Nobody seems to be quite sure how many were constructed, although numbers quoted on the internet range as high as 240. Although Traditional Coach Works wasn’t endorsed by General Motors, the vehicles were sold via regular Cadillac dealerships. In retrospect, we figure the name is no worse than gibberish like Buick TourX, and it’s certainly less of a mouthful than BMW Individual M760Li xDrive Model V12 Excellence THE NEXT 100 YEARS.īetween 19, Traditional turned out a couple hundred Mirages. To punctuate it, of course, they appended the good old American term “wagon” to the end, just in case you weren’t sure what you were getting into. Traditional also built a de Ville–based wagon called the Mirage Sports Wagon and a Fleetwood longroof called the Castillian Fleetwood Estate Wagon, the latter combining the then hot trend of Iberian-themed American luxury (see: Cordoba, Chrysler) with the preferred British nomenclature for the five-door, sedan-based family hauler. Its Mirage, a Coupe de Ville–based pickup, wasn’t the only customized Caddy to emerge from the shop. One contender came from Traditional Coach Works, a concern based in Chatsworth, California, that once employed famed customizer Gene Winfield. In the mid-1970s, the classiest option available from a factory was GMC’s El Camino clone, the Sprint, but the well-heeled sort of folks who thought Nudie Cohn’s idea of vehicle customization wasn’t entirely off base had to turn to small-batch private enterprise to feed their need for legitimate luxury in pickup form. Today, of course, everybody from down-home Ram to highfalutin Lamborghini sells a gussied-up trucklike object of some sort, but the scales have tipped in favor of lifted wagons and leather-trimmed behemoths in the half-ton-and-up classes. For decades, the formula was simply a sedan-based light pickup, pioneered in the United States by the Ford Ranchero in 1957.Ĭhevrolet countered in 1959 with the El Camino, having tested the market’s waters with the truck-based, fiberglass-and-steel-bedded Cameo in 1955. It thus kicked off a fascination with car/truck hybrids that persists to the present day-even if today’s hybrids seem to have grown the wrong way ’round. GM would revive the El Camino name in 1959 for its Chevrolet car-pickup hybrid.ĭow Jones industrial average (year-end) 404.In 1934, the Australian Ford Coupe Utility was born of a farm wife’s protest that there was no vehicle suitable for doing work around the family homestead that could also ferry herself and her husband to church. The El Camino was the first Cadillac with four headlights. By 1956, the El Camino's tail-fin design and headlight treatment were beginning to show up on Cadillac's Eldorado. The car was powered by Cadillac's 5.4-liter V-8. Inside, two passengers rode in high-backed aircraft-type seats with built-in headrests that tapered back to the rear window. That approach gave birth to the Cadillac El Camino, a two-passenger coupe with a fiberglass body, a brushed-aluminum top and an aircraft bubble canopy with curved tinted glass. Each year General Motors, Ford and Chrysler would try to outdo one another with futuristic cars that often contained features and designs that would subsequently show up in their production models. Throughout the modern era of the automobile, carmakers have tantalized buyers with show cars, now called concept cars, to be displayed at annual auto shows.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |