The entire run of the original 1953 Eldorado was just 532 cars — 0.5% of Cadillac's sales that year, making Cadillac's halo convertible rarer than almost anything else on the lot.
Median 80 hp across 12 similar cars
Lead trim: Eldorado 331 cu in Cadillac V8
Cadillac Eldorado1953–1953
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Nobody in Burbles has spotted a Cadillac Eldorado yet. See one on the street, point the app at it, and the first card is yours — with your @handle permanently credited on this page.
FactThe entire run of the original 1953 Eldorado was just 532 cars — 0.5% of Cadillac's sales that year, making Cadillac's halo convertible rarer than almost anything else on the lot.
The Cadillac Series 62 Eldorado joined the Oldsmobile 98 Fiesta and Buick Roadmaster Skylark as top-of-the-line, limited-production specialty convertibles introduced in 1953 by General Motors to promote its design leadership. A special-bodied, low-production convertible (532 units, just 0.5% of Cadillac's 1953 sales), it was the production version of the 1952 El Dorado "Golden Anniversary" concept car, designed by Harley Earl; it borrowed bumper bullets from the 1951 GM Le Sabre show car, introduced the wraparound windshield and cut-down beltline from Cadillac's standard production models, and carried no special badging other than a gold-colored "Eldorado" nameplate in the center of the dash. A hard tonneau cover flush with the rear deck hid the convertible top; it was available in four unique colors (Aztec Red, Alpine White, Azure Blue and Artisan Ochre) with black or white Orlon tops, air conditioning as a US$620 option and wire wheels US$325. Technically a subseries of the Series 62 sharing its engine, the 331 cu in (5.4 L) Cadillac OHV V8 with the 4-speed Hydra-Matic, it cost US$7,750, nearly twice the Packard Caribbean convertible. Standard features included windshield washers, a signal-seeking radio, power windows and a heater. It rode a 126.0 in wheelbase and was 220.8 in long, 80.1 in wide, 58.5 in high and 5,000 lb.
Collectors Spotted in the Cadillac Eldorado Lineage
No member has published a public street spot of the Cadillac Eldorado yet — the First · Worldwide stamp is wide open.
Trims & Figures
One published trim in the catalogue. A blank is a figure not recorded, not zero.
| Trim | Years | Engine | Power | Torque | 0–60 | Drive | Gearbox | MSRP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eldorado 331 cu in Cadillac V8 | 1953–1953 | 5.4 L V8 | 190 hp | — | — | RWD | — | — |
Owning one
We don’t estimate running costs for a car like this. What it costs depends on its condition, its specialist and how it is driven, and an average would mislead.
Owners’ builds
Nobody has claimed one yet.
Photographs
By 1997 this Eldorado had standard electronic stability control, traction control and adaptive suspension all talking to each other — tech Wikipedia compares directly to Lexus's vaunted VDIM system.
Cadillac shrank the Eldorado by 16 inches and 350 pounds in 1986, betting on a gas-price spike that never came — sales cratered 72% from the outgoing model, and buyers found it too small for Cadillac people yet still not a BMW.
1984 was the best year the Eldorado nameplate ever had: 77,806 sold, more than one in four Cadillacs that left a showroom that year.
When Cadillac supplied the 1973 Indy 500 pace car, it built 566 convertible replicas — just 33 ever saw the track, and the other 533 went one-per-dealership nationwide.
For exactly two years — 1967 and 1968 — the Eldorado hid its headlights behind moving covers, the only Cadillac ever built that way before regulations shut the idea down.
The 1965-66 Fleetwood Eldorado marked the end of an era — the last rear-wheel-drive Eldorado before Cadillac switched the nameplate to front-wheel drive.
The 1963 Eldorado Biarritz was the first Fleetwood-bodied convertible Cadillac had built in 22 years — the body style had vanished when the V16 Series 90 went out of production in 1941.
For 1961, Cadillac quietly demoted the Eldorado Biarritz convertible — it was reclassified as a mere subseries of the De Ville line, a status that stuck for years.
This Eldorado Biarritz had a second career thirty years later as Maurice Minnifield's car on the 1990s TV series Northern Exposure.
The 1959-60 Eldorado Brougham wasn't built in Detroit at all: Cadillac shipped the chassis by boat to Savona, Italy, where Pinin Farina mated the hand-built bodies in Turin before shipping the finished cars back across the Atlantic.
The 1957 Eldorado Brougham carried one of the first all-transistor car radios ever built — a 13-transistor Delco unit, and it came standard, not optional.
The sculpted rear-end styling on the 1957 Eldorado Seville and Biarritz wasn't new — it was a callback to the Cadillac "Interceptor," an obscure post-war show prototype most people have never heard of.
The Eldorado's fluted aluminum side panels were distinctive enough that Reynolds Aluminum commissioned a one-of-a-kind Eldorado coupe to show them off.
The entire run of the original 1953 Eldorado was just 532 cars — 0.5% of Cadillac's sales that year, making Cadillac's halo convertible rarer than almost anything else on the lot.
Rivals
Same body, same money, other badges — tap any card to flip.
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