Celebrating 120 years of Cadillac

While it’s true that Cadillac as we know it was created in 1902, it was a reorganization of Henry Ford’s second company, which he founded in November 1901 and left the following March after a dispute with his investors.

Ford finally hit the jackpot with his third company which you might know, while the one from which he had just flounced was renamed after 17th century French explorer and Detroit founder Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac. Let’s tell the Cadillac story, illustrated by its most notable cars:

The first Cadillac cars bore a remarkable, and understandable, resemblance to the 1903 Ford Model A. The difference was that while the Ford had a 1.7-litre two-cylinder engine, Cadillac used a single-cylinder 1.6-litre unit supplied by Leland and Faulkner. 

Cadillac had examples of its new car, retrospectively named Model A, ready for the New York Auto Show in January 1903 and was still building Model S and Model T derivatives in 1908.

Cadillac’s second car, launched in 1905, was larger than the first, and featured a four-cylinder engine measuring 3.7, 4.9 or 6.4 litres. The Models D, G, H and L were also offered in different sizes and with a variety of body styles.

With its single-cylinder cars, Cadillac had already developed a reputation for reliability. Thanks to the Model D (pictured) and its successors, it was now also becoming known as a luxury brand.

Cadillac took the Model G and developed it into the Model Thirty, which was unusual in two ways. First, one of the available bodies had a solid roof, a very strange thing for a car introduced in the dying weeks of 1909.

Second, the car had electric lights and, more famously, an electric starter, which removed the need to crank the engine into life by hand. This invention won Cadillac the Royal Automobile Club’s 1912 Dewar Trophy.

Cadillac’s large and luxurious Type 51 was launched in 1914 with the startling feature of a 5.1-litre V8 engine producing 70 horsepower. The engine was by no means the world’s first V8, but it was an extremely early example of one made available in a mass-produced car. In January 2000 it was named by Wards Auto as one of its top 10 engines of the 20th century.

The Type 51 was helped a lot by the electric starter innovation - people would have got seriously cranky trying to manually start a heavy eight-cylinder engine.

In the 1920s, General Motors assigned four of its five brands with slightly differentiated companion makes, each of them intended to fill a gap in GM’s line-up and addressing a slightly different demographic. Cadillac’s companion was LaSalle, named, like Cadillac itself, after a 17th century French explorer – in this case René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.

LaSalle was placed second from the top in the GM hierarchy, below Cadillac but above Buick, until it was discontinued in 1940. Its first designer was Harley Earl, who went on to have a glittering career at GM. The LaSalle name went on to be used on a number of celebrated post-war concept cars.

Although the layout is common in other applications, very few production cars have been fitted with V16 engines. The first to go on sale was the 7.4-litre Cadillac V-16 (with a hyphen), also known as the Cadillac Sixteen or, more prosaically, the Series 452.

It was launched in 1930, right at the start of the Great Depression, and somehow remained on the market until it was replaced in 1938 by the 7.1-litre Series 90, which had another V16 engine with a wider V angle. Cadillac finally stopped building V16 models in 1940.

Oddly, there have been fewer V12 Cadillacs than V16s. The Series 370 V-12 had an engine which was derived from the first V16, and shared its 45-degree V angle, which is not optimal for V12s.

Less frighteningly expensive than the V16 models, it sold better. However, it was also abandoned earlier, in 1937, the year after a name change to Series 80 for regular models and Series 85 for long-wheelbase ones.

Although it was still considered daring, aerodynamic styling was gradually working its way into the mainstream in the mid 1930s. The Cadillac Series 70, styled under the direction of the now increasingly influential Harley Earl, was introduced in 1936, and was significantly more rounded than earlier models.

Its new 5.7-litre V8 engine was relatively conventional compared with the V12 and V16 that Cadillac had already put on the market, but it produced a useful 135 horsepower. Although the Series 70 was discontinued in 1938, the long-wheelbase Series 75 (pictured) remained in production for many years.

The first of many Cadillacs named Sixty Special was launched in 1938. Essentially the replacement for the previously mentioned Series 70, it was mechanically a long-wheelbase derivative of Cadillac’s entry-level Series 60, which at the time was the brand’s most popular model.

The Sixty Special looked quite different, though. Its body was of the then-unusual “three box” sedan type, and it had more glass area than other Cadillacs of the period. The model was facelifted in 1939 and replaced by a new Sixty Special three years after that.

The Series 62 was into its third generation by the time Cadillac created its first de Ville (“of the town”) model in 1949. It appeared a few months after a Coupe de Ville concept was displayed at the inaugural General Motors Motorama (or Transportation Unlimited Autorama as it was known in that first year), but that car was based on the existing Sixty Special.

The production Coupe de Ville is regarded as one of the world’s first hardtop coupes along with two other GM models released the same year – the Buick Roadmaster Riviera and the Oldsmobile 98 Holiday.

Another name later to become famous in Cadillac history made its debut in 1953. Like the Coupe de Ville, the first Eldorado was a derivative of the Series 62, but this time a range-topping, limited-production convertible produced in very small numbers and sold at a high price.

Also like the Coupe de Ville, the Eldorado was one of three very similar GM models, the others being the Buick Roadmaster Skylark and the Oldsmobile 98 Fiesta. None of them was in production for long, though another ’53 GM convertible, the first-generation Chevrolet Corvette, was to remain on sale for nearly a decade.

