BMW 507 designer's gold Cadillac Elegante sets a $1.4 million record

Before the BMW 507, Albrecht Goertz shaped a gold Cadillac in Turin

Kruse Auctions sold the 1953 Cadillac Elegante for $1,275,000 on 5 September at its Auburn, Indiana sale, $1.4 million once the buyer's premium is added, and no Cadillac has ever made more at public auction. The one-off was commissioned in New York, drawn by a German designer two years before his BMW 507, and hand-formed in aluminium by Carrozzeria Motto in Turin. It had never been offered for sale in public before.

Kruse Auctions took the Elegante past a Duesenberg Model J at the same sale

Lot 620 was the headline of Kruse Auctions' 56th Auburn sale, a three-day sale that grossed $21 million from more than 2,000 bidders with a sell-through above 85 percent. The Elegante beat the next lot on the board, a 1932 Duesenberg Model J Sweep Panel Dual Cowl Phaeton at $1.022 million. The old Cadillac record was $940,000, paid at Broad Arrow's Monterey Jet Center sale in August 2023 for a 1934 V-16 Fleetwood Aerodynamic Coupe, one of eight built. That same coupe had made $616,000 at Gooding in 2007, so the marque's ceiling took 16 years to rise by half and one afternoon to rise by another third.

Harry Birdsall and Joe Mascari spent $30,000, the price of four Eldorados

The commission came from Harry Birdsall, a New York commercial artist, and Joe Mascari, a contractor who imported Italian speedboats. They started with a 1953 Series 62 chassis salvaged from a fire-damaged dealership car, lowered it 20 centimetres and kept Cadillac's 5.4-litre V8, 210 hp through a four-speed Hydra-Matic. Kruse puts the build at 30 months and $30,000. Cadillac's own most expensive car that year, the Eldorado convertible, listed at $7,750, so the two men paid for nearly four of them and got one car.

Goertz drew the Elegante in 1953, and the BMW 507 followed in August 1955

Albrecht Goertz was born in Brunkensen, Lower Saxony, in 1914, learned the trade in Raymond Loewy's Studebaker studio and opened Goertz Industrial Design in New York in 1953. The Elegante was one of the first commissions through that door. Max Hoffman, the Austrian-born importer who sold BMWs in America, introduced him to Munich, and the 507 he drew there was unveiled at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in August 1955, four months after the Elegante had turned on a rotating platform at the New York International Auto Show. Both cars were importers' ideas from the same Manhattan studio, and only one carried its designer's name into the history books.

Carrozzeria Motto formed the aluminium over 30 months and plated it in 24-karat gold

Mascari's speedboat contacts led to Carrozzeria Rocco Motto in Turin, the shop that bodied Cisitalias and Erminis and would build Raymond Loewy's own Lancia Flaminia Loraymo in 1960. Motto hand-formed the aluminium and finished the car in pearlescent white with a gold roof. Headlamp rings, wheel covers, windscreen surround, dashboard, door panels and bronze castings were plated in 24-karat gold, and the hardtop retracted hydraulically. Inside, red leather surrounds a thin Lucite steering wheel. The New York Times wrote it up on 28 April 1955. No second car was ever built.

Hurricane Andrew flattened it in 1992, and Dicky Birdsall spent 16 years on the repair

The Elegante stayed in the Birdsall family. In 1992 Hurricane Andrew brought a carport down on it in Florida, and Harry's son Richard, known as Dicky, took 16 years to return it to its 1955 specification. It surfaced at the Amelia Island Concours in 2014, took the People's Choice award, and then went back out of sight until Kruse announced it this summer. The odometer reads under 7,000 km.

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Goertz is the name that priced this car, and Cadillac is the badge that capped it. John Surtees' one-owner BMW 507 made £3,809,500 at Bonhams' Goodwood sale in July 2018, more than three times what the Elegante fetched with its premium, for a car built 252 times. A one-off by the same hand, two years older, with 24-karat gold on it, went for a third of that because collectors do not pay BMW or Ferrari money for the emblem on its nose. That gap is the Cadillac discount, and it is more than $3 million wide.

It will not close from Cadillac's side. The ceiling for a factory-bodied Cadillac is still the $940,000 that a 1934 V-16 coupe took 16 years to reach, and the only Cadillac above it is one that Cadillac never designed, built or sold. When Broad Arrow and Gooding return to Monterey in August 2027, the most expensive Cadillac of that week will be a coachbuilt one-off or a concept, not a Fleetwood-bodied V-16, and it will still sit below the price of a well-kept 507.

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