This showed up last Sunday a few miles from my home – a car that I seriously lusted after, during my pre-teen years in a family that never could have afforded such wanton extravagance (in ’64 we were motoring in a tired 1957 Oldsmobile station wagon). Asking price was $15.5K with 43,000 original miles. Assuming I was flush with the dough, would I consider pulling the trigger?
Well, I’d say ”no”. Yes, she’s straight and clean; on the other hand there seems to be something a little funky going on with the suspension, the exhaust is hanging rather low and the gangsta window tint isn’t my style. These things probably wouldn’t take much to fix, though.
No, my main problem is with that color. Jeepers, this has to be one of the more egregious slatherings of ‘resale red’ I’ve ever seen.
You see, although I ‘ve never ridden in, much less driven, one of these cars, I’ve been carrying around a mental image of my dream ’64 Caddy for decades, and that image comes in metallic light blue, turquoise or green, not this – well, whatever this is. It may actually be a factory color (Matador Red?) and it probably looks pretty good on a wet, dark night under mercury-vapor streetlamps, but in daylight, it’s a bit over the top. So, sadly, I must drive on. Hey, no matter – couldn’t afford it then, couldn’t afford it now.
Postscript: not two days later, it was gone, so what do I know?
Lawrence Jones’ fine argument for the ’63-‘64s as greatest post-war Cadillacs can be found here.
Forgive me, I like it. No let me rephrase that, I LOVE IT!
The whole thing, lipstick red, gangsta tint, whitewalls, and chrome tips.
Would it make me look like I was up to no good? Of course! I’d drive by you with a wink and a wave just to feed that paranoia.
This car needs a customized plate that says something like: MACKNIFE
+1
What’s the number 62 represent?
Series 60, 62, 75 (limo)…..
I know like in Oldsmobile’s case, 88 and Ninety-Eight actually represented model ranges and engines; the models were the 80s and the 90s, and the 8 represented an 8-cylinder.
According to Wiki, the Series 62 replaced the Series 61. Does that help?
I have no idea what the number represented, but the 62 was the basic Cadillac starting in 1940. I believe that it was replaced by the Calais in maybe 1965.
A slightly more detailed answer: the Series 61 was sold alongside the 62, but often had a shorter wheelbase. The last year for both 61s and 62s was 1951, when the 61 had a 122″ wb, and the 62 a 126″ wb.
After 1951, all regular Caddys were 62s, including DeVilles (the 75 was of course the extended wb limo). And in many years there was a Series Sixty Special, often with its own wheelbase too, somewhat longer than the 62.
In 1959, the DeVille, became its own series, and 62 was then just the lower content Cadillac, but on the same wheelbase.
In 1965, the Calais replaced the 62 as the low-content series.
Guess alot of it was marketing.
I do get the 60-special name though, just like the A/G special bodies of the 70s and 80s.
This would have looked so much better in one of the two darker reds or the maroon which were original 1964 Cadillac colors.
This car also appears to be missing the thin stainless strip on the sides, and the result makes the sides look fairly thick.
I’m with GGH on this. This color is just wrong, wrong, wrong on this car. I have no proof, but I have never seen one of these in a red this hot. I would love to see the interior color.
It also looks like the rear suspension is up too high, maybe air shocks? All in all, I suspect that for that kind of money, a guy can do better.
Agreed. It makes it look much shorter. At first glance, I thought it was a Park Avenue, but they didn’t make that in 1964. That strip makes quite a difference.
I’d say the rear is at original height minus a little of the inevitable sagging while the front has been dropped.
Compare with the brochure photos how much of the wheelcover is showing below the fender skirt. If the drawings are fairly accurate, then the back end of this car is raised, while the front is at about stock height.
Yes, in the drawings the bottom edge of the fender skirt is centered on the rear wheel cover. The back end of the car is clearly raised higher than that.
Yeah, I was going to mention the missing rub strips. Makes a surprisingly big difference to the looks.
I’ve seen it. A neighbor of my grandpa had one just like this one. I think what makes this car look funky is the dark window tint. The neighbor’s car didn’t have it, and that blood red color with the white leather interior looked terrific.
