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Coachbuilt 1948 Cadillac Series 62 Sold For $857,000 At Auction

In the 1940s, General Motors couldn’t be bothered by Louis Ritter, a New York furrier, who wanted a special Cadillac convertible for his new wife. GM said it was too busy keeping up with demand with other cars. So, Ritter sought out a different solution. He wanted a custom convertible built on a Cadillac chassis with an automatic transmission so his wife could drive it.

Enter what you see here: a coachbuilt 1948 Cadillac Series 62 convertible hailing from France. Ritter was intrigued by Carrosserie J. Saoutchik’s work and tasked the coachbuilder with creating the special Cadillac. Saoutchik wielded his design to pen a very different Cadillac with elegant lines and flowing creases. Ritter took delivery of the car in 1949.

Shortly after that, he sold the car and it traded hands with different owners over the past few decades. The car was completely restored in recent years and sat in pristine condition. It still bears Ritter’s initials on the radiator shell.

The car sold for $857,000 at RM Sotheby’s New York Icons auction last week. We think the beautiful automobile is worth every penny.

Former GM Authority staff writer.

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Comments

  1. It’s always a cool thing to see these old cars that were actually designed by ” pen to paper ” with no help from CAD .
    Those guys actually had a vision as to what a car should look like and not something spit out of a computer or having to be co-efficient .
    What car built now will be looked at the same way in 70 years .
    JDN would have called this car a CS62 .

    Reply
    1. JDN wouldn’t have had to call it anything. The Series nomenclature just proves my point that ‘named’ Cadillac’s don’t tell you anything about the car, and that the Series names, the A&S names, and the CT/XT names are more in line with Cadillac’s heritage.

      As for designing cars back then without CAD, car designers certainly used sculptural clay to get the details of a 1:1 model worked out. Even to this day, you can design a car with CAD, but you can’t design a car with CAD like you can with clay.

      Reply
  2. It certainly has a French twist, but I’ll take Cadzilla.

    Reply

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