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The 1959 Lincoln Continental and 1959 Cadillac Eldorado took 1950s styling to absurd extremes, with very different results.
Peak ’50s
The 1959 Lincoln Continental and the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado are two very memorable cars with two vastly different legacies. The 1950s was an era of visual innovation in automotive design. Each year saw successively more ornamentation, more chrome, longer, bigger fins, and bigger, more elaborate grilles. For some, things went a bit too far as Detroit’s Big Three competed to outdo one another, producing bloated, over-styled cars that, by the close of the decade, had begun to venture into self-parody.
And so, the Continental and the Eldorado embody the best and worst tendencies of a decade of automotive design. If you are well-disposed to the visual excesses of 1950s cars, the ’59 Eldorado is the pinnacle, the teleological culmination of a decade-long visual arms race with those massive fins with their double bullet taillights as the era’s mic drop moment. The third generation Continental offers a flipside to the Eldorado. Like its Ford Motor Company contemporary, the Edsel, the 1959 Continental’s design is a collection of half-baked ideas that fail to coalesce into a coherent whole, with the result looking weird rather than innovative.
Below we will look more closely at both cars and examine how they represent the best and worst of their era.
1959 Lincoln Continental
The shift of the Continental to a slot above the Lincoln brand brought with it the debut of the new Mark II. Priced at $10,000, the Continental Mark II was the most expensive car produced in the US and aimed to compete with the likes of Rolls-Royce. Production costs were high, not least because the Mark II was largely a hand-built affair. In fact, Ford was losing roughly $1,000 per unit on the Mark II.
Instead, the Continental was brought back under the Lincoln brand and a new car developed for 1958. The hope was a shift down-market and a new $6,000 price point could help reinvigorate the brand. The new Lincoln Continental Mark III was a massive car, five inches longer than before and now stretching to a 131-inch wheelbase. It carried a massive engine as well, in place of the Mark II’s 368 cu-in Y-block V8 was a new larger 430 cu-in V8. The car was designed by John Najjar and Elwood Engel with its most notable feature being its slanting stacked headlights.
The new design, with its odd use of angles and scalloped side paneling, proved too radical for many buyers and development costs ballooned over the three-year period from 1958 through 1960 resulting in a $60 million dollar loss for Lincoln. It was at this point Ford VP of vehicle operations, Robert McNamara, suggested scuttling the Continental altogether.
It is at this moment where we arrive at the third generation Continental’s true impact. Rather than eliminate Lincoln, Ford gave the division one final shot. A radically restyled Continental, smaller, simpler, vastly more elegant, was developed. The new fourth-generation Continental was a hit for Lincoln, arguably saving the nameplate and the brand, and its paired-back styling a major influence on automotive design throughout the 1960s. (For more on the 1960s Continental, click here.)
1959 Cadillac Eldorado
The Cadillac Eldorado kicked off its brief fourth generation with the 1959 model year. Designed by Chuck Jordan, the ’59 Cadillac Eldorado takes the chrome and fins styling of the decade and pushes those extremes. But rather than spill over into the absurd, as the Continental did, the Eldorado manages to balance even its most over-the-top elements. Inspired by jet aircraft, the low, sleek body is accentuated by massive rear fins (the largest of any car in 1959) including those signature double bullet taillights. A massive chrome grille is flanked by two sets of quad headlights, and the interior is replete with leather upholstery and chrome trim. Much of this styling was shared between the Eldorado and the De Ville, Series 62, and Sixty Special. The ’59 Eldorado was both over styled and brilliantly executed, creating an enduring icon and one of the best-looking cars of the decade or perhaps any decade.
Under the hood of the Eldorado was a 390 cu-in V8 (345 horsepower) mated to a four-speed Hydra-Matic automatic transmission. Like the Continental, the Eldorado was big, with a 130-inch wheelbase. For this generation, the ultra-high-end Brougham version was built in Italy by Pininfarina. The Brougham’s exclusive air-suspension system proved problematic, negatively impacting sales of a car already priced at an eye-watering $13,000 dollars.
A mild redesign for 1960 turned down the volume on the ’59’s loudest elements. The tailfins shrunk and lost their bullet taillights and the car’s use of chrome trim was paired back. The 1960 Cadillac was by no means subtle or conservative, but it’s the 1959 model, with its razzle-dazzle attitude, that is most fondly remembered today.
Conclusions
As we noted at the outset, the “competition” between the ’59 Lincoln Continental and the ’59 Cadillac Eldorado is not all that close. The Continental’s controversial design was close to the final nail for the car and the Lincoln brand. It did, however, lead to the fourth-generation’s seismic shift in styling that influenced the next decade’s worth of car designs.
The ’59 Cadillac Eldorado clearly wins this comparison of 1950s luxury cars, having risen to the status of an automotive icon through the subsequent decades. Ironically, Cadillac may have “won” the ’50s, but by the early 1960s they were following Lincoln’s lead by dropping the overwrought ’50s filigree for straighter lines, smaller fins, and less chrome.
In the final analysis, the 1959 models of the Lincoln Continental and the Cadillac Eldorado represent the zenith (and nadir) of 1950s styling and remain inarguably compelling to this day.