“No, my main problem is with that color. Jeepers, this has to be one of the more egregious slatherings of ‘resale red’ I’ve ever seen.”
I first encountered “resale red” as a youth walking home from the bus stop through the back lot of a street corner cheesy used car lot in coastal NJ. The lot bought, fixed, and painted its own cars. They would pack in the Bondo around rusted out wheel wells, often respray the cars “resale red” (or resale metallic medium blue for pickups) and then apply white tape pin stripes. Never mind that you’d often see multiple body colors on the inside of the door jambs and other areas since their clients didn’t care.
This ’64 is all wrong; el-cheapo paint job and the dark tinted windows probably hide a horrendously re-upholstered interior. Love the ’63 and ’64’s, but I’d pass on this one. Solution? Make a trip to the S.F. Bay Area. There, you’ll find a few very clean ones, correct and original in color and appointments.
Love the brochure page touting the “youthful” Sixty-Two Series. Now when was a Cadillac ever “youthful?” Still an elegant design, though. The Sixty-Two Series was the “poor man’s Cadillac,” a salesman once told my father. Must have been, the brochure photos feature crank windows, can’t imagine ponying up $5 grand for the Standard of the World without opting for a hundred bucks worth of power windows.
Exactly my thought. Evidently the Baby Boom demographic, with its attendant glorification of youth & repudiation of adult responsibility (which the Mustang suggested so well), made a deep impression even on the division building cars for successful men of means like my grandfather.
Some TV shows from that time illustrate how pathetically their producers tried to ride this wave.
The standard series 62 amenities were enough to entice many buyers to make the step up to Cadillac. Their contemporaries on the base series (sans Lincoln, in the Continental years) all had crank windows, manual seat adjusters and the like. I once looked at a fairly clean ’64 62 coupe – crank windows and all – and it still drove quite elegantly (presence on the road) and had a nice jacquard/broadcloth/vinyl two tone interior and top grade interior hardware . . . a step above of an Electra 225 and (slightly) above a contemporary 98. Having manual items put the 62 at a price point attractive to many large car buyers.
There were still a number of folks buying Cadillacs (and other models) in these years who had bad memories of the slow and unreliable hydro-electric windows of the early 50s, with their cracked and leaking tubes and discolored doorsills (that fluid would stain!). For a brief period of time in the early 50’s my Dad worked at a car dealership where he repaired these windows and the experience kept him from having power windows in a car, including our 65 T-Bird, until his 71 Lincoln. Even the all-electric windows of the later years were not nearly as reliable as today.
My father was like that for a long time; he resisted any car with power windows until around the early 90’s when it started getting hard to avoid them except in the cheapest penalty boxes. He would always say about cars loaded with power accessories “just more stuff to break!”
It’s the difference between built in quality and bolt on luxury. One of the reasons Mercedes Benz ended up overtaking Cadillac as the standard of the world in the 80s was that even though they could be pretty austere in the equipment fitted, what was there was clearly much higher quality
I still feel that way. I’m also just annoyed that with most cars with power windows, you can’t open the windows with the ignition off. (I know some high-end cars now have a function that lets you open the windows after the ignition is turned off, at least for a while, but that’s well out of my price range.)
Depends on what you consider a high end car our 2000 Taurus has retained power for the power windows, but strangely enough not for the radio like on my other Fords with Retained Accessory Power.
“I still feel that way. I’m also just annoyed that with most cars with power windows, you can’t open the windows with the ignition off. (I know some high-end cars now have a function that lets you open the windows after the ignition is turned off, at least for a while, but that’s well out of my price range.)”
If you’re adventurous, there’s a solution. Wire the power windows to a circuit not controlled by the key. That may be sacrilege in some circles, but it’s not too terribly involved if you have a shop and wiring manual. Just make note of what spaded connectors you moved.
It will eliminate, too, a lot of anxiety about not being able to wind down the windows in an emergency with the key off.
I’ve seen mid-60s owners manuals (eg, 1968 Ford Galaxie) where it explicitly states that, should the owner desire, the dealer could rewire the windows to full time operation.
FWIW, my ’10 Civic LX’s power windows will operate indefinitely with the ignition off until a door is opened, whereas our ’04 Sienna LE’s will “time out” after awhile in this state. I think it’s all in the software now; one can program several different power lock startup/shutdown behaviors.
