1963 & 1964 Equipment Percentages

[Jason Edge]

Here is a list of equipment percentages I had pulled from the Ward Automotive Yearbooks for 1963 and 1964 and have used for several trivia questions. I thought I would share the entire list as seen below.

Any surprises?

Equipment	1963	1964
Automatic Transmission	100%	100%
Power Steering	100%	100%
Power Brakes	100%	100%
Heater	100%	99.9%
Radio	99.3%	99.4%
White Wall Tires	99.0%	99.1%
Tinted Glass	97.2%	97.7%
Power Windows	95.1%	96.7%
Power Seats (4 or 6 way)	84.8%	86.6%
Air Conditioning	66.0%	75.4%
Tilt Steering	unknown	34.5%
Seat Belts	22.6%	unknown
Limited Slip (controlled/posi) Differential	13.2%	15.4%
Bucket Seats	2.8%	2.4%

[Kurt]

A little surprising. Was it possible to order 63 & 64 Cadillacs WITHOUT Automatic Transmission, Power Steering & Power Brakes? If not, I don't consider these Optional Equipment. Also Tilt Steering IS applicable to 1963 Cadillacs (ask me how I know : ) and I doubt seat belts are N/A for 1964 Cadillacs.

[Jason Edge]

Kurt, I took the word Optional out. I was carrying forward the wording from the Ward Yearbook. Along with Cadillac you would have seen Fords, Chevy's etc and for those it was optional. 
There was no "Delete" option for the Auto transmission, Power Steering and Power Brakes.
There was for Heater, so you get a less than 100% for 1964 Heaters. 

N/A meant the data was not available as in unknown for the Ward Automotive Yearbook at time the book was produced.  I will change this to Unknown.

Tilt was introduced in 63 and front seatbelts became mandatory in 1964 after VIN 75000, but the customer could still request to delete them.

[Jason Edge]

Also, just to add there were 30+ optional items between 1963 and 1964 as can be seen if you go to our - Body Name Plate (ID Plate on top left of firewall near cowl) page and scroll down to the list of accessory codes. I should probably break that list out and have it separate on the Help Page.

I wish the Ward Book had all options and broke it down further for all options/accessories/equipment and broke it down by body style.

The bucket seat data would be my first go to item as I would truly love to see the actual # of Bucket Seats in Eldorados since it was a "no cost" option. I have some many people tell me "you know they made few Eldorados with bucket seat, most had bench seats".

What you can do is some math and say for 1963 with 2.8% of 163,174 cars made, that about 4,569 had bucket seats. My wild guess is about 1/2 of the the Eldorados had bucket seats. Looking at our Newsletters cover features we have featured 7 bench seat Eldorados (either year) and 6 bucket seat Eldorados (either year) so that makes me think my guess might be somewhere in the ball park.

So if 50% is accurate that would mean about 912 1963 Eldorados out of a total of 1,825 had bucket seats. Again, it was a no cost option and you got that console, so I have to bite my tongue a bit when the Eldo owners tell me how rare those bucket seats are.  They are rear in terms of overall production % (2.8% and 2.4%) but a big % of the Eldorados did have them. This is just one example where more details would be cool to have.

[Jason Edge]

I think the one surprise I get from others regarding equipment %'s is AC. Many assume many, or even all, Cadillacs have AC ... even in 1963/74. While the numbers were significant and growing (66% & 75%) that still meant over 55K 1963's and over 41K 1964's were heat only.   The series 62 body series, expectedly received the higher % of heat only cars, but again this is not a breakdown I have seen in the Wards Yearbooks or other documentation.  It has been my 1st had experience in bringing in many Series 62 parts cars that many did not have AC, which again makes sense as this was the low end body series.