1966 Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado Convertible – The Last Fading Ember of the Rear-Drive Eldorado

 

Today, the Cadillac Eldorado is best-remembered as Cadillac’s FWD personal luxury coupe, but before that, it was primarily a flashy RWD convertible — the top of the Cadillac line, more or less. Let’s take a closer look at this “Ember Firemist” 1966 Fleetwood Eldorado, one of the last rear-drive Eldorados, and consider what this model once represented for Cadillac.

 

Some people default to the top of the line in everything they can afford. This can be for many reasons: status; pride; having internalized that stupid Terry Pratchett homily about cheap goods being more expensive in the long run; or just a hatred of haggling. For people who’ve grown up poor and come into sudden success, the joy and relief in not having to pinch pennies or settle for less can be hard to resist.

 

For about 10 years, ending with the 1966 model year, it was for that group that I think Cadillac made the Eldorado convertible — called Eldorado Biarritz from 1956 to 1963, Fleetwood Eldorado thereafter.

 

The first Cadillac Eldorado, back in 1953, had been essentially a factory custom job, a limited-production, partly hand-built convertible with a variety of then-novel styling features, like a one-piece wraparound windscreen. It was extraordinarily expensive ($7,750 FOB Detroit, whose relative value MeasuringWorth estimates as close to $140,000 in 2025 dollars) and labor-intensive to build, so only 532 were produced, and subsequent iterations were less elaborate.

 

From 1956, there was a hardtop called Eldorado Seville, joined from 1957 by the rare four-door Eldorado Brougham, which made the original Eldorado seem cheap, but both were gone after 1960, leaving only the convertible.

 

This became progressively more ordinary throughout the early 1960s. The Eldorado didn’t look all that different from a Series 62 or De Ville convertible, and its former Tri-Power engine and air suspension had long since been dropped. Compared to its line-mates, it offered different exterior trim, more standard equipment, a more lavish leather-lined interior, and optional front bucket seats, but many of its interior features could be special-ordered on other models, and its standard equipment still didn’t include a radio, air conditioning, or cruise control. Since the Eldorado’s list price was around $1,000 more than a lower-line convertible, sales were modest. The Eldorado convertible’s best year had been 3,950 units, back in 1955, and sales hadn’t topped 2,300 a year since then. (The final tally for 1966 would be 2,250 cars.)

 

If the stylish FWD model hadn’t come along for 1967, the Eldorado might have faded away in a few more years, having long since become irrelevant. Unlike its FWD successor, the RWD Eldorado wasn’t a personal luxury car in the manner of the Ford Thunderbird — it was just a fancier Cadillac convertible, a straggler from the days when the most glamorous models were flashy convertibles, not specialty cars.

 

On the other hand, if the Eldorado convertible hadn’t existed already, Cadillac might have had to invent it, because it held a unique place in the lineup.

 

As you’ve probably noticed, many people don’t really know, or care to know, very much about cars. They do, however, recognize certain brands and have a certain amount of received wisdom about which are good or bad. I think it’s safe to say that in the ’60s, nearly anyone who had ever heard of an automobile had heard of Cadillac, and was aware that it was some kind of big deal. (It’s true that its cachet among the coastal intelligentsia was already fading, but it would be some years before that would become a serious problem for Cadillac.)

 

So, if any of those folks of low-to-average knowledge of cars happened to come into a stack of money and decide to spend some of on a fancy new car, there was a good chance they might end up in a Cadillac dealership, asking what would be the best, fanciest Cadillac they could get. Strictly as a matter of price, the answer was the Fleetwood 75, but that was mostly for livery services and the chauffeur-driven set. There was also the Fleetwood Sixty Special, but unless the prospective customer was over 50 and preoccupied with T-bills and sub-prime interest rates, this was probably a little too staid. For the bon vivant, the sweepstakes winner, the newly crowned star actor or athlete, or the middle-aged businessperson looking to treat themselves after a long year of worrying about T-bills and sub-prime interest, there was the Eldorado convertible.

 

The March 22, 1963 issue of TIME magazine carried a cover story about a voluble, charismatic young heavyweight boxer from Louisville named Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. — the once and future Muhammad Ali. TIME writers Nick Thimmesch and Charles Parmiter had talked to Clay about his then-imminent elimination bout at Madison Square Garden against Doug Jones.

 

The article quoted Clay as saying:

“That Jones!” hooted Cassius. “That ugly little man! I’ll annihilate him! You know what this fight means to me? A tomato-red Cadillac Eldorado convertible with white leather upholstery, air conditioning and hifi. That’s what the [sponsoring] group is giving me for a victory present. Can you picture me losing to this ugly bum Jones with that kind of swinging car waiting for me? I get sore, and Jones fall in four.”

Clay had indeed won that fight on March 13, albeit in 10 rounds rather than four, and afterwards, tobacco magnate William Sol Cutchins, a member of Clay’s Louisville Sponsoring Group, did indeed order him a new Cadillac convertible. However, as Jonathan Eig relates in his 2016 biography Ali: A Life —

Soon, he [Clay] was on his way to the Cadillac dealership in downtown Louisville.

“Tomato-red Cadillac convertible, I am here!” he shouted, throwing his arms in the air as he pushed open the glass door.

But when he saw the car Cutchins had ordered, Clay was crestfallen.

“It ain’t no Eldorado,” he said. “It ain’t no Eldorado at all. I don’t want it. I was supposed to get Eldorado. Call up Cutchins and tell him I don’t want it.”

