One day in the early eighties, I took my 1957 Thunderbird (the one I no longer own) in for detailing at a place in Beverly Hills. When I went to pick it up, there was a short delay in bringing it out so I got to chatting with the manager there. He asked me if I'd ever seen a Pierre Cardin Cadillac. I said no. He said, "Come on in here," and he took me into one of his garages. There, I saw the most beautiful new (i.e., non-classic) car I'd ever seen in my life. It was not the one in the photo below, which is a picture of another model of Pierre Cardin Cadillac. It was even better looking than that, painted with pinstripes in colors one does not ordinarily see on an automobile. I asked him to explain just what it was I was looking at. Car buffs, please forgive me if I get a few of the numbers wrong.
He explained, "Every year, the Pierre Cardin company buys 100 new Cadillacs right off the assembly line. They get them unpainted and without upholstery or other decorations. The Pierre Cardin people supply all that. They design a special paint job, a special interior, special carpeting…everything. Then they install it all. It's a designer Cadillac."
He then went on to explain about the one glistening there before me: "Customers have to order them and put down a 25% down payment. Then they're shipped out from the Pierre Cardin factory but before they go to the buyer, they're sent to a detailer like me to give them a final cleaning before delivery. But this car is homeless. The guy who was going to take delivery of it defaulted on his last payment or something so he's not going to get it."
I asked what was going to become of it. He said, "It's been sitting here for two weeks. I'm charging them storage while I wait for them to tell me what to do with it. Hey, you interested in buying it?"
I wasn't interested in buying any new car at any price but I had to ask, "How much is it?"
He said, "Seventy-five thousand dollars." That's a lot of money for a car now and you can imagine how much it was at the time, which I think was around 1983. A brand-new non-designer Cadillac Eldorado that year was around $20,000. I paid a lot less than that for the T-Bird.
I told the gentleman I wasn't interested in buying a new car. Especially a $75,000 car.
He said, "I could probably arrange for you to get a thousand off." He said that as if he expected me to say, "Whoa! I don't want a $75,000 car but of course I want a $74,000 car! Write it up!" Instead, I said no thanks. He asked why not. I said, "Well, the price is reason enough. But even if I had that kind of money to spend, I wouldn't drive a car that fancy and expensive. It practically screams, 'Steal me! Steal me!'"
"Oh, no," he said. "People never steal these."
"Are you serious? A beautiful car like this, people don't steal?"
"It's too dangerous," he explained. "There are only, like, three of them in the entire state. If someone's driving one around, it gets noticed instantly. If you're going to steal an expensive car, you want to steal a grey Mercedes. They all look alike."
I didn't completely buy that but I asked him, "Okay, so people don't steal Pierre Cardin Cadillacs. Do they ever strip them for parts?"
He said, "That, they do. And it's beastly expensive to replace parts or to get certain things fixed on them."
"So why would anyone possibly want one?"
The man thought for a second, shrugged and replied, "To tell the whole world you can afford one."