I had to stop by Menards this morning, and caught this land barge in the parking lot amidst all the contractor’s trucks… Good thing I got to it before Tom – he might have drooled all over that white leather interior!
What a delightful color combination, too. I suspect that green may not be the original shade, though. Looks a bit too energetic for 1974, which was the second year for the Eldorado to be its own series. Interestingly, the base price of the 1974 Eldo jumped from $7,873 to $9,437 mid-year – for comparison, a 1974 VW Beetle convertible would have set you back a mere $3,475.
It appears one could actually fit quite a lot of stuff in that (13.6 cubic foot capacity) trunk. Maybe there’s a new 50 gallon water heater hiding in there? Or perhaps a spare VW Beetle?
1973 brought beefed up bumpers to a lot of US-spec cars… this example from 1974 is sporting *dual* bumper guards! Behind that massive piece of chromed metal lies an 8.2l V8 engine making 210hp – equivalent to the combined horsepower of nearly four 1974 VW Beetles.
Only 7,600 Eldorado convertibles were built in 1974, so this is somewhat of a find, especially in this condition. And with that, I’ll hop in my own VW Beetle convertible and head off to work!
the 500 c.i. engine was down to 210 hp in 1974. even worse, by the time it was dropped after 1976 it had slid further down to 190 hp.
Good catch (now fixed) – I had too many tabs open and pulled the data from the wrong one!
500cid. Thanks for that, so I didn’t have to open my conversion calculator and figure out the equivalent of 8.2L. Real engines are measured in cubic inches. 🙂
When I was in my early teens, the folks next door had a ’76 DeVille with the 500. Decent torque off the line but the miserable thing ran out of breath at like 3000 rpm. It really is the poster child for the malaise era.
When your VW convertible got closer, did you notice any gravitational forces pulling it into the Eldorado’s orbit?
I often find that with every Eldo convertible, there are at least three smaller convertibles sucked into their orbit.
LOL!
Even a Plymouth Satellite could orbit this Caddy!
Ha! Watch out for that Mercury Meteor!!!
Is that a Comet I see out there coming toward us?
There aren’t enough cars with space-themed names anymore. The only ones I can think of still sold in North America are the Chevy Equinox, Nissan Titan (moon of Saturn) and Ford Taurus (star constellation).
I wonder how old those tires are? I have not seen those semi-wide whitewalls in eons. I remember these making a mini-comeback in the early 80s. I liked them. They may not be quite correct for this car’s 1974 look, but they suit this car perfectly.
I miss the days when a 10 minute session with a bottle of Wesley’s Bleech-White, a scrub brush and a bucket of water would spiff your car up nicely.
I zoomed in, because I needed a laugh. “Dimension IV.” The old Firestone 721 wider white tooling sold off to a third party, who made them until about 10 years ago. Still pretty, um, “tired,” but I’ve seen older and scarier.
I purchased white walls in this style in 1983 and again around 1987. They looked nice, if not a little over the top on my ’76 Cutlass with factory rallies and my ’72 Grandville with Pontiac wire wheel covers. Goodyear Arriva all season tires.
That style is still made, at least in 1″ size. Runway Enduro is the brand. I had them on my ’83 Bonneville but it did seem a little overkill on a little car like that, especially when the rest of the car isn’t quite perfect.
I know that Coker Tire has them in their catalog, or at least they did several months ago. It was not a convertible buy my brother and his wife owned a 1973 Eldo, back in the late seventies/early eighties. I remember that it had seemingly unlimited torque, and gas mileage was something like 8 MPG city and 12 highway. It was still a great car for road trips though, it would just ease up to any speed (within reason) and stay there until you had to make a pit stop for more gas.
Ed: ” I suspect that green may not be the original shade”.
I disagree. I remember this color on DeVilles from this era though I do not remember seeing it on an Eldorado. I looked it up; the color (available on both DeVille and Eldorado) was called “Persian Lime Firemist Poly”.
The color appeals to me and my 1974 Schwinn Suburban is finished in a very similar shade. Greens were popular in the ’70s, this lime metallic too.
