In 1959 the craze for fins on cars reached its pinnacle. None other than the car maker Cadillac, famous for the most elegant and glamorous cars, set the record: with fins a breathtaking 42 inches (107 centimeters) high, crowning the rear end of the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz.
To call this Cadillac a car is actually a bit of an understatement; land-yacht would be more appropriate. All models seated six and came with the famous 6.3-litre V-eight engine; the convertible had a whopping 345 bhp.
Fuel consumption was somewhere in the 8mpg range. With gas being slightly cheaper in the days of the glorious finned automobiles, nobody really cared.
And here is a Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz fin in all it’s shiny and chrome-glossy glory. Start drooling. I did. Plenty.
I did, then and now. As I recall, gas was on the order of $0.25/gallon. Those days are so over. What I wanted most of all, however, was a little ’55 – ’57 Thunderbird. Check out the “porthole”. Isn’t that just the most?
That is the beauty of Southern California – no snow, not a lot of rain, no harsh weather conditions, which means that cars (if properly taken care of or properly restored) last forever and can be seen on the streets all the time. A little T-Bird just the one you pointed out very often parks around the corner on a supermarket parking lot, porthole and all.
Oh, I’m so jealous. I wish I could see it. Several years ago, Ford came out with a new version of the 50s Thunderbird. For some reason, I never thought it was quite right. It just wasn’t the same look, somehow. Just tiny differences, but still off the mark.