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.
Median 78 hp across 29 similar cars
Lead trim: Eldorado Brougham 390 cu in V8
Cadillac Eldorado Brougham1959–1960
- 0spots by members
- Unclaimednobody has spotted one yet
- 1set it completes
Nobody in Burbles has spotted a Cadillac Eldorado Brougham 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 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.
For the 1959 and 1960 model years the Eldorado Brougham (moved from the Series 70 to its own Series 6900) became longer, lower and wider (130 in wheelbase, 80.2 in wide, 56.2 in high as a four-door hardtop), with narrow taillights integrated into low tailfins and an angular rear roofline with rear ventiplanes contrasting with the rounded roofline; bumper assemblies were shared with standard Cadillacs. Designed in-house, Cadillac contracted Pinin Farina of Turin, Italy for the manufacture of the low-volume model, among the first Cadillacs hand-built in Italy: chassis were shipped to Savona and on to the Grugliasco factory in Turin, mated with the body and shipped back to Detroit. Priced at $13,075 ($1 more than its predecessor), it did not sell as well as its forebears. The Brougham did not have Eldorado front fender letters or body-edge highlight trim; a vertical crest medallion with Brougham script appeared on the front fenders (relocated to the rear fenders for 1960 with a fin-like lower-body skeg), and standard equipment matched other Eldorados plus cruise control, Autronic Eye, air conditioning and E-Z Eye glass. The engine was the 390 cu in (6.4 L) OHV V8 of the 1959–60 Eldorado line with a 4-speed Hydra-Matic; the page gives the Brougham no separate rating.
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 Brougham 390 cu in V8 | 1959–1960 | 6.4 L V8 | 325 hp | 430 lb-ft | — | 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.
The Celica XX, Japan's name for the A60 Supra, introduced the world's first in-car navigation computer.
The CTR Anniversary looks like a 911 but Ruf built its carbon monocoque from scratch, no Porsche body underneath.
The 228's coupe styling hides a sedan underneath: Maserati stretched it onto the longer four-door Biturbo chassis to make room for its biggest V6, which is literally where the name comes from — 2-door, 2.8 litre.
Switching to fuel injection let this V8 finally shed its trademark bonnet bulge — and only 405 of these flat-hooded Series 5 cars were built before the whole model retired in 1989.
Japanese buyers got a secret weapon in their MX-6 — the JDM-only KL-ZE V6 made about 40 more horsepower than the engine sold in the exact same car in North America.
An American tuner, Callaway Cars, built twin-turbo conversions of the GTV6 that boosted its V6 by fifty percent to 230 hp — turning Alfa's grand tourer into something far quicker than the factory ever intended.
Audi TTS Coupe · TTS Coupe (2016–2023) · 2016–2023.
A product of the DaimlerChrysler merger, the Crossfire shares 80% of its parts with the Mercedes-Benz SLK — German bones under American badges.