A 1970 Cadillac Eldorado wearing a coat of paint called Money Green, headlights the size of searchlights, and a steering wheel stamped with the Cadillac crest is currently live on Bring a Trailer. It’s not just any Eldorado. It’s a George Barris custom, the man who built the original Batmobile, and it might be the most gloriously excessive thing to surface on the auction site this year.
Barris called it the Eldorado “del Cavallero,” one of a small run of dealer-ordered customs he produced between 1967 and 1970 through a partnership with Universal Coach Corporation. You didn’t need Hollywood connections to get one. You could walk into a Cadillac dealership and order it, which says something about the kind of money floating around at the dawn of the Seventies.
This particular car has been around the block before, literally and figuratively. It last appeared on Bring a Trailer in 2018. Since then, it’s picked up curb feelers, gold knock-on-style hubcaps, and wide whitewall tires — additions that push it further into the realm of rolling cultural artifact.
Mileage is listed as unknown, which either means nobody kept track or nobody cared.
Under roughly an acre of that Money Green paint sits Cadillac’s 500-cubic-inch V-8, the biggest mill the Eldorado offered. Factory ratings claimed 400 horsepower and 550 pound-feet of torque by the old SAE gross standard, numbers that were generous even then. And because this generation of Eldorado drove the front wheels, all that torque had to find traction through a single axle.
The point was presence. Barris understood that better than almost anyone in the custom car world. The massive headlights — similar units could be sourced from ASC Custom Craft, the same outfit that later helped build the Buick GNX — turn the front end into something that belongs on a battleship. Chrome drips from every surface. Gold accents punctuate the green like jewelry on a velvet suit.
Inside, the leather-lined cabin is dominated by that absurd Cadillac-crest steering wheel, a piece so outlandish it transcends bad taste and arrives somewhere near art. Subtlety was never on the options list.
Barris customs from this era occupy a strange space in the collector market. They’re not concours cars, muscle cars, or traditional customs in the sense that a Gene Winfield or Joe Bailon creation would be. They’re spectacles, built to be seen and to announce their owners with the force of a brass band.
The del Cavallero is peak Barris in that regard — theatricality wrapped in sheet metal, sold through a Cadillac franchise. The auction closes May 13. Where the bidding goes depends entirely on how many people out there still want to cruise down the boulevard in something that makes a Rolls-Royce look timid.
Given the current appetite for anything weird, rare, and dripping with provenance, this green machine could fetch serious money. Or it could go for a song. That’s the thing about cars this loud — they tend to polarize.
You either see a masterpiece or a punch line. Barris never worried about which side you landed on. He just kept building.
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