I still can’t believe that this fruit, along with cruise-control, is standard in mainstream models like these. Nice, but I wouldn’t have paid for them as options.
Geez, was everyone’s father like that? Mine said the same thing for years, “just more stuff to break,” and “you kids will just play with them until they break.” He finally relented, though, after we nagged him forever, when he ordered our ’63 Mercury Monterey Custom. And it was all she wrote in every car thereafter. BTW, they never did break.
That poppy red is over the top, but I’d drive it like that. At least it’s still wearing the original wheel covers and whitewalls, and not some super-oversize wagon wheels on rubber-band tires.
Maybe paint the roof in a dark maroon, which would tone it down a bit without the expense of a full repaint and make the car look lower and longer.
I’m supposed to believe the miles are original when the rest of the car looks like an old whore with way to much make up? $15K for a sedan?Not even a deVille or a Fleetwood sedan? What pipe are they hitting?
$9K will buy you a much more honest looking Fleetwood sedan on ebay.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1964-Cadillac-Fleetwood-/221258770403?pt=US_Cars_Trucks&hash=item33840ce7e3
I like the 64 a little more than the 63, because of the Turbo 400, I have always liked this last finny Cadillac.
The THM 400 was standard on the Eldorado and Fleetwoods, optional on the other series until late in MY ’64 where it then became standard.
Every 64 I have ever seen has the TH400, so it must have been very popular.
So it is. I wonder if this brochure pic is correct, showing only the L position.
Nice Fleetwood, but wide whitewalls on anything newer than a ’61 look silly.
Interesting rake – I wonder if it has hydraulics.
Somehow, a black vinyl top and chrome rocker panels would help the red a lot (along with a tint-ectomy).
I hate to think that was probably a very nice original car before the awful color change but it probably was. At least it’s not wearing Clown Rimz (yet).
Jacking up the rear of a car with fender skirts is almost as bad as resale red, brite orange, or day-glo yellow on a full-size car.
Had a white Coupe like this in 1988…even then if you pulled in somewhere with it people would come over to look at it….15k seems really high for a four door with weird paint, but it seems lately that everyone thinks anything from 75 back is worth Barrett Jackson money.
The finned Caddy is interestingly juxtaposed against the “ComputerFixer” sign on the building, 2 totally different eras, the 64 Cadillac don’t do Wi-Fi…..
It looks like somebody tried the “pimp my ride” on this Caddy with a bit of good taste(?)….I honestly don’t ever remember seeing a Cadillac in this shade of bright red…Cadillac would have almost certainly never allowed this shade of red at the factory,
they would have considered it way too garish for the image they wanted to give to their vehicles. Sarcasm.
The first impulse of many customizers appears to be to remove trim. They forget that sometimes what is left is an unbroken expanse of metal that changes the apparent proportions of the design, and not in a good way.
Besides, having owned both the 4-window and 6-window sedan versions of this design (in ’63 models), I will take the 6-window over the 4 any day. Not only does the 6-window have incredible 360-degree visibility (try that in any 21st century car), it’s also much friendlier to rear passengers. The C-pillar on the 4-window gets more in the way of entry and exit than you might expect.
Wow, my mom had one just like the light blue one in the pics! It replaced her just so ugly and oddly green colored ’62 Chrysler New Yorker that seemed to have a thing for eating alternators when it was more than 10 miles from home, or the weather was bad. Just for looks alone, the New Yorker was bad news. I remember the gadgets the Caddy had, the “Wonderbar” radio being a magnet for me. We had it for longer than the usual 2 years my folks kept cars. It finally was traded in on a ’69 avacado green Sedan DeVille that was totalled by my dad when he passed out and hit a telephone pole, exploding a transformer, knocking out power for the who South end of Toledo. I’ve never been a fan of light blue/”frosty” blue, but I really hated that avacado green, on cars, appliances, whatever, it’s a bad color.
I wonder if the level-ride suspension is responsible for the rake. Note that the front wheels are sitting up on the curb (nice parking job, buddy).
That said, add the side chrome molding back on, ditch the tinted windows, and I’d drive it–provided that the interior hasn’t been screwed with.