Among American luxury manufacturers, Packard; Cord; Stutz, and Duesenberg are long gone, and Lincoln awaits a cash infusion.

Yet times are good at Lincoln founder Henry Leland's other (prior) project: the Cadillac Motor Division. Spurred on by fresh investment, and more confident following Escalade's success in attracting a younger market, Cadillac moves to chase import performance-luxury nameplates with BMW-esque focus and yet a postmodern design language that grows increasingly American with every incarnation, from CTS to XLR, through SRX, and beyond.

With Buick focused on more traditional styling and appointments, Cadillac is permitted more focus, in the form of edgy, razor-like signature lines.

The average age of Cadillac buyers stands at 59 in 2004, down from 63 in 1999. The average Escalade ESV buyer is 48. Undoubtedly, Escalade was the first Cadillac in decades to capture the imagination of professional athletes and entertainers, and to again insert itself into popular culture.

As of 2004, Cadillac counts 1,491 dealerships across America.

Per the 2008 Cadillac CTS' Director of Exterior Design John Manoogian, Cadillac's brand essence is "extravagant; exclusive, and one that offers a dramatic presence."


"No one will confuse a modern Cadillac with a Mercedes-Benz," figures CNNMoney.com staff writer Peter Valdes-Dapena.

"Cadillacs are still show, still sharp, still glitzy.

"But underneath, there's real substance now.

"Someone might still buy a Cadillac because, on balance, they prefer Cadillac's style. That's fine, but it would be better if people bought a Caddy instead of a Mercedes because the Cadillac was just a better car.

"The redesigned 2008 Cadillac CTS might just do it" ('GM's plan to outmaneuver Toyota,' CNNMoney.com, October 7^th, 2007).

In its long and illustrious history, the Standard of the World has dabbled with the idea of a "small" Cadillac several times. The original Seville proved somewhat successful, but fell from grace in the '80s, drawing shock for its bustle-back. Cimarron is best remembered for generating shock by way of its very existence; Catera is barely remembered at all.

It falls, then, to the CTS of 2002 to prove that a small Cadillac can work.

CTS moves into its 2^nd generation for 2008.


Cadillac's road from land yachts, through emulating European handling qualities, and to its emergence as a legitimate, wiser American counterpart to both the Euro near-luxury and luxury sedans and to rapidly-emerging Japanese competition has been long and arduous.

Prior lack of consistency and focus meant that Cadillac never matched Mercedes-Benz's equity; nor BMW's performance moves, nor Audi's Bauhaus design; and so its shaky, ever-changing image was slammed by upstarts, most notably Lexus.

By 2005, Cadillac's entire line-up has returned to rear-wheel drive. Mark LaNeve, Cadillac General Manager, openly talks about becoming the Standard of the World again.

Now, like BMW, Cadillac brags of tuning its cars at the Nurburgring. The superlative performance of V-series models raises more than a few enthusiast eyebrows. Cadillac advertises its new cars on the merits of their rear-wheel-drive performance. Meanwhile, it undertakes a design revolution.

The forceful attitude of Cadillac's Art & Science design language, combined with engineering that is independent from other General Motors products in all the important ways (compare and contrast with front-heavy Acura), are just what the brand needs to again be seriously considered a premium player.


In the very beginning, particularly during the early- to mid-1920s, Cadillac hired coachbuilders to build its bodies. Fleetwood was one (its Pennsylvania factoria would later become part of GM-owned Fisher); Pininfarina was another.

Gradually, Cadillac challenged the very idea that body design should be solely the work of engineers. By 1948, it was convinced that its own in-houes designs were capable of meeting the demands of a nation optimistically entering the jet age after years of war.

Contours would start at the nose and continue back toward the trunk, the days of "flat-panel fenders and square coupés having come to an end" (Classic Cadillacs, James A. Dietzler, 2000).

"Chrome flowed like water," gushes Dietzler. The tail-fin became larger and larger until Harley Earl's '59 Eldorado Biarritz, the epitome of extravagance. Unrestrained elegance at the rear met dominance at the front, with bullet-nosed front bumpers and ever larger grilles.

The '59 Cadillacs taper to a wedge at the front, setting up a styling theme followed to this day.

By 1964, restraint was the new order of the day. Cadillac's innate desire for extravagance never recovered. Only the scripted Cadillac badge continued to express the exaggerated lines of old.

With the square designs of the '70s, Cadillacs were less curvaceous than ever. In 1980, the Seville took a turn for the Baroque, gaining a bustle-back design which, suggests Andrew Montgomery, "harked back to the razor-edged Rolls-Royces produced by Hooper and Vanden Plas in the 1950s" (The Illustrated Directory of American Cars, Andrew Montgomery, MBI, 2003).

The first sign of a Cadillac rebirth that would redefine the brand from the ground up was the Evoq Concept of 2000. Cadillac's new coupé boldly cleaved a new profile through air heavy with nostalgia, as other manufacturers filled Detroit's Cobo Hall with retro models at the dawn of the New Millennium. Evoq cloaked Northstar in a fresh, jet fighter inspired, homegrown designed that stunned the public.

When the CTS sport sedan emerged in 2001 as an '02 model, it was an evolution of the concept; yet it looked not only like nothing Cadillac had been building, but, equally, like nothing else around.

CTS' rear-wheel-drive, Sigma platform was a revelation, suddenly touting its track tuning rather than, as had been Cadillac's front-wheel-drive mantra for two decades, its prowess in poor weather.