That’s wild… I remember the “puke green” that was common on early-’70s GM products, but not this one. It struck me as a ’90s interpretation of a ’70s color. Cadillac was apparently ahead of their time!
There was a series of bright metallic Firemist colors that appeared for 1974 on Cadillacs.
Persian Lime Firemist as seen on the Eldorado in the article was one of them. There was a Cranberry Firemist too, which was like a bright purplelish burgundy, a Mandarin Orange, which would have been perfect if you ran a combination Orange Julius/house of ill repute and a Terra Cotta Firemist, which was like a tomato bisque with lots of metallic paint.
Yup. Here’s a Terra Cotta Fleetwood Brougham from the ’74 brochure:
The Cranberry ’74 Eldorado convertible…
And last but not least, the Persian Lime ’74 CDV. Yes, the Firemist colors got a lot of exposure in the 1974 Cadillac brochure.
Nice bike! I’ve got a blue 1979 Traveler, myself. It’s a fun bike for a nice, sedate ride. The combination of the 10-Speed drivetrain and the cruiser-bike handlebars make it a Personal Luxury Bicycle; the Chevrolet Monte Carlo of bikes. (Or since all bikes are topless, maybe it’s an Eldo Convertible.)
Wow: My late mother had a blue Schwinn Suburban — blue was her favorite color. I remember it being a 5-speed. My father had a larger red “Collegiate” maybe(?): red is his favorite color. Both bikes had head and taillights run by a little generator that drove off the sidewall of the rear tire.
My first bike was a dark red Sting Ray 🙂 I loved that thing.
I bet your dad had the Schwinn Varsity, which would have been a 10-speed. I wasn’t lucky enough to get a genuine Schwinn Stingray, but I did have a Sears Stingray knock-off. I used to love doing wheelies!
The Varsity was Schwinn’s counterpart to American cars of its day. Heavy-duty steel frame was durable, & gave its users lots of exercise into the bargain.☺
I had a friend in Pasadena in the 70s who had an Eldordo convertible (a 1973) in this exact color and same interior. It didn’t seem quite so big back then, but now it seems huge!
“… the base price of the 1974 Eldo jumped from $7,873 to $9,437 mid-year –”
Sticker shock from high inflation was one other ‘boogie man’ that hurt car sales in 1974-75. Not just gas prices.
And yes, that lime green is original for ’74. There was a similar lime shade offered in 1976, too.
did this price change effect all cars in 1974? or all GM cars? thats a lot of money and a big percentage chaneg
Been liking these since Walter drove one in the original Bad News Bears.
That was a real color for the Eldorado in ’74 Persian Lime Firemist
Great find!
Love it!
I was going to try and find a color chart (before I noticed it was done) and found this car…..
Likely the same one!
What’s odd is this car has NY plates… In the Middle West, no less.
Nope, this car has a passenger remote mirror, the one in the article, strangely does not.
As mentioned further below, it was at a show in Galesburg in June. It could be a recently purchased hobby car, and they’re keeping the NY plates on it until they expire.
The full color chart might be of interest…….
Hopefully a range of colors like this makes a comeback. My teenage kids find today’s choices boring, so future consumers may demand variety again.
Isn’t this Eldo essentially the same colour as Chris Green’s ’76 Monte?
IIRC, during this period Cadillac would “pioneer” a color, then it would migrate to other GM divisions a year or two later. So I do think this was the inspiration for the 1976 GM green.
Not my cup of tea but nice to see a car being used and not a trailer queen.That is a very nice colour combination but no way would I ever have a white interior in any car.It just wouldn’t be white for very long in my grubby mitts
210 horsepower from an 8.2L V8. It’s amazing how 2.0L turbo I4s can make more power than that today.
It may seem wasteful today, but in its time, this car was considered very green. 🙂
A Valiant 6 made more in 74.
You weren’t using SAE net.
Only 210hp from all that engine I bet it had bags of torque though, That green was on cars over here too not Caddies they were kinda hard to get but other GM stuff was so coloured, I”d never want a white interior too hard to keep clean as I use my cars for everything.
