Welcome one, welcome all to one of the very finest hot rods ever realized in metal: Billy Gibbons’ Cadzilla. When you’re a good ol’ Texan boy, love hot rods, and play a mean blues guitar for ZZ Top you need a ride to match your levels of cool. You need Cadillac’s head designer and you need hot rod legend Boyd Coddington along with all the master craftsmen at his disposal. Only then can you build a car so cool, so dripping with menace, that it’ll come to be known as one of the all-time greats.

Origins

Cadzilla was conceived, like many great things and people, in a dusty old bar on the Mexican-American border. Billy and Larry Erickson (Caddy’s design boss at the time) were doing some drinking together and got to talking about hot rods. Billy mentioned an idea for a one-of-a-kind lead sled based on the 1948 Cadillac Series 62 Sedanette, a long (and rare) two door luxury barge. Larry grabbed a napkin and the two started sketching what would become the absolute embodiment of cool on four wheels. Here’s a quick video of Billy talking about the design process and a picture of the Caddy that it’s based on.

Before

Exterior/Metal Work

Once they had everything planned out Billy contacted the illustrious Mr. Coddington and asked if he’d like to be part of the project. Boyd said something along the lines of “Fuck yes!” and put the unbelievably talented Craig Naff in charge of the Cadzilla metalwork. There isn’t a single panel or surface on the outside of the car that didn’t get altered or massaged in some way. When Naff was worried that the chopped roof line would mess with the windscreen he was told “Make it the way you want it to be; we’ll make a custom windshield to fit when you’re finished.” Make it that way he did!

The entire front end of the car, custom hood, fenders and all, is welded together into one piece that swings open to allow access to the engine. The headlights are Frenched (smoothed flush with the fenders) to make the front end as sleek as the stretched-out and contoured body that follows them. The suicide doors open with the touch of a button and everything is covered with many, many coats of “Deep Purple” House of Color paint. Pretty fitting that the paint’s named after one of the heaviest bands of the 70s, hey? 😉

Underneath

Cadzilla sits on a bespoke steel frame; a necessity after all the custom stuff that’s going on under that brilliant Craig Naff bodywork. Billy’s a fan of big, rumbly, reliable V8 power so the absolutely massive 500 cubic inch (8.1 litre) Cadillac V8 under the hood is perfect for his needs. Coddington’s engine specialists designed a unique Holley fuel injection system for the titanic engine and it’s got custom headers to make sure it sounds right too. Sound’s very important to a musician after all!

The steering rack and disc brakes are from a 1985 Corvette and the Koni coilover shocks at all four corners make sure Cadzilla can actually handle all that heft through the corners. The whole thing sits on massive 22-inch wheels reminiscent of Caddies of old with each one painstakingly milled from a block of solid aluminum. This is no trailer queen show car either. All that performance stuff means that it’s actually nice to drive (for a stunning 200 foot-long land yacht); a fact that Billy demonstrated by road-tripping it 2,200 miles from the Coddington shop to the Hot Rod Super Nationals for its public debut. The public, naturally, loved it and how could they not? Cadzilla is one of the absolute coolest things to exist on four wheels EVER.