Junkyard Find: 1962 Cadillac Sedan DeVille

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

The brain-melting Colorado yard must have a couple thousand pre-1970 cars scattered about its several square miles of land on the Colorado High Plains just east of Pikes Peak. That means I’ll never run out of Junkyard Finds there! While most of my Brain-Melting Junkyard posts have featured non-Big-Three products, there’s some pretty good stuff made by The General among the Kaisers and Willys (Willyses?). Today we’ll look at a sunbleached but solid-looking ’62 Cadillac.

This car has been sitting for a decade of two. Every winter, it hides beneath the snow. Every summer, the High Plains sun applies jillions-o-joules.

The four-door hardtop Cadillacs of this era aren’t as desirable as the coupes and convertibles, so it’s likely that this car is worth more in parts than as a restoration candidate.

But you never know what will happen to the values of cars like this; perhaps its value will be much higher in another decade.






Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

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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  • Doug-g Doug-g on Jul 28, 2013

    1962 was the year I fell for Cadillacs. I was all of six. Chick, my dad's friend, bought a white Fleetwood Sixty Special with the white and black interior. I can still recall sitting in that car and thinking it was the pinnacle of motordom. Nearly 51 years have passed and I still love Cadillacs even though they've let me down several times over the years.

  • CAMeyer CAMeyer on Jul 30, 2013

    Was there a rusty Don Draper in this car?

  • Bkojote @Lou_BC I don't know how broad of a difference in capability there is between 2 door and 4 door broncos or even Wranglers as I can't speak to that from experience. Generally the consensus is while a Tacoma/4Runner is ~10% less capable on 'difficult' trails they're significantly more pleasant to drive on the way to the trails and actually pleasant the other 90% of the time. I'm guessing the Trailhunter narrows that gap even more and is probably almost as capable as a 4 Door Bronco Sasquatch but significantly more pleasant/fuel efficient on the road. To wit, just about everyone in our group with a 4Runner bought a second set of wheels/tires for when it sees road duty. Everyone in our group with a Bronco bought a second vehicle...
  • Aja8888 No.
  • 2manyvettes Since all of my cars have V8 gas engines (with one exception, a V6) guess what my opinion is about a cheap EV. And there is even a Tesla supercharger all of a mile from my house.
  • Cla65691460 April 24 (Reuters) - A made-in-China electric vehicle will hit U.S. dealers this summer offering power and efficiency similar to the Tesla Model Y, the world's best-selling EV, but for about $8,000 less.
  • FreedMike It certainly wouldn't hurt. But let's think about the demographic here. We're talking people with less money to spend, so it follows that many of them won't have a dedicated place to charge up. Lots of them may be urban dwellers. That means they'll be depending on the current charging infrastructure, which is improving, but isn't "there" yet. So...what would help EV adoption for less-well-heeled buyers, in my opinion, is improved charging options. We also have to think about the 900-pound gorilla in the room, namely: how do automakers make this category more profitable? The answer is clear: you go after margin, which means more expensive vehicles. That goes a long way to explaining why no one's making cheap EVS for our market. So...maybe cheaper EVs aren't all that necessary in the short term.
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