Better Than A Gold Watch

Former GM design chief Ed Welburn finally takes a spin in the Cadillac Cyclone—the car that inspired him to chase his dreams.

- Todd Lassa

We all drew cars on the backs of our school notebooks when we were kids, though very few of us with the fervor, ambition, or skill of Ed Welburn.

“I’ve been drawing since I was 2 and a half, maybe 3. I was drawing all the time and nothing but cars,” says Welburn, who retired from General Motors recently after 44 years with the company, including the last 13 as GM’s sixth design chief.

Welburn’s parents took their car-crazy son to the Philadelphia Auto Show when he was 8. That fateful visit ignited a passion in him that led to one of the top jobs in automotive design.

“I’ll never forget this, walking in, and my mother was on my right, and my father was on my left,” he says. “It was a dream car, and it was unbelievable. It was, like, a pearl white. And I just loved that car, and I told my parents, ‘When I grow up, I want to design cars. I want to draw cars for that company, General Motors.’”

The car? The Cadillac Cyclone XP-74 Concept, a two-seat, bubble-topped convertible designed to wow the crowds at GM’s Motorama shows, which ran from 1949 to 1961. It was officially revealed to the world February 1, 1959, as part of the inaugural Daytona 500 festivities.

“First time I saw it, they had it on a bed of angel hair,” he says of his initial encounter with the Cyclone at the Philly show, “which was used quite a bit in those days.”