Whatever your preference in the 3-box class, one product within it - the BMW 3 series - is most responsible for defining the performance luxury mix that others follow. BMW Group Design Head Chris Bangle chased human forms in penning the E46 3 series, describing its front fascia as a face.

Cadillac, on the other hand, did its best to slash where the Bimmer curved, vertically stacking its headlamps and dashboard, and labeling its technique Art & Science.

There is an American swagger in the original CTS' design, creased and pressed into a brash format the re-wrote the rules.

Meanwhile, GM Vice Chairman for Product Development Bob Lutz prefers curves over the cuts of Art & Science. Cuts and slashes are to be used at a car's extremities, rather than forcing the eye in multiple directions across the body. Lutz's preference leads to a gentle refinement of Cadillac's design language for the 2^nd-generation, 2008 CTS.

Just as Cadillac's Torpedo, debuting at the 1910 New York National Automobile Show, smoothed out some of the traditional horseless carriage design cues, Cadillac's Art & Science was being honed.


In the wake of the 1973 gas crisis, Cadillac stumbles when the time comes to make more than stylistic changes. A multi-billion dollar downsizing plan chases import buyers, but is in reality lucky to retain Cadillac's domestic-oriented audience.

The Seville, born from humble Chevrolet Nova beginnings in 1975, struggles to deliver Cadillac's Standard of the World promise. In 1980, it switches to front-wheel drive and never looks back, even as the general consensus among the Germans (who by now commanded a more favorable image) holds that the layout is inherently unsuited to performance luxury.

By 1977, every Cadillac has been downsized in a billion-dollar GM-wide program. Cadillac had a record year, with sales of 358,487 cars, and for a time it seems as though the Seville has stemmed the import luxury tide. Yet the proud brand's nadir is yet to come, with the Cimarron and the dreadful diesel engines of the early-80s.

Cadillac's front-wheel-drive excursions date back to 1967, with the Eldorado (sister car to Oldsmobile's Toronado). By the '80s, however, what had begun as a technological showpiece was rapidly becoming a trademark of paranoid (if expensive) planning that left ever Cadillac but the Fleetwood Brougham a front-wheel-drive vehicle. Becoming the first American manufacturer to arrange a V8 in transverse fashion in 1985 was, in hindsight, no great honor when one considers the resulting weight distribution.

In December 1991, Car and Driver called Cadillac's de Ville "one Touring Sedan to blow Mother Hubbard's skirts off." It was damning with faint praise, for Cadillac's computer-controlled wizardry and 4.9-liter V8 remained saddled with a ho-hum chassis. The ride was blissful, and the car, quick, but the luxury market had by now firmly turned toward acceleration of the lateral kind.

One hand effectively tied behind its back, Cadillac had one more card to play - and it was a good one. Yes, the advertising for both the Seville and the more traditional de Ville bragged about their stability in incelement weather; but the Northstar 4.6-liter all-aluminum engine of 1993 gave driving enthusiasts a reason to admire Cadillac again. First introduced in the Allante, instantly making that car the fastest Cadillac ever tested by Road & Track, the new 32-valver had double overhead camshafts for each cylinder bank, and immediately hit Ward's 10 Best Engines list.

"From its birth," writes Angelo van Bogart, "the heart of a Cadillac was its engine, and with the Northstar, a new pulse surged back into the company" (Cadillac: 100 Years of Innovation, Krause, 2003).

For the first time in years, Cadillac was filtering down into GM products, rather being diluted by convenience. Oldsmobile's (stillborn) turnaround was spearheaded by a Northstar-derived V8, placed in its flagship Aurora. Buick's Riviera coupé was developed at Cadillac's Engineering and Manufacturing Division in Flint, Michigan.

Yet, all the while, Northstar's excellence "only served to highlight the limitations of the (1993-2004) Seville's front-wheel-drive layout" (as Automobile, July 2004, put it).

If Cadillac never quite recovered its premium positioning, suffering at the hands of Europe's best, it continued to dream - as did legions of Cadillac fans, buoyed by innovations such as Northstar and night vision, but equally disheartened to be spinning their front tires while labels as evocative as Eldorado were neglected to the point of ignominious defeat and withdrawal from the market.

Certainly, the Cadillac name was still a potent force in the American market. "Northstar... follow the North star. Fantastic.

And we've got Duratec," complained a Ford engineer to author Mary Walton as Cadillac's new V8 made a name for itself (Car, 1996).

Small wonder, then, that Cadillac was the first of GM's brands to be rejuvenated at the turn of the Millennium. Convinced that Cadillac continued to enjoy a remarkable amount of goodwill, even considering its missteps, GM began a $6 billion rethink to bring you the best of the crest.


Before Henry Leland jumped ship to Lincoln, and after he was rebugged by Ransom E. Olds for going over cost, his ideas for bolstering the automobile's shaky image with opulence began at Cadillac in 1902. Having worked as a mechanic at the Crompton-Knowles Loom WOrks at Springfield, Massacusetts during the Civil War, Leland was well-equipped to found his own company, and to demand exacting standards to the tiniest detail.

The car, both Leland and Cadillac were convinced, was more than a conveyance; it was an innovation to be celebrated.

Cadillac knew that the crank starter was no way to treat upscale buyers, and Leland gladly bought and improved upon the electric systems that Charles Franklin Kettering had been testing on his own Cadillac roadster. Leland's faith in innovation redefined the way people started their cars.

From its very birth, Cadillac was obsessive