CarBrandLogos archive · Cadillac · 1940

CadillacSeries 62

The postwar Cadillac that grew the first tailfin and set the shape of American luxury.

Photo: Greg Gjerdingen from Willmar, USA · CC BY 2.0

The story

A defining chapter in Cadillac history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Cadillac Series 62, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Introduced for 1940 to slot beneath the senior Cadillacs and replace the Series 61 and 65, the Series 62 became, after the war, the volume car that carried the division. It was the body on which Cadillac tried out nearly everything that would define American luxury for two decades.

1947 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible · No machine-readable author provided. Sfoskett~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 3.0

Design and engineering

The most consequential experiment came in 1948, when stylist Frank Hershey added a small blade to the rear fender, drawn from the twin booms of the P-38 Lightning fighter. It was a modest thing — barely a bump — but it gave the American car industry a shape it would chase for the next twelve years, ending in the enormous chrome-edged fins of the 1959 Series 62, still the high-water mark of the idea.

'40 Cadillac · Bull-Doser · Public domain

In production

Underneath, 1949 mattered more. That year Cadillac replaced its flathead with a 331-cubic-inch overhead-valve V8, lighter and far more efficient than the engine it replaced, and it pushed the whole industry towards short-stroke, high-compression V8s. The Series 62 also spawned Cadillac's showcase cars: the Coupe de Ville hardtop of 1949, and in 1953 the limited-run Eldorado convertible, both launched as Series 62 subseries before becoming ranges of their own.

Cadillac Series 62 · Thesupermat · CC BY-SA 3.0

Legacy

By the early 1960s the naming had become unwieldy, and for 1965 Cadillac split the line into the Calais and the de Ville. The Series 62 name disappeared, but the cars that succeeded it were essentially the same recipe, and Cadillac would keep selling it, with diminishing conviction, well into the 1990s.

At a glance