Not to mention a lot more HP these days if you remove all the vintage emissions stuff…that Caddy V8 would get up and go prior to ’72-’74, even on such a big, heavy car.
Wow 😮 !!! That’s jaw dropping, a real ’70s queen ! Odd as it may be Eldos from this era are some of the most popular american classics in italy (they are perfect wedding-mobiles…) and sometimes you can spot the occasional one…although not super cool as this there’s a light yellow ’75-’76 that sometimes rolls around my town…and it’s like an ufo…its proportions, related to our country and our times, are simply something coming from another dimension !
For the longest time in Rhode Island a 1974 Eldorado convertible exactly like the featured car roamed our streets. Same lime green, white top, white leather interior. I remember seeing it at the mall first, when I was probably about 9 or 10. Then I saw it when I was in my mid-twenties down in Newport parked with the top down – still looking pristine as ever. The last time I saw it was about 5 years ago at a classic car show in Providence. I spoke with the new owner and he had purchased it from the original owner’s estate after he died. It only had about 20,000 miles on it and was in fantastic shape. That color is really striking in person. Combined with the white top and trim it really makes an incredible looking car look even cooler!
There was one of these in that exact combination on the next block when I was a kid. And another neighbor with a Coupe de Ville in the same combination.
And now today, I just can’t imagine anyone selecting this, even if it was offered. Which is sad.
They sold a good number of these bright green Camaros a few years ago, truth is, these super bright colors weren’t loved by all either.
“which was the second year for the Eldorado to be its own series” I don’t want to nit-pick a fine post but I’m not sure what was meant by the quote above.
From 1953 (when the convertible by this name made it’s debut along with the Buick Skylark and Oldsmobile Fiesta – production versions of GM “show cars”) until 1966 the Eldorado was a higher trim, and sometimes higher performance analog (optional dual 4-barrel carburetors in the late 50’s) to the Cadillac Series 62 or de Ville convertible. From model years 1967 through 1970 the Eldorado was a stand alone model with FWD architecture very similar to the new for 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado and available only as a coupe. During this time (1967-1970) the de Ville convertible was Cadillac’s sole drop-top offering.
Starting in model year 1971 through 1976 the Eldorado was available as a coupe (with “opera widows”) or a convertible. There was no de Ville convertible after 1970.
The 1971-1976 Eldorado’s seemed to have a bloated look to me, especially the ’75 and ’76 year models. Perhaps it was the square headlights that made them appear so. I do like the egg crate grille of the ’73 and the finer mesh grille of the ’74 but the 5mph bumpers really did the cars’ looks no favors.
I didn’t get what he meant either, the Eldorado had been a “separate” series technically since 1963, when it gained a Fleetwood wreath and crest and joined the Fleetwood side of the line up, though it always was a different model number, even when it was more or less a DeVille convertible with nicer trim and better performance. It really split with the rest of the Cadillac line up when it changed to the FWD E-body.
Sorry for not being clear there… wiki sez: “With model year 1973 the Eldorado was removed from the Fleetwood series and reestablished as its own series.” I was trying to translate that to the ’74 model, but it came out awkward…
Eh, Wikipedia is wrong, lots of times, the Eldorado remained part of the Fleetwood line, its official name in the Cadillac “scrolls” remained as
Fleetwood Eldorado from 1967 until the at least 1978.
That was what I remember too, that the Eldo was “Fleetwood Eldorado” from the first FWD ’67 to the end of the biggies in ’78.
However, Cadillac stopped referring to then as Fleetwood Eldorados in the brochures after ’71. No idea why.
This by far is my favorite color combo for this car. Gorge us.
“[A]n 8.2l V8 engine making 210hp – equivalent to the combined horsepower of nearly four 1974 VW Beetles.”
…And requiring the combined displacement of five-and-a-half 1974 VW Beetles to do so.
