replicas with a dash plaque. The race was a disaster. Art Pollard was killed in practice on 12 May. The start on 28 May produced an eleven-car crash that injured eleven spectators. Rain wiped out two days. When it finally ran on 30 May, Swede Savage crashed on lap 59 and later died of his injuries, crewman Armando Teran was struck and killed in the pit lane, and rain stopped it at 133 laps.

No car carries the 1970s more literally. In Super Fly (1972) the dealer Youngblood Priest drives a 1971 Eldorado worked over by Les Dunham Coachworks of New Jersey: covered headlamps, a Rolls-style goddess on the nose, lake pipes, porthole windows. The car was not a prop. It belonged to a Harlem hustler credited as K.C., who also appears in the film. What followed was a national customising trend, and the Eldorado became the exact shape the word pimpmobile describes, which is both why the car reads instantly to anyone over forty and why so many were modified past recovery. The other screen credit is a straight one: the white 1971 Eldorado convertible that Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo take across the desert in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) is Hunter S. Thompson's White Whale made literal. Beyond the screen, the 1976 convertible had a cultural moment of its own. Fourteen thousand Americans bought a car specifically because they had been told nobody would ever be able to buy one again, and a great many of them drove it straight into a garage and left it there.

Living with one is mostly a question of scale. It is more than eighteen and a half feet long, it returns 10 to 13 mpg on a good day, and parking is a planning exercise. Everything else is ordinary 1970s American car ownership. The 500 and the 425 are understressed and will run a very long time given an honest cooling system and a correctly set carburettor, and the chain-driven THM425 rarely lets go, though it is a serious job when it does. What actually consumes an owner's time is the periphery: the automatic climate control's servo and amplifier, seat and window motors, door locks, the trunk pull-down, and fifty-year-old grounds behind the dash. Convertible tops leak eventually and the leak reaches the floors. The bumper fillers crumble on schedule. Fuel-injected cars from 1975 on want somebody who knows the Bendix system rather than somebody who wants to fit a carburettor over it. None of this is mysterious and none of it is exotic, which is the point: this is a car an ordinary mechanic can keep on the road on an ordinary budget, which very few things with this much presence can claim.