The 1967 Cadillac Eldorado is a milestone Cadillac by any standard. Rakish, sophisticated, and surprisingly sporty, it was the division’s first front-wheel-drive car and its first serious entry in the burgeoning personal luxury genre. This week, we explore the story of the first FWD Eldorado.

Author’s note: An earlier version of this article first appeared in August 2009. We’ve completely rewritten and expanded it, clearing up some errors and misconceptions and adding new information and new images.

ELDORADO ORIGINS

Cadillac’s first Eldorado was born in the early fifties, but the model’s conceptual roots go back to the mid-thirties, when GM styling chief Harley Earl convinced a wary Cadillac management to approve a stylish new image leader: the 1938 Sixty Special. The work of a young designer named Bill Mitchell, the Sixty Special was mechanically unremarkable, but it justified its higher price with sophisticated styling. It was a commercial success, selling around 21,000 units between 1938 and 1942, and proved highly influential. Unlike the flagship V-16, which disappeared after 1940, the Sixty Special became a permanent part of the Cadillac line, although later editions were less distinctive.

Around 1951, Cadillac conceived a new image leader: the Eldorado convertible, which debuted in January 1953. Like the original Sixty Special, it was a showcase for advanced styling features, including cut-down fenders and Cadillac’s first wraparound windshield. It was expensive to build, however, and with a lofty $7,750 price tag — more than twice as much as a Series 62 sedan — it was not a volume seller. Cadillac built only 532 for 1953. Subsequent Eldorados were more like other Cadillacs, allowing a lower price and more comfortable profit margins. Sales remained modest, reaching a peak of 6,050 units in 1956, when a hardtop coupe called Eldorado Seville was added to the line.

Roughly a year after the debut of the first Eldorado, Harley Earl began pushing for an even more upscale four-door hardtop model, the Eldorado Brougham. As originally conceived, the Brougham was to be both a styling leader and an engineering flagship, with fuel injection, disc brakes, a rear transaxle, and independent rear suspension. Cadillac’s engineering staff was leery of its likely costs, but the corporation eventually approved it as a rival for Ford’s forthcoming Continental Mark II.

Many of the Brougham’s engineering features were subsequently dropped for cost reasons, but the production car debuted in early 1957, sporting air suspension, a full list of power accessories, and a towering $13,074 list price, enough to buy three Series 62 hardtops. Unfortunately, the market for such high-end cars had turned out to be much softer than expected. Cadillac sold only 400 Eldorado Broughams in 1957 and an additional 304 in the 1958 model year, and it’s likely that the division lost a lot of money on them.

Nonetheless, Cadillac introduced a second-generation Brougham in January 1959, more conservatively styled than before, but still priced at over $13,000. To reduce labor costs, it was now built by Pinin Farina in Turin, although the car was styled in Detroit.

With the U.S. economy still in the throes of recession, the new Brougham was not heavily promoted and Cadillac’s contract with Farina apparently called for only 100 cars per year. Total production for 1959 was actually 99, followed by 101 of the mildly restyled 1960 version. We don’t know if Cadillac made money on them or not, but given their unique glass, trim, and exterior sheet metal, as well as the cost of transatlantic shipping, it seems unlikely.

By mid-1959, the Brougham’s days were numbered. Ford had already given up on the Mark II, rolling the Continental Division back into Lincoln. The Eldorado Brougham was dropped after the 1960 model year, although retired GM designer Pierre Ollier says its styling had a strong influence on Cadillac’s 1961 line. The Eldorado Seville hardtop was dropped at the same time, leaving the convertible, which survived through the 1966 model year.

THE XP-715 AND XP-727

While the demand for ultra-luxury flagships was limited, the arrival of the four-seat Ford Thunderbird in January 1958 revealed a robust market in a somewhat lower price bracket. The new Thunderbird was a curious hybrid — not really a sports car, not quite a luxury car — but it offered flashy styling and reasonable practicality for a high but attainable price. It was an immediate hit and caught GM off-guard.

Around the middle of 1959, Bill Mitchell, who had recently succeeded Harley Earl as GM’s VP of styling, assigned designer Ned Nickles to develop a new Thunderbird-style personal luxury car. Nickles’ initial concept — intended for Cadillac, but developed in a separate Special Projects studio — was a sleek, six-passenger convertible whose styling evoked the 1939–1940 LaSalle, Cadillac’s long-departed companion make. At Mitchell’s suggestion, it subsequently became a hardtop coupe with a sharp-edged roofline inspired by a custom-bodied Rolls-Royce Mitchell had spotted on a recent trip to London. The full-size clay model of Nickles’ design, the XP-715, was badged “LaSalle II.”

Around the same time, the Cadillac styling studio, then led by Charles M. Jordan, was exploring its own ideas for a sporty personal car, conceived by Cadillac assistant general sales manager Tom La Rue and assistant chief engineer Dan Adams as an eventual replacement for the Eldorado Brougham. By October 1959, this project had yielded a full-size model, dubbed XP-727. We’ve been unable to find any photos of the first XP-727, but it was probably at least broadly similar to the XP-715 — both were two-door hardtops, with five-passenger capacity and long-hood/short-deck proportions in the mold of prewar Classics. The most dramatic difference between the two was the possibility that the XP-727 might have front-wheel drive.

GM’s corporate Engineering Staff had been toying with front-wheel drive since at least 1954 and had at least one Cadillac-engined test mule by 1958. In late 1959, a small group of Cadillac engineers, including Lester Milliken, who had developed the Brougham’s air suspension, joined their counterparts from the corporate staff to conduct winter testing of the FWD prototypes. Details about those test mules are scarce, but it appears they had transverse engines, like Oldsmobile’s first FWD prototype, which was completed a few months later. (We don’t know if they also had a similar dual chain drive system, although it seems likely.)

Although the FWD prototypes performed well on snow and ice, the XP-727 project apparently stalled by early 1960. According to Chuck Jordan, Cadillac proposed the personal car idea to the corporate Engineering Policy Committee, which said no. If Cadillac really lost as much money on the earlier Eldorado Broughams as some observers have suggested, that’s not surprising; we assume the business case for a Brougham replacement was not strong, particularly factoring in the additional expense of front-wheel drive.

Beyond that, Cadillac general manager Harold Warner appears to have been at best ambivalent about the idea of adding another line. Shortly afterward, he rejected Mitchell’s XP-715 proposal, another personal car idea originally intended as a revival of the LaSalle marque. That project had the support of GM president Jack Gordon (who Mitchell said had been getting an earful from dealers demanding to know why GM had no answer to the Thunderbird), but Warner passed, seeing no need for such a car.

As author Michael Lamm has observed, Cadillac was then pushing the limits of its production capacity (which by late 1962 would prompt Warner to initiate a major expansion program), but Warner also had good reason to be satisfied with the status quo. Demand for new Cadillacs was very strong and Cadillac’s badge cachet was at its peak, so adding a cheaper companion make — particularly a more stylish one — would have been a questionable business decision, Thunderbird or no. There was still an argument to be made that Cadillac needed a personal car, but at that point, the division didn’t need a new LaSalle.