Really futuristic, I dig the fins.
There’s some irony there...a class full of students at one of the best universities in the world can’t get a ‘62 Cadillac up and running, but if you gave that same car to a bunch of high school kids in some rural corner of Oklahoma or Georgia or Pennsylvania or California, they’d have the thing not only shining like a diamond and ready to cruise the local strip, they’d have it doing 12-second passes at the local dragstrip by the end of the semester.
}:-)4
If I read Stanford’s website correctly it’s about $13k per quarter for a high school auto mechanic’s class. Brilliant.
My dad owned a 62 Cadillac exactly like that
Pah. If they want a real challenge they need to move up to the ‘56 Eldorado....replacement parts are hard to find, certainly not cheap, and do not generally match another year around it.
Southside Chicago will think of him often...
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A great point, actually. I don't know how the American high-school system compares to ours up here in Canada. But here, it's very likely that students going on to university—including engineering school—never had the opportunity to take vocational classes. I originally started in mechanical engineering and worked for a couple summers as a draftsman. There were times on the job that I thought a course in welding or machine shop would have come in very handy.
Doesn’t look like the piece of junk that the instructor described. Some amateur bodywork down the right side, so-so respray in what looks not to be a facory color for that year, but reasonably complete, chrome and glass are good, only missing a fender skirt.
That body style was derived from the amazing 1960 Eldorado Brougham which was the last of the truly custom bodied Cadillacs, body built by Pininfarina in Italy and shipped to the US for final assembly, shared no sheetmetal whatsoever with the rest of the 60 line which still sported the massive fins and chrome, chrome, chrome. Pininfarina cleaned it up, much sharper lines, modest angular fins, squared off formal roofline in the rear.
That was picked up across the line in 61 with a downsiezed line, there was a recession on at the time. Most manufacturers began to go much cleaner and to shed the flamboyance of the late fifties, with the most dramatic departure being the famous “Kennedy” Lincolns against which cars such as this Cadillac competed.
Dad had one. Great car.
For those who don't know, the 57 had the "Electric Eye" for the Headlights, so as to change from High Beam, to Low Beam and the "Foot Operated Wonder Bar" {Located Under the Brake Pedal, not really a good location} to select radio stations on the Radio, if I remember correctly, so did my 1960 (21 Foot Long) have both of these options.
See here 1960 Caddy http://www.conceptcarz.com/view/photo/207781,12029/1960-Cadillac-DeVille_photo.aspx
We call(ed) it “Learn by Doing” a couple of hundred miles down the
coast from Stanford. It is the Cal Poly motto. Welcome to the world
of practical application.