1958 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz “Raindrop” Prototype

This car, Lot 216, sold for $324,500, including buyer’s premium, at RM Sotheby’s Andrews Collection auction on May 2, 2015.

Old is new

“Nothing is new under the sun” is a quote that dates back over 2,300 years. Today in the automotive world, that maxim couldn’t be more accurate. A number of luxury brands have touted rain-sensing auto-closing sunroofs and auto-activated windshield wipers. As the ancient scribe said, “nothing new,” as evidenced by this Cadillac.

As the post-war “Jet Age” quickly morphed into the “Space Age,” it seemed like anything was possible. It certainly seemed that way at mighty General Motors, and putting his stamp of approval on every GM product was Harley Earl, GM’s Vice President of Design.

Long before social media and data mining revealed consumers’ tastes, Earl launched the famous Motorama traveling shows to display GM’s current and future automotive designs, and to gauge the acceptance of those designs from the flocks of people who attended them.

Earl’s LeSabre

One of the most famous Motorama cars was the 1951 LeSabre XP-8. More than just a show car, the LeSabre was Earl’s personal transportation for a number of years. British design critic Stephen Bayley called the LeSabre “a phallic jelly-mould of a car with aeroplane nozzles and details, which Earl named after the F86 Sabre jet serving the U.S. forces. Earl, regardless of what the sociologists said about cars displaying your sexual fears, steered this awful tool around Grosse Pointe as his personal transport, leaving friends and colleagues at country clubs around Michigan astonished at his style.”

Legend has it that a sudden rain shower got the interior of the LeSabre wet while parked at one of those country clubs. With the enormous resources of GM at his disposal, Earl had the LeSabre equipped with a rain-sensing top mechanism. At the first drops of precipitation, the rear deck would automatically rise, the top would move into position and attach to the windshield frame, the windows would roll up, and the deck would lower back into place.

With the exception of the rain sensor, this spectacle was not unlike the automated convertible-top mechanisms of today’s luxury cars — but this was 1951.

Sometimes the ideas generated by the Motorama show were just too far ahead of the technology at the time, or the market wasn’t ready for them. So LeSabre’s rain-sensing system gestated until the later ’50s, when it was revisited by GM Design.

The Standard of the World

If any production automobile completely embodied the Motorama philosophy, it was the Cadillac Eldorado. Cadillac claimed to be the “Standard of the World,” and the Eldorado was that standard. The first Eldorado, built in 1953, cost $7,750 — two times the next Cadillac model. It pioneered the wraparound windshield and featured a hard tonneau covering the convertible top — ideas found on Harley Earl’s LeSabre.

In 1956, a hard-top coupe, the Seville, joined the convertible, now known as the Biarritz. By 1958, the Eldorado had established itself as the ne plus ultra of American luxury cars, and just 815 of the exclusive Biarritz convertibles were built that year.

Five of those convertibles were delivered to GM Design for special modifications. Our subject car was one of the five, and it was given fiberglass body panels, predicting the giant fins and bullet taillights of the ’59 models. All body moldings were removed, except for the wheelarches. The interior was also heavily modified, with leather seating for four and a large full-length console through the middle. Luxury appointments were everywhere, even including an ice bucket built into the center console. Most important, the “raindrop” feature first seen on the LeSabre was reportedly fitted to three of the cars, including this one.

Four of the five convertibles made the rounds of public appearances at state fairs and other venues. As with most design and engineering studies, those four Cadillacs were eventually scrapped, but one was recovered and restored many years later.

Our subject car, the fifth car, was retained by Harley Earl. After his retirement from GM in 1958, Earl was often seen driving this car around his new home in West Palm Beach, FL. A letter written by Richard Stout in 1991 attests to those sightings, and to the car’s “raindrop” top, apparently still fitted at that time. Stout should know Harley Earl — he was a designer under Earl at GM in the late ’40s and early ’50s before moving on to a career at Lincoln-Mercury, Packard and Edsel.

Restored to like-new condition, Earl’s Cadillac moved to Texas, where Paul and Chris Andrews paid $330,000 for it at RM’s Al Wiseman Collection auction in 2007 (ACC# 47748).

What it’s worth

How can you accurately gauge the value of a one-off prototype? Certain makes will attract more potential buyers — a one-of-a-kind Cadillac will generate more interest than a Yugo prototype — and a flashy car from the ’50s should appeal more than one from, say, the ’70s.

RM Sotheby’s estimated the value of Earl’s “raindrop” to be $400,000 to $600,000. The other existing ’58 prototype sold for $220,000 in 2010 (ACC# 156892), but due to its one-time junkyard condition, that car used a great deal of donor-car parts and does not have its “raindrop” mechanism.

Then there is the larger-than-life legacy of Harley Earl, and the fact that this is one of possibly two cars outside of GM’s collections that have Earl’s provenance (the other is a 1963 Corvette convertible styling car that sold for $980,500 at a Mecum auction in 2010, ACC# 162650).

To me, $324,500 for the last remaining “raindrop” ’58 is on the cheap side — but it’s not far off from the $330,000 it made when it last sold in 2007. It seems like the market has spoken here. But as a piece of GM and Harley Earl history and with some innovative styling and engineering features, I can’t help but call it well bought.

(Introductory description courtesy of RM Sotheby’s.