I love the idea that after creeping up ever higher into the 400s (455, 460, 472), somebody in Detroit finally decided to go all the way to FIVE HUNDRED CUBES. But I don’t love the reality that this enormo-dynamo was both thirsty and pathetically lazy. If a customer is going to take on the punitive fuel costs of running so huge an engine, that customer deserves a lot better than 210 hp (and a 100 mph speedo!) in return. This was, after all, with the exception of the limited-production Stutz Blackhawk, America’s most expensive car. Apparently, the pre-smog 1970 8.2s have some real grunt to them; by ’74 the beast had been pretty thoroughly tamed.
I’ve mentioned on here driving for hours to look at a rusting heap of a ’74 Eldo convertible in a farmer’s field that had been given the Superfly treatment by (supposedly, but probably not) Mr. Superfly himself, Les Dunham of Dunham Coach. It was exactly this color and material combo — only it was a total wreck, way beyond salvation. Like something out of Porter Waggoner’s nightmares. If it had looked a little more like today’s lovely specimen, I would’ve bought it.
There were outside forces at play.
Even with 210, the 500 has torque, lots of it, an all you can eat buffet of torque with a carving station.
The Fleetwood 75 limos were more expensive than the Eldorado convertible.
This Eldo has far too nice an interior, but ratty ones like the DeVilles that my buddy and I have make great haulers. Buy a new big screen TV? Just drop the top and throw it in the back seat. Pick up a pinball machine? Just pull out the back seat (just a couple of screws), and lift the pinball machine right over the side. Dishwashers, sinks, water heaters? No problem.
Love to try one of these out just for big block torque. Don’t argue about the HP rating, its all apples to oranges, if you put some of our modern engines on the old system they would go way up and some of the storied engines of the 60s would go way down. It’s a relative wash…
Recommended period musical accompaniment for cruising in this barge: “The Rubberband Man” by The Spinners.
Sweet revenge for the ’70s here would be a Chevy ZZ502 crate motor. I know, it costs more than the car is worth.
Back in 1974, my mother was stopped for a light in her 1971 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight when a distracted driver (cigarette was the culprit in those pre-cellphone days), with a ’74 Eldorado, bumped her from behind. It was very low speed, but the impact those bumper guards and pointed bumper corners made on the back of the Olds was unmistakable. While I hate the aesthetic results of the 5 mph bumper requirements, the rear of our Olds was testament to the hazards of not having them, with good-sized dents in the bumper and decklid from each of the Cadillac’s bumper guards, plus a broken left taillight from the left-side pointed bumper corner. Needless to say the Eldo was unscathed.
I once rear-ended a Rabbit with my ’81 Escort because my foot slipped off the brake pedal while stopping for a red light. I was furious since I was wearing borrowed shoes that had slick bottoms. However, because both cars had 5mph bumpers & the speed was low, both I & they agreed there was no damage whatever.
So the Naderites won that round.
Does Ed know me or what?
And is anyone surprised I already have a set of pics for this very car? I caught it at the Galesburg Railroad Days show last June.
Sorry to steal your thunder, Tom – you should still write it up; you’ll have much more detail, as usual!
No worries; I have over 150 CCs shot that I have yet to write up…and that doesn’t include Outtake, car show and ebay cars 🙂
That is my car! Thank you for all of the complimentary comments. It’s far from perfect as it is driven a lot all summer long. Those pictures were taken right after it got a fresh coat of paint at my shop.
That’s awesome, Bob! You have a beautiful car in a distinctive color, no wonder everyone liked it. And you driving it all summer long is the whole point of the car, no sense in it being locked up all the time. Hopefully you enjoy it for a long time yet.
I saw one very similar in Northeast Ohio, but a coupe. It was the same Persian Lime Firemist metallic, and was at a car show in Burton (Century Village, a 19th-century full-scale village made real).
One interesting thing–the dashboard had a strange array of roses in a chain, as if they were strung together, on the wood panel by the glovebox, as well as on the door pulls.
Does anyone have any background on the ’71-’76 interior design language? Some Caddies even had unusual swirl patterns and damask patterns never seen before or since in vehicles. I know Buick, Olds and Pontiac had them as well. Some had smaller versions of those patterns from ’66 to ’70 but not like the ’71-’76s.
I’ve attached an example.