For car buyers in 1962, Cadillac was the ultimate status symbol in American automobiles. Here’s part of the strategy behind it.
There’s a memorable line in Mad Men, the award-winning television drama depicting the glamorous world of the Madison Avenue advertising agencies in the ’60s (above). Top ad man Don Draper is visiting a Manhattan showroom to check out a new Cadillac, where he is soon engaged by a smooth salesman. “This is the one,” the salesman says. “Nineteen-sixty-two Coupe de Ville. Does everything but make breakfast. What are you in now?”
“I had a Dodge,” Draper answers.
“Those are wonderful if you want to get somewhere,” the salesman says. “This is for when you’ve already arrived.”
There was plenty of truth to that, as Cadillac was the ultimate in prestige and status in an American car throughout the early ’60s—the rolling symbol that you had arrived. GM’s premium car division was then towering over every other luxury make, selling three times as many cars as Lincoln and Imperial combined. And with its distinctive style and presence, a Cadillac could never be mistaken for any other car.
The cost of admission was steep: Prices started at $5,213 for a Series 62 Sedan, twice as much as a perfectly respectable Chevrolet Impala. A Sedan de Ville with standard power windows and seat raised the toll to $5,631, while the Eldorado Biarritz Convertible and Fleetwood Sixty Sedan each sold in the mid-$6000 range. At the very top of the line for a production Cadillac, the Series 75 Fleetwood Limousine with room for nine passengers, was priced at nearly $10,000. According to the Consumer Price Index, that would be equivalent to more than $108,000 today.
Fleetwood 75 Series Limousine
An all-star lineup of General Motors stylists was responsible for the ’62 Cadillac exterior. They included studio chief Chuck Jordan and assistant David R. Holls, working under the watchful eye of GM styling VP Bill Mitchell. The styling mission for Cadillac was a little different than most: Provide enough change each year to be clearly noticeable, but with enough similarity to the previous model to be instantly recognizable as a Cadillac. It was a delicate balance.
Sedan de Ville Six Window
To help the styling staff maintain this continuity, on a wall of the Cadillac studio was a series of photographs of every front end from 1941 on. At times the vision might drift a little. For example, Mitchell decided that the ’61 front end was too Chevy-like, so the ’62 was pulled back into in line with Cadillac tradition. The strategy must have worked, as Cadillac sales steadily climbed each year, reaching 160,000 cars in 1962—another record year.
1962 Chicago Auto Show 
I absolutely love that episode of Mad Men! That salesman taught a master class to someone who was also an expert at selling!
Note that the limo still has a 1959 windshield. It was a halo car in terms of its place in the full line brochure, but mainly a vocational model as far as its’ actual clientele, corporate car services and the funeral trade.
I’d long suspected that after crashing his Season 1 Olds hardtop coupe in the first season Don went to the Dodge post sedan, as then favored by state police agencies, to have a safer car next time (and indeed he crashed it drunk driving too).
The context that he upgraded to the Cadillac after his second DUI crash rather than it being the end of his license for the rest of the decade was as much of the period as the Caddy’s status. That being said, one bit of atypical behavior for Don “Midcentury Man” Draper was that he kept the ’62 until ’65 and his 1965 Caddy for the rest of the series. He never became a “new Cadillac every year” man.