CADILLAC, THE MYTHICAL AMERICAN LUXURY VEHICLES

Today, The Grandma has decided to buy a new car. She has chosen a Cadillac. She loves these cars, whose company was founded on a day like today in 1902.

The Cadillac Motor Car Division is a division of the American automobile manufacturer General Motors Company (GM) that designs and builds luxury vehicles.

Cadillac's models are distributed in 34 additional markets worldwide. Cadillac's automobiles are at the top of the luxury field within the United States. In 2019, Cadillac sold 390,458 vehicles worldwide, a record for the brand.

Cadillac is among the first automotive brands in the world, 4th in the United States only to fellow Autocar Company (1897) and GM marques Oldsmobile (1897) and Buick (1899). It was named after Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who founded Detroit, Michigan. The Cadillac crest is based on his coat of arms.

By the time General Motors purchased the company in 1909, Cadillac had already established itself as one of America's premier luxury carmakers. The complete interchangeability of its precision parts had allowed it to lay the foundation for the modern mass production of automobiles. It was at the forefront of technological advances, introducing full electrical systems, the clash less manual transmission and the steel roof. The brand developed three engines, with its V8 setting the standard for the American automotive industry.

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Cadillac had the first U.S. car to win the Royal Automobile Club of the United Kingdom's Dewar Trophy by successfully demonstrating the interchangeability of its component parts during a reliability test in 1908; this spawned the firm's slogan Standard of the World. It won the trophy again in 1912 for incorporating electric starting and lighting in a production automobile.

Cadillac was formed from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company. After a dispute between Henry Ford and his investors, Ford left the company along with several of his key partners in March 1902. Ford's financial backers William Murphy and Lemuel Bowen called in engineer Henry M. Leland of Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing Company to appraise the plant and equipment in preparation for liquidating the company's assets.

Instead, Leland persuaded the pair to continue manufacturing automobiles using Leland's proven single-cylinder engine. A new company called the Cadillac Automobile Company was established on 22 August 1902, re-purposing the Henry Ford Company factory at Cass Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It was named after French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who had founded Detroit in 1701.

Cadillac's first automobiles, the Runabout and Tonneau, were completed in October 1902. They were two-seat horseless carriages powered by a 10 hp (7 kW) single-cylinder engine. They were practically identical to the 1903 Ford Model A. Many sources say the first car rolled out of the factory on 17 October; in the book Henry Leland-Master of Precision, the date is 20 October; another reliable source shows car number three to have been built on 16 October.  

 

Cadillac displayed the new vehicles at the New York Auto Show in January 1903, where the vehicles impressed the crowds enough to gather over 2,000 firm orders.

 

Cadillac's biggest selling point was precision manufacturing, and therefore, reliability; a Cadillac was simply a better-made vehicle than its competitors.

The Cadillac Automobile Company merged with Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing, forming The Cadillac Motor Company in 1905.

From its earliest years, Cadillac aimed for precision engineering and stylish luxury finishes, causing its cars to be ranked among the finest in the United States. Cadillac was the first volume manufacturer of a fully enclosed car, in 1906. Cadillac participated in the 1908 interchangeability test in the United Kingdom, and was awarded the Dewar Trophy for the most important advancement of the year in the automobile industry.

In 1909, Cadillac was purchased by the General Motors (GM) conglomerate. Cadillac became General Motors' prestige division, devoted to the production of large luxury vehicles. The Cadillac line was also GM's default marque for commercial chassis institutional vehicles, such as limousines, ambulances, hearses and funeral home flower cars, the last three of which were custom-built by after market manufacturers. It became positioned at the top of GM's vehicle hierarchy, above Buick, Oldsmobile, Oakland, and later, Chevrolet.

In 1912, Cadillac was the first automobile manufacturer to incorporate an electrical system enabling starting, ignition, and lighting.

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Pre-World War II Cadillacs were well-built, powerful, mass-produced luxury cars aimed at an upper-class market. In the 1930s, Cadillac added cars with V12 and V16 engines to their range, many of which were fitted with custom coach-built bodies.

In the 1920s and 1930s Cadillac and Buick vehicles were popular with longer-distance passenger service operators, e.g. the Nairn Transport Company in the Middle East (Baghdad-Damascus) and Newmans Coach Lines in New Zealand.

Postwar Cadillac vehicles innovated many of the styling features that came to be synonymous with the late 1940s and 1950s American automobile.

The 1970s saw new extremes in vehicle luxury and dimension.

The 1980s also saw the introduction of new, technology-assisted luxury features.

In 2000, Cadillac introduced a new design philosophy for the 21st century called Art and Science, which it states incorporates sharp, sheer forms and crisp edges -a form vocabulary that expresses bold, high-technology design and invokes the technology used to design it.

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Long as I was riding in a big Cadillac
and dressed nice and had plenty of food,
that's all I cared about.

 

Etta James