Junkyard Find: This One Really Hurts
Before GM delivered a one-two-three punch to Cadillac’s image with the Seville, V8-6-4 engine, and Cimarron, the first of the front-wheel-drive Eldorados attained some sort of zenith for strip-club-owner-grade, ridiculous-yet-awesome Detroit Iron. Here’s a ’68 Eldo that will never drive the Las Vegas Strip again.
It’s very rough, though the only severe rust seems to be concentrated beneath the vinyl top— a common GM problem of the era.
You’d have to be really motivated to spend what it would take to fix this rot, and this car’s last owner probably saw that scrap steel was going for $250/ton and decided he or she would take the 600 bucks rather than try to fix the Cadillac.
472 cubic inches driving the front wheels via huge chains! Amazingly, this system worked quite well.
I think I’d prefer a Coupe de Ville, were I going for a late ’60s Cadillac, but the Eldorado of the era made the kind of statement that GM hasn’t been able to make for decades. This car will be missed.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Noticed the Window Lock switch had three settings...Normal, Lock, and Emergency. Anyone here know what the Emergency setting was for?
Given Jay Leno's work on his RWD Oldsmobile Toronado, I could imagine him giving this Eldorado the 'V-Series' treatment with the E-Rod engine.