I’ve always thought it was a shame that GM never installed its clever Unitized Power Package front-wheel-drive powertrain in a full-size station wagon rather than just in personal luxury coupes and the massive GMC Motorhome. However, outside coachbuilders did create some wagon conversions of the FWD Cadillac Eldorado, like this odd-looking metallic orange “el Clásico” wagon made by Michigan’s Wisco Corp.
First used on the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado, the Unitized Power Package (UPP) was one of GM’s cleverest ideas. It took a mostly stock V-8 engine, offset slightly to the right, with a modified Turbo Hydra-Matic transmission rotated 180 degrees and tucked along the left of the engine, driven off the torque converter by a Morse Hi-Vo chain drive. A planetary differential split power between the drive shafts, one of which passed under the engine sump.
The UPP wasn’t cheap, and there were some additional frictional losses from the chain drive, but it was compact, rugged, and didn’t flinch under big block V-8 torque. It would have been ideal for a van or a full-size station wagon designed to take advantage of its tidy packaging efficiency. Unfortunately, the cost of the system discouraged GM from ever offering it on any passenger models other than personal luxury cars (the Toronado, Cadillac Eldorado, and later the Buick Riviera and Cadillac Seville), which needed it least. Between 1974 and 1978, the Toronado powertrain was also used in the GMC Motorhome, but that was much too big for daily chores, and very expensive to boot.
Some affluent owners nonetheless saw the opportunity to turn the big GM personal luxury coupes into posh station wagons. One of the best-known (a very relative term when it comes to coachbuilt custom conversions) was the 1969 Cadillac Eldorado “Casa de Eldorado” [sic] Custom Sport Wagon, created by George Barris (of Batmobile fame) for Dean Martin. (Barris eventually built roughly a dozen of these conversions for well-heeled customers.)
The Martin/Barris car still exists, somewhat the worse for wear, and turned up at Donington Auctions in Australia in February 2024, fetching $9,500 AUD. Although it has some tacky touches, like the body-side vinyl spears and the tacked-on “side mount” humps on the front fenders, its basic shooting brake shape and basket-handle B-pillar are generally pleasing.
Unfortunately, most of these conversions didn’t score highly in practicality. The Casa de Eldorado wagon was particularly hampered by the intrusive rear fuel filler panel. I assume that the cost of relocating the fuel tank and filler was deemed excessive, even for wealthy customers. Celebrity-commissioned conversions like this were usually fashion statements, to be cast aside when the owner got bored with it.
Here’s another conversion, one of about eight performed by the American Sunroof Corporation (ASC) based on the 1972 Eldorado. The white one shown here, which has Montana license plates, was supposedly once owned by stunt performer Evel Knievel. It turned up at Bonhams in October 2023, selling for £6,240.
The seller optimistically claimed there was “just some light surface rust poking through the paint,” but all of the underhood and underbody shots suggested that the whole thing might vanish in a cloud of ferrous oxide dust if someone stomped their feet too hard in its vicinity. Also, while the red leather cabin looked in good shape, there was a suspicious lack of photos of the converted cargo area, which was piled with stray pieces of the non-running engine. Still, as a styling exercise, this ASC wagon was not too bad, marred by a few heavy-handed touches like the absurd Parthenon-like grille.
I’m not going to try to provide a rundown of Eldorado-based customs — the (New) Cadillac Database has a photo gallery, if you want to see more — but the Barris and ASC conversions provide some context for our featured wagon, which was converted by Wisco Corp. in Michigan. I wasn’t able to find a lot of information on Wisco (which should not be confused with the Chinese steel company of the same name), but it was originally based in Roseville, Michigan, north of Detroit, and later moved to 10711 North End Ave. in Ferndale. At some point, it was bought out by ASC and became ASC Wisco Corporation.
Wisco Corp. did a variety of custom work, including the occasional limousine conversion. In 1975, they built a special 1976 Fleetwood Brougham conversion for King Khalid bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, designed with “advisory help” from Dollie Ann Cole, wife of former GM president Ed Cole.
However it seems like a lot of Wisco jobs were less elaborate, the usual array of landau tops and Continental kits so popular with the hey-look-at-me set in the ’70s and early ’80s.
The “el Clásico” badge seems to have been applied generally to Wisco conversions rather than being specific to these wagons.
A dealer badge on the rear deck indicates that this Mandarin Orange Eldorado, which was originally a coupe, was purchased from Franklin Cadillac in Cincinnati. The conversion may have been commissioned by the dealer on the buyer’s behalf, not uncommon with this kind of job.
Mandarin Orange, incidentally, was a regular Cadillac paint option in 1975 — I’ve seen several unmodified Cadillacs in this color.
Candidly, I think this is a very awkward-looking wagon, with its camel hump roof and mismatched rear windows. The Barris and ASC conversions, for all their incidental departures from good taste, were palatable enough as basic shapes — were it in better shape, the Barris wagon might even qualify as “jaunty.” The Wisco conversion looks distressingly homemade. Considered as a shooting brake, I’d say Wisco brought a cartoon mallet to a gunfight.
