| Built
for Riding, Not Driving
No automotive development ever
happened in a vacuum. With few and remarkable
exceptions like minds were busy working on similar plans for multiple cylinders, mass
production, automatic transmissions, safer windshields, and stretch limousines.
Automobile air conditioning was developed almost twenty years before its general use
in mass production. Dual overhead cams were not unheard of eighty years ago.
With the limousine, it's all been done before, too.
As ever, the point of the limousine is to put
the interior luxury
of the closed carriage to the motor car.
Coachwork
(photo by Michael L. Bromley)
The Closed Carriage
Cadillac Style, 1958
(Courtesy Yann Saunders, "The (new) Cadillac
Database)
Presidential Privacy, 1972
(Courtesy ASC Incorporated)
Modern Privacy, 2001 Cadillac
(Photo by Michael L. Bromley)
We can't tell you who this car was built
for... some major league public player
whose name you'd know.. The car was built to order, but it wasn't quite right.
We applaud the discretion. Reminds the authors of the story of Al Jolson who in the
1920s orderd a limousine bult low, "so low I’d have to crawl in."
When it was delivered he was unimpressed with the result.
He handed the builder a check for $10,000
and instructed the dealer to sell the car right away.
Or the story of Donald Trump, who sat in a
new limousine,
then jumped out, horrified that the opposite seats were too close.
The stretch was two inches short!
He sent it back to get longer, just the way he wanted.
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