Though it really wasn’t in the sports car business, in 1954 Cadillac produced a two-seat sports roadster for the Motorama, La Espada.

In the early ’50s, the Styling Section at General Motors went all in on two-seat sports cars for the Motorama dream fleet. Chevrolet had the Corvette, which quickly went into production. But Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Buick displayed two-seater dream cars, too,  unlikely though they were to ever see a dealer showroom. Sports cars brought excitement to the Motorama, even among Americans who would never buy one. In 1954, Cadillac brought not one but two sports cars to the show: El Camino and La Espada.

El Camino (‘the road” in Spanish) and La Espada (“the sword”) were close Cadillac siblings, with nearly identical front ends and tailfins.  And they shared the same 115-in wheelbase on a shortened Cadillac chassis with a production Cadillac V8 and running gear. (See our feature on El Camino here.) But there were key differences, too: El Camino was a fixed-roof, two-place coupe, while La Espada was a roadster with a disappearing one-piece hardtop.

Credit for the design of El Camino and La Espada goes to Cadillac studio chief Ed Glowacke, working under the direction of GM styling boss Harley Earl and with a team that included Dave Holls, Bob Scheelk, Ron Hill, and others. Holls was quickly becoming a star in the GM studios and eventually became director of design. One noteworthy feature of El Camino/La Espada is the quad headlamp setup, which wouldn’t appear on production cars for three more years. Evidently, GM had some inkling of future headlamp regulations.

It seems La Espada began its car-show career with silver exterior paint when it appeared at the New York Motorama in January of 1954. But one month later at the Chicago Auto Show when actor Ronald Reagan took a turn behind the wheel (above), the car was repainted white—or maybe there were actually two cars. It’s possible. Eventually, the wide whitewalls were exchanged for blackwalls, while the cockpit was reupholstered in bold, ice-cream shop stripes.

In the Getty archive, there’s Hearst newsreel footage of La Espada speeding around a parking lot with a lady model behind the wheel, so we know it was a running, driving car. The retracting hardtop was powered and functional, too. Reportedly, there is no official factory record of the car’s destruction, but it hasn’t been seen in decades so it can be presumed lost. La Espada’s story ends there. But in 1968 Lamborghini, possibly with no knowledge that the Cadillac dream car ever existed, named its four-place GT the Espada.