The roof, tailgate, and quarter windows were apparently salvaged from a contemporary GM A-body station wagon, like this 1974 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser.
One of the weirder elements is the triangular filler plate at the leading edge of each rear side window, which seems to have been necessitated by trying to integrate the roof of the four-door A-body wagon with the Eldorado’s cobbled-together C-pillars. I have no idea how much this wagon conversion originally cost — probably at least $25,000, since a loaded stock Eldorado coupe ran to more than $12,000 in 1975 — but crude details like this made a strong case for just buying a Ford LTD Country Squire.
Unlike the Barris and ASC wagons pictured earlier, the cargo area is in reasonably good condition, but it’s narrow and rather shallow.
Part of the reason the bay is so shallow is that Wisco took the trouble to give this wagon a flip-up rear-facing third seat. This is no doubt a conversation piece, but exactly who or what might condescend to sit back there is another matter. Unlike a typical 8- or 9-passenger wagon, there’s no footwell to speak of, so children would have to crouch with their knees up. Also, even Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was only 4’8″ as an adult, might have been troubled by the proximity of the rear glass to his face, a consequence of the forward slope of the tailgate.
The space saver spare is concealed on the right side, which is sensible.
However, if you really wanted to make a practical wagon out of this platform, you’d need to redesign and/or relocate the Eldorado’s massive 27-gallon fuel tank, which occupies most of the space under the trunk floor, with the filler behind the rear bumper.
If you’re wondering why so many of these wagon conversions have vinyl roofs, the answer is that heavily padded vinyl covers a lot of metalworking scars. I assume if you were to strip away the vinyl and padding, the metal underneath would look like Frankenstein’s monster. Still, the very visible central seam strikes me as another low-rent touch.
I’ve never had a chance to ride in one of these conversions, so I don’t know how the conversion work affects the interior noise level. A ’70s Eldorado was not fast, nimble, or economical, but people normally expected them to be serenely quiet inside.
You can at least see out, although the interior detailing seems clumsy, even accounting for 50+ years of wear and tear.
The 1975 Eldorado had a 500-cid engine, which was why the 27-gallon fuel tank was so necessary. It wasn’t especially powerful for its size, and, embarrassingly, it actually had less torque than the Oldsmobile 455-cid V-8 in the mechanically similar Toronado. However, it did have enough grunt for a wagon like this, which probably weighed upwards of 5,500 lb.
At the time it showed up on Bring a Trailer in 2021, this wagon was a “50-footer,” with some ominous bubbling around the edges, and the underbody looked almost as orange as the paint. The driver’s side door also looks like it’s drooping, which doesn’t inspire confidence on a car that’s had this kind of structural surgery. Except for the bubbling on the tailgate, the actual wagon conversion pieces seem to have held up well, so it seems like Wisco Corp. did their work competently, if not very prettily. Still, the seller seemed to have an exaggerated idea of this wagon’s value — it didn’t sell at a high bid of $9,000 USD.
I don’t imagine there would have been much market for a factory Eldorado station wagon, but I still can’t help thinking there was a missed opportunity here, something between the 5,200 lb 2+2 of the stock Eldorado (or Toronado) coupes and these expensive, often tasteless conversion jobs, that could have taken fuller advantage of the compactness and muscle of the UPP powertrain. I guess we’ll never know.
Related Reading
Curbside Classic: 1973 Cadillac Eldorado Convertible – Lipstick On A Barge (by Tatra87)
Cohort Classic: 1975 Cadillac Eldorado – Frozen In Time (by Paul N)
Vintage PR Photo: 1976 Cadillac Eldorado Comstock Sport Wagon – Looks Like A Hatchback To Me (by Paul N)
Curbside Classic: 1975 Buick Estate Wagon – The Biggest And Longest American Station Wagon Ever (by Paul N)
Curbside Classic: 1975 Ford Country Squire – The Car That Made Di-Noc Millions (by Tom Klockau)
A Toronado wagon perhaps?
A Cadillac wagon might be a hard sell to GM top brass, but Oldsmobile could slot a vehicle above the Vista Cruiser
Not a Toronado wagon per se, but maybe a luxury wagon in the Toronado price class, with some thought to arranging the cabin and cargo area (and the fuel tank under them) to actually take advantage of the lack of a driveshaft tunnel or a bulky live axle. GM had done a concept vehicle along those lines in the ’50s, but that was way before the Toronado project, so they didn’t have a powertrain for it other than some convoluted mock-ups. Later, they actually had a powertrain package that would have been idea for it, but never used it for anything like that.
I’m reasonably sure factory GM cars from that era had a seam right up the middle of the vinyl top. I know my mother’s 76 Cutlass S sedan did, so it’s not a step down from GM practice at least.
Most vinyl roofs obviously had seams, with varying levels of obtrusiveness — it’s the prominence of this one (which makes it look like the roof is held together with Scotch tape) that I find objectionable, given what this thing probably cost.
