General Motors wanted this car crushed. In 1958, the company shipped its one-off 1956 Eldorado Brougham Town Car to Warhoops Used Auto & Truck Parts in Warren, Michigan, with clear instructions: dismantle and destroy. The junkyard owner ignored them.
Nearly seven decades later, the car just sold for $494,500 at RM Sotheby’s Hershey auction.
The car, known internally as XP-48, was built for GM’s 1956 Motorama, the traveling auto show that doubled as Detroit’s most extravagant marketing tool. Robert Cumberford designed it at 19 years old, working under Harley Earl. It was a rolling fantasy of what chauffeured luxury could look like, with an open driver’s compartment up front and a fully enclosed passenger cabin behind a glass partition.
Inside that rear cabin sat black and beige leather, Wilton wool carpet, gold-finished hardware, air conditioning, a cigar humidor, drinking glasses, and an intercom so passengers could address the chauffeur without raising their voices. It debuted at Motorama, then crossed the Atlantic for the Paris Salon.
Two years later, GM was done with it. The company sent the Town Car to the scrapyard alongside two 1955 LaSalle II concepts and a 1955 Chevrolet Biscayne, all earmarked for destruction. This was standard operating procedure for Detroit in that era.
Concept cars were promotional tools, not museum pieces. Once their usefulness expired, they were liabilities.
Harry Warholak Sr. saw something else. He partially dismantled the other concepts as instructed but hid the Cadillac in a trailer. His son later said the old man wanted to use it for his daughter’s wedding. The wedding never happened, but the car survived anyway.
Decades later, collector Joe Bortz bought the Cadillac along with the remains of the other scrapped concepts. Only the Town Car was largely intact, its lavish cabin almost entirely preserved. But “intact” came with a serious catch.
The XP-48 was never a real automobile. It sat on a production GM chassis, and the doors, hood, and trunk worked, but that was about it. No engine, no transmission, no electrical system, no brakes. Cadillac had simply added dead weight to the front end to simulate a powertrain’s mass for show purposes.
The car passed through several hands. Roy Warshawsky, who owned the legendary J.C. Whitney catalog company, began a restoration in the early 1990s. Declining health forced him to sell in 1996 to Cadillac enthusiast Dick Baruk, who finished the job.
Baruk fitted a period-correct engine and transmission with dual four-barrel carburetors and, in a touch befitting the car’s original excess, gold-plated valve covers. The restored Town Car took Best in Class at the 2013 Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance.
At $494,500, the hammer price might seem modest for a one-of-one Motorama car that Harley Earl’s studio produced at the peak of Detroit’s most flamboyant decade. The Motorama era produced some of the most celebrated concept cars in history, and the survivors are vanishingly rare precisely because GM made a habit of sending them to the crusher.
This one exists only because a junkyard owner in Warren, Michigan, decided his daughter deserved a better wedding car than whatever was sitting on the used lot. She never got the ride. But Harry Warholak’s quiet act of defiance preserved a car that GM itself had written off as scrap metal, a car that collectors and concours judges would spend the next half century fighting over.
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