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

THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY: AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY

The Ford Motor Company Logo

The Ford Motor Company is an American multinational automaker headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. 

It was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. The company sells automobiles and commercial vehicles under the Ford brand and most luxury cars under the Lincoln brand.

Henry Ford's first attempt at a car company under his own name was the Henry Ford Company on November 3, 1901, which became the Cadillac Motor Company on August 22, 1902, after Ford left with the rights to his name. The Ford Motor Company was launched in a converted factory in 1903 with $28,000 in cash from twelve investors, most notably John and Horace Dodge, who would later found their own car company. 

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During its early years, the company produced just a few cars a day at its factory on Mack Avenue and later its factory on Piquette Avenue in Detroit, Michigan. Groups of two or three men worked on each car, assembling it from parts made mostly by supplier companies contracting for Ford. Within a decade, the company would lead the world in the expansion and refinement of the assembly line concept, and Ford soon brought much of the part production in-house in a vertical integration that seemed a better path for the era.

Henry Ford driving one of his cars

Henry Ford was 39 years old when he founded the Ford Motor Company, whichwould go on to become one of the world's largest and most profitable companies. 

It has been in continuous family control for over 100 years and is one of the largest family-controlled companies in the world. 

The first gasoline powered automobile had been created in 1885 by the German inventor Carl Benz from Benz Patent-Motorwagen. 

More efficient production methods were needed to make automobiles affordable for the middle class, to which Ford contributed by, for instance, introducing the first moving assembly line in 1913 at the Ford factory in Highland Park.

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Between 1903 and 1908, Ford produced the Models A, B, C, F, K, N, R, and S. Hundreds or a few thousand of most of these were sold per year. In 1908, Ford introduced the mass-produced Model T, which totalled millions sold over nearly 20 years. In 1927, Ford replaced the T with the Model A, the first car with safety glass in the windshield. Ford launched the first low-priced car with a V8 engine in 1932.

Henry Ford with a Ford Model

Ford created the Mercury in 1939 as a higher-priced companion car to Ford. Henry Ford purchased the Lincoln Motor Company in 1922, in order to compete with such brands as Cadillac and Packard for the luxury segment of the automobile market. 

In 1929, Ford was contracted by the government of the Soviet Union to set up the Gorky Automobile Plant in Russia initially producing Ford Model A and AAs thereby playing an important role in the industrialisation of that country.

The creation of a scientific laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan in 1951, doing unfettered basic research, led to Ford's unlikely involvement in superconductivity research. In 1964, Ford Research Labs made a key breakthrough with the invention of a superconducting quantum interference device or SQUID.

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Ford offered the Lifeguard safety package from 1956, which included such innovations as a standard deep-dish steering wheel, optional front, and, for the first time in a car, rear seatbelts, and an optional padded dash. Ford introduced child-proof door locks into its products in 1957, and, in the same year, offered the first retractable hardtop on a mass-produced six-seater car.

A Ford Mustang, 1965

In late 1955, Ford established the Continental division as a separate luxury car division. This division was responsible for the manufacture and sale of the famous Continental Mark II. At the same time, the Edsel division was created to design and market that car starting with the 1958 model year.

Due to limited sales of the Continental and the Edsel disaster, Ford merged Lincoln, Mercury, and Edsel into M-E-L, which reverted to Lincoln-Mercury after Edsel's November 1959 demise.

The Ford Mustang was introduced in 1964. In 1965, Ford introduced the seat belt reminder light.

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With the 1980s, Ford introduced several highly successful vehicles around the world. During the 1980s, Ford began using the advertising slogan, Have you driven a Ford, lately? to introduce new customers to their brand and make their vehicles appear more modern. In 1990 and 1994 respectively, Ford also acquired Jaguar Cars and Aston Martin. During the mid- to late 1990s, Ford continued to sell large numbers of vehicles, in a booming American economy with a soaring stock market and low fuel prices.

With the dawn of the new century, legacy health care costs, higher fuel prices, and a faltering economy led to falling market shares, declining sales, and diminished profit margins. Most of the corporate profits came from financing consumer automobile loans through Ford Motor Credit Company.

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Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. 

Anyone who keeps learning stays young. 

The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. 

Henry Ford