The ’74 Vista Cruiser is a handsome car. Especially in the dark brown with Super Stock wheels. I’d much rather have one of them fully decked out than this abomination.
You could probably have had three of them fully decked out for what this Eldowagon cost.
That square window in front of the colonnade wagon window looks to be from a de Ville. Doesn’t really fit the space well.
I’ve long thought that the UPP/front-drive platform should have been used for a wagon, where the flat floor could have made even a 2-row car a comfortable 6-seater. It had the width certainly, something the smaller 1979-85 versions really didn’t.
The UPP is a survivor; I think I see as many GMC motorhomes now as I see Eldorado’s or Toronado’s. The history of the American full-size van might have been quite different if GM had used it in that application, though it might have been better downsized to small-block proportions. Imagine the low floor and usable cargo room of a ProMaster fifty years earlier. With a Bedford version (maybe with a Perkins diesel) to compete against similar European vans.
It seems Cadillac could have adapted the UPP for commercial vehicles, i.e. a hearse, and made things easier on the pallbearers.
Or offered a UPP FWD version of the Cadillac commercial chassis and let third-party coachbuilders run with it.
I’m not sure that I understand the idea that the UPP (or FWD in general) is a great idea for a station wagon or anything that tows or hauls loads. Adding cargo or tongue weight to the rear would reduce the weight over the drive wheels. That’s not optimal, for it would affect traction and steering.
In the modern world, the FWD RAM ProMaster van has (I believe) lower weight and towing capacities than its RWD counterparts from Ford and Mercedes, the tradeoff being a lower cargo floor in the RAM. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad van, but it has limitations.
I realize that these Eldorado conversions probably weren’t used for heavy loads, but I think the premise that FWD was better in this case is flawed.
I am a fan of two door ‘long-roof’ wagons and a fan of Eldorado’s. I have seen images of concept Eldorado wagons and some look beautiful. Unfortunately, the feature car just looks cobbled together, awful.
I have never seen an Eldo wagon in person but did see a 1976 (or 77) Eldo pickup conversion about 1979 when I lived in Houston. I attended a cocktail party at a house-warming party for a friend-of-friend. Being an Interior Designer I have experienced some mega homes, mostly horrible/tasteless, but this 2-bedroom 3,500 sf abode was exquisite both in its architectural & interior design, worthy of publication in Architectural Digest. The home owner, whom I had not previously met, greeted people at the front door with Texas style hospitality. He saw me park my white w/red interior 1976 Eldo conv. in the entrance courtyard, top down of course. I introduced myself, and first thing he said to me was “who made my car?”. Slightly taken back, I said General Motors. He grabbed my arm and off to see his white w/red interior Eldo pickup. At the time I did think it was beautiful.
Later become friends with my host and he was a really nice, down-to-earth ex-cattle rancher. A Texas rancher who hit big oil in the 1970s, ditched the wife, moved to the big city, built a home to celebrate a new phase of his life. He surrounded himself with people from the arts & design community.
My take on all this was perhaps people who bought these Cadillac conversations in the 1970s was a statement of both current fashion and lifestyle, not for utility. Why else would a down to earth rancher, with new money, buy a Cadillac pickup? When I was in my mid-20s and bought my new Eldo conv. it was not because it was a Cadillac. It was a convertible and I just loved the body style, and still do.
I really like the Barris / Martin Sports Wagon, not designed for utility .
Bummer it’s so rough now .
The lack of lower foot room isn’t an issue for children, all my foster boys wanted to ride in the third row of my 1984 Graymarket Mercedes 300TD .
In the 1950’s Fisher body (IIRC) made lots of Cadillac “Flower Cars” that were essentially pickup trucks, I lusted after one all through the 60’s .
-Nate
I can’t give too many compliments to the feature car, but – judging from the photos – the leading edge of the upper part of the roof exactly matches the angle of the rear fender directly below it. Somebody apparently cared enough to make sure of that.
YIKES!
That roof is hideous.
As mentioned in the article, the Barris ones look more.. (not sure if ‘normal’ is the correct word).. acceptable?
(Sans the silly sim spare tire fender humps).
Cadillac eventually sold a ‘luxury wagon’, the Escalade. (ok, a ‘tall AWD wagon’, but wagon Bones none the less). I think a factory Caddy wagon in 60’s & 70’s coulda worked. Real wagon, not one of these silly things pictured, or a hearse.
YMMV.
T
Now I know what a cut down Eldorado with a pickup truck cap bolted to it would look like. It’s hard to believe that someone made an effort to achieve this look.
European perspective here. The UK used to be world leaders in ‘bitsa’ cars: bits of this, bits of that… You have found a real horror show here.
Tornado UPP was amazing tech but FWD was (apart from Citroen) in its infancy. I suspect too expensive to develop at that point in time.
Vinyl roof covers all sorts of evil: even Jaguar resorted to this bodge on the XJC.
Rear-facing child seats may have been borrowed from Volvo 145/165/245/265. No real footwell there either!
Olds 74 Vista looks lovely: thank you.