In late December of 1975, C/D‘s Charles Fox took possession of a Custom Cloud at the docks in Southampton, England, with the goal of seeing how the fancied-up Chevy Monte Carlo might fare in the homeland of Rolls-Royce. The car was spat upon, cheered, had derision heaped upon it, and suffered the ignominy of having its faux-Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament stolen. In short, while Fox admitted that the Custom Cloud was the funniest thing that happened in London during that dreary Christmas season, he seemed fundamentally depressed by the entire experience. Typical sad Limey stuff from a day when Morrissey was still just a morose Manchester kid writing fan letters to the New York Dolls. You, however, are a 21st-century American possessed of much optimism and fine taste, and as such, you invariably want to know how to get your hands on one of these Custom Clouds.
The car was the brainchild of a Floridian named Jon Tedesco, a generous man who wanted to give Americans a big slice of the European high life at a mere quarter of the cost. Imagine a bolt-on fiberglass kit that turns a modern Camaro into an inexact facsimile of a Wraith for 75 thou, car included. That’s basically what Tedesco and company were hawking in 1976, using the vaguely baroque second-generation Monte Carlo as a basis. Questionable, sure, but we’ve seen more ludicrous and ill-advised vehicular transformations at the SEMA show. To add a bit of context, the fake Rolls grille was a semi-hot trend among 1970s Volkswagen Beetle owners who hadn’t replaced their front-trunk lids with ’41 Ford noses. The American people of the 1970s were accustomed to Rollers that weren’t Rollers.
Recently, in a Facebook group the author belongs to, the son of boxing commentator and former Muhammad Ali cornerman Ferdie Pacheco posted a photo of his father’s 1976 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. The car, noted the younger Pacheco, was so terrible, so utterly breakage prone that, in disgust, the Fight Doctor, spitting profanities, dropped off the Shadow at the local Cadillac dealership and rolled away in a new Fleetwood. In short, most everything was terrible in the mid-’70s for the affluent American motorist.
In his piece on Tedesco’s creation, Englishman Fox blamed the United States for a wider cultural predicament, lamenting that “the West seems to have lost the ability to distinguish between cheap, flimsy, poor, and shoddy . . . and something of value.” Compared to a Rolls of its era, the Custom Cloud offers an easily repaired, reliable Chevy 350 backed by an equally serviceable and reliable Turbo-Hydra-Matic 350 transmission. It also featured a fairly robust Delco electrical system. Rolls did at least have the good sense to spec the Turbo 350’s beefier brother, the TH400, for the Silver Shadow.
But is a luxury car produced during Britain’s nadir as an automaking nation truly something of value? Oddly, if this ad at Hemmings is to be believed, you can sell a Custom Cloud for what you paid for it, if we conveniently forget to account for 41 years’ worth of inflation. A new one ran you $10,000 in the mid-’70s, and the ask for this example is $9900. In 1976, the Silver Shadow’s MSRP was $38,750, while a quick scan of today’s prices reveals a spread from around five grand to over 50 large. That’s a perceived-value gamut wide enough to drive a Grey Poupon tanker through. Sure, a top-notch, needs-nothing Shadow is a somewhat decent investment, but you can fix a Custom Cloud with fiberglass resin, J-B Weld, and Chevy parts from AutoZone.
What say ye, America? We celebrate July 4 because we stuck it to the Brits. There’s no better time to put your money down on a Custom Cloud and stick it to ’em all over again.
“The Spirit of ’76” is C/D’s Fourth-of-July holiday-weekend series highlighting some of the most awesome cars for sale from our nation’s bicentennial year.
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