This Cadillac was one notch below an Eldorado, with a bit less chrome and absent some of the Eldorado’s trim. The manager of the showroom said he could get the Eldorado, but it would take a month. Clay, cooling off, said he would wait.

The lower-trimmed convertible in 1963 was the Series 62, which was hardly a bargain special (its base price was $5,590), and if you parked it next to an Eldorado, I doubt more than about one person in 20 could have told you which was which unless they were close enough to read the badges.

 

However, that wasn’t the point. Clay knew the Eldorado was the best, the poshest, the most glamorous, the most enviable, and that was what he had been promised: an Eldorado, tomato-red (“Frost Red” in the catalog), white leather, top of the line — nothing but the greatest for the Greatest.

 

One can get used to that sort of thing, if the money holds out. The original purchaser of the Ember Firemist 1966 Eldorado pictured below had also had a 1963 Eldorado Biarritz, which they traded in when they bought the 1966 car at a Chicago dealership on December 10, 1965. The salesman allowed them a generous $3,000.65 on the ’63, about $500 over book value, perhaps because the purchaser ordered their ’66 with nearly every available option, including $35 of undercoating and a $275 set of Vogue gold-stripe tires. Total price with destination charge was $8,353.65 (a relative worth of almost $97,500 in 2025 dollars), less the trade-in allowance. The buyer paid the $5,353 balance on delivery, probably in cash.

 

Although the 1965–1966 Eldorado was now classed with the Fleetwood line (before, the model had been numbered as a De Ville), its external distinctiveness had further eroded. The Eldorado now had Fleetwood crests and a different rear grille from the De Ville and Calais; the body-side molding was lower than on a De Ville; and there was bright trim on the rocker panels, but that was about it.

 

Inside, there were slabs of real walnut on the door panels and rear quarters, and upholstery in what Cadillac called “maximum leather.” According to the data book, only the door coverings and a portion of the front seat back were vinyl.

 

The De Ville convertible also had perforated leather upholstery, but there was a lot more genuine cowhide in the Eldorado, which also had different trim patterns.

 

The whole Cadillac line had been fully redesigned for 1965, so there weren’t many changes for 1966: a new grille, new pistons to address an oil consumption issue, a few new options, and standard seat belts both front and rear. (In 1965, they’d only been standard in front.) Outside California, where GM’s Air Injection Reactor was now fitted, the biggest and most useful mechanical change was new variable-ratio power steering, which required a mere 2.4 turns lock-to-lock while providing more feel in highway driving.

 

As before, the 429 cu. in. (7,008 cc) V-8 supplied more-than-adequate grunt even in such heavy cars (my guess at the Ember Firemist car’s curb weight, based on the AMA specifications, is close to 4,880 lb): 0 to 60 in less than 10 seconds, the standing quarter mile in the low 17s, a top speed of around 115 mph. If you weren’t overly intimidated by its sheer size and accepted that the Cadillac definition of “handling” had far more to do with close-quarters parking maneuverability than fast transient response or cornering grip, the only real sour note was that the brakes would get hot and fade noticeably in repeated use. (Standard Cadillacs wouldn’t offer front discs until 1968, although they would be optional for the FWD Eldorado in 1967.)

 

If for some reason you weren’t approaching your new car purchase like you’d just won the lottery, I’m not sure buying one of these final RWD Eldorado convertibles made much sense. The interior was nice, true, but so was the De Ville’s, and with the exception of the wood trim (which wasn’t necessarily the most desirable on a convertible anyway), delving into the color and trim sections of the Cadillac order book would let you match most of the Eldorado’s lavishness for hundreds of dollars less elsewhere in the line.

 

However, the Eldorado was for people who enjoyed not having to fuss about such things, and Cadillac must have sold just enough of them to keep this model alive, an occasional big-ticket item to add some extra cream to the Cadillac salesperson’s coffee.

 

The 1967 Eldorado was a different animal: far more technologically ambitious, a magnificent design in a somewhat different category of high-end specialty cars. It sold much better than the Fleetwood Eldorado convertible had, but it took Cadillac into a new era of market fragmentation, which would see the once fairly unitary lineup splinter into different segments of different sizes and classes, not always with good results.

 

1966 was really the last time a buyer walking into a Cadillac showroom looking for the fanciest and flashiest model would find a straightforward answer, whether they were a serial Eldorado buyer from Chicago, a lottery-winning Ohio housewife, or a 23-year-old heavyweight from Kentucky. A decade or so later, after introductions of the FWD Eldorado, the relatively compact but very expensive 1976 Seville, and the downsized 1977 C-body line, asking for the top of the line of “The Standard of the World” would become a much different and more complicated proposition.

Related Reading

Car Show Classic: 1955 Cadillac Eldorado – If Only It Could Talk (by Greg Beckenbaugh)
1960 Cadillac Eldorado Seville: An Artifact Of The Tomorrow That Never Was (by me)
CC Global: 1963 Cadillac Eldorado – Fabled City of Gold Discovered (by Robert Kim)
Cohort Pic(k) of the Day: 1964 Cadillac Eldorado Convertible – Cadillac Tosses The Fender Skirts Once Again, To Good Effect (by Paul N)
Vintage CL Road Test: 1966 Cadillac Calais – The “Economy Cadillac” (by Paul N)
Curbside Classic: 1965-66 Cadillac Sedan DeVille – The King’s Last Stand (by Laurence Jones)
Vintage Reviews And Commentary: 1967-1968 Cadillac Eldorado – The King Of Cadillac From When Cadillac Was King (by GN)