For an example of how extreme Cadillac styling became in the mid 20th century, look no further than the capitalism-on-wheels ’59 de Ville, available with sedan and coupe body styles.

Bill Mitchell’s Jet Age design included a complex front grille, enormous rear fenders and bullet-like tail lights. The styling was toned down considerably for the 1960 model year.

Cadillac turned to front-wheel drive for the first time in 1967. That year’s Eldorado, with notably crisper styling than previous models of the same name, was also the brand’s first attempt at a personal luxury car, a type of vehicle which looked relatively sporty but had a greater emphasis on comfort than performance, and a segment that would boom over the next decade.

The engine driving the front wheels in ’67 was the 7.0-litre V8, the smallest ever fitted to this generation of Eldorado. A year later, it was replaced by one 10 percent larger.

An even more monstrous V8 made its first appearance in the 1970 Eldorado. This one measured 500 cubic inches, or 8.2 litres, and was rated at 400 horsepower gross, but this amounts to only around 235bhp in today’s figures because of the major differences in ways power is calculated in net terms.

It was the largest-capacity engine ever offered in a production Cadillac, and became available in other models in the mid 1970s.

The introduction of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations in the US obliged Cadillac to produce less resource-intensive models. The 1977 de Ville models were accordingly nine inches shorter, four inches narrower and nearly half a ton lighter than the cars they replaced.

The largest engine in the new range was, at 7.0 litres, almost a midget compared with the 7.7-litre V8 entry-level unit in the previous de Ville.

One of Cadillac’s more unusual models was the two-seat Allanté roadster. Launched in 1987, it was assembled in Detroit from bodies built by its designer Pininfarina in Turin and then flown across the Atlantic. This complex and very expensive process continued until 1993.

Most models were fitted with Cadillac’s High Technology V8 engine in first 4.1-litre and then 4.5-litre forms, though this was replaced by the more modern 4.6-litre Northstar V8 for the final year of production. Just 21,430 examples were sold in total, and history has deemed this competitor for the Mercedes-Benz SL a failure, albeit an interesting one.

Cadillac’s new entry-level car for the 1997 model year was the Catera, a roomy four-door sedan with a 3.0-litre V6 engine.

Although it was fresh to the US, the Catera was familiar to Europeans, being a rebadged and mildly restyled version of the Opel/Vauxhall Omega. And while that latter car sold reasonably well, the Catera proved too small and unspecial for the US luxury market; 95,000 were sold until the experiment ended in 2001.

Cadillac built cars called Seville across five generations, starting in 1975. The final version, launched in 1998, was the first Cadillac to be built in both right- and left-hand drive forms, and the first to be given regulatory Type Approval to be sold in Europe.

Reactions within the UK motoring press varied wildly. Some reviewers thought the Seville drove beautifully, while others objected to the idea of a front-wheel drive car with 300bhp (courtesy of the 4.6-litre Northstar V8 engine) and claimed that the Seville suffered from both understeer and torque steer.

Like almost every other manufacturer, Cadillac bowed to the inevitable (and perhaps once unthinkable) and developed a full-size SUV. The first-generation Escalade went on sale in 1998 as a rival to the Mercedes M-Class, the Lexus LX and the Lincoln Navigator.

The Escalade quickly became a poster child for conspicuous consumption in the US. “Blinged” Escalades were soon the car of choice for top-selling rap artists in much the same way that the Toyota Prius found favour with Hollywood film stars, though many of them also hid an Escalade in their garages at the same time.

The BLS was one of the most curious models in Cadillac history. It was never sold in the US or Canada, but was instead aimed at customers in Europe and other non-American markets.

It was based on GM’s Epsilon platform and was therefore a close relative of the Fiat Croma, Saab 9-3 and Vauxhall Insignia, among many others. Examples were built either by Saab in Sweden or at a GM factory in Kaliningrad, Russia. Having failed to find many customers, the BLS was discontinued after five years.

Cadillac has a long, though not continuous, history in motorsport. Its latest effort surrounds the DPi-V.R., which is run by several private teams. The chassis is a variant of the Dallara P217, while the engine is a GM Small Block V8 specially developed for the car by ECR Engines.

The car has been very successful, for example winning the 24 Hours of Daytona every year from 2017 to 2020.

The most powerful Cadillac ever to go into production, at least for a while, will be the CT5-V Blackwing, which is due to go on sale in mid 2021. It is the ultra high-performance version of the already rapid CT5-V (pictured).

The Blackwing has a supercharged 6.2-litre V8 engine whose power output has not been confirmed at the time of writing, but which is expected to produce over 640bhp. Projected performance figures are a top speed of 200mph and a 0-62mph time of 3.7 seconds.

The fifth-generation Escalade SUV – and the first to be fitted with a stop/start system - went on sale in late 2020 despite production delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is sold in North America with either a 6.2-litre 420bhp V8 gasoline engine or a 3.0-litre 277bhp turbodiesel. It features a curved OLED infotainment screen, the first production vehicle to feature such a thing.

The Escalade will be exported to China, Japan and the Middle East, and there are rumours that it will also find its way to Australia.

Although there are currently no Cadillac electric vehicles, there are likely to be six by the end of 2025. Of these, only the projected Escalade EV will be an electric version of an existing model.

All the others will be based on EV-specific platforms. The first to go on sale will be the Lyriq crossover, which was revealed as a nearly production-ready show car in August 2020. The Lyriq will go on sale in the first quarter of 2022, nine months ahead of the original schedule.