In my research of the 1959 Cadillac, I found that the car came with two large ashtrays that flipped down, one for the driver and another for the passenger. Because of course it would. I could imagine this feature lasting into the ’70s, but I don’t know if it did.
The panel lines for the boxes were in the kit part, which is nice. I decided I wanted a little extra detail, so I planned to open one of them. The structure of how the dash is designed meant I would make things hard to attach if I tried to open the driver’s box, so I cut open the passenger. In my mind, this works okay as in the first film we saw Winston driving while Ray was in the passenger seat. Ray was the heaviest smoker we saw, so there we go.

Here is the front seat of the original Ecto-1 before restoration.

See the open ash tray? That’s my shape and size reference. Here’s what I ended up with. The arm on the side is meant to keep it from opening too far.

The advantage of opening the ashtray on the far right is that it opens in the same angle as the glove box. That allows me to modify the hinge mechanism and use existing pieces to help it work. This is what I came up with.

What I did was use the existing screwed down plate for the box hinge and the strut that spaces to the upper dash to hold a metal rod that goes through a cut piece of styrene tube. I added a small piece of steel from a broken scalpel blade to the edge of the ashtray door, and a magnet to catch it. I did the same for the glove box as it tended to hang open a tiny bit, especially after I cut up the plastic around it.

And here they are opened up and closed. There’s a little gap as the top isn’t screwed down on the dash at this point.
You can also see other mods I’ve done here. I replaced the ignition button with a panel where the key is inserted. It is also the accurate bare gray of a cast metal piece. The button is still behind it, but you insert a little key to press it to start the engine. I also added buttons under the radio to look more like a real one.