Elite or Street – Woodward Dream Cruise and Pebble Beach Concours

General Motors Chairman Dan Akerson drives a classic 1960 Chevrolet Corvette up Woodward Avenue with Vice Chairman Steve Girsky in the passenger seat, No smoky burnouts for these bean counters at last year’s cruise.

Nowhere will two diverse approaches to automobiles be more apparent than at the Woodward Dream Cruise in the northern Detroit suburbs and the Pebble Beach Concours in Northern California this weekend.

Woodward Avenue, of course, is of late notable for the world’s largest gathering of hot rodders and classic car enthusiasts. The Dream Cruise routinely gathers hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million, participants and spectators to celebrate the automotive heritage of the Motor City. It’s a “be there or be square” kind of celebration in the best tradition of the auto industry that created the middle class. The people driving old cars up and down Woodward know the difference between rat and mouse motors, as well box and socket wrenches, and have the bruised knuckles to show for it. 

Pebble Beach remains the province of the super rich – the kind of people who own car companies, but don’t work for them – with exquisitely lovely, but esoteric vehicles sitting on a golf course whose normal occupants, as well as these car owners, likely couldn’t tell you what a quarter mile is unless you explained the measurement in yards and the strokes required for par. Bored and stroked would, well, likely elicit a bored stare.

If you have to ask, you can’t afford the Cadillac Phaeton 5859, which sold for $962,500 and the Roadster 5802 for $1,001,000.

Therefore, no surprises then that two of the more interesting vehicles on display this weekend at Pebble are a pair of Cadillac models that were never even built. It takes deep pockets as well as a large number of hirelings to create something from almost nothing. The 1934 rumble seat roadster model 5802 and a 1937 Phaeton model 5859 were part of Cadillac’s made-to-order Fleetwood collection in the so called “build books” that customers used to select options for their cars. All other body styles in the books were built for customers, but these two models went unselected. Each recently sold at auction after being built from the original blueprints of Cadillac designer John Hampshire. Both have won best in class awards at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. If you have to ask, you can’t afford the Phaeton, which sold for $962,500 and the Roadster for $1,001,000. These catalog cars are not unique at Pebble. There are others.

With this much money about come the moneychangers, so even though Pebble is a latter day temple designed to worship the automotive past, makers purveying to the rich use the opportunity to display their wares. Therefore, no surprise a one off McLaren X-1 carbon-fiber car created for an anonymous enthusiast will be there as the company looks for more wealthy customers. As to the dozens of other less expensive production car debuts that now surround Pebble or for that matter Woodward, AutoInformed will, for once, remain silent and only celebrate vintage wheels this weekend.  So wherever you are, “run what ya brung” and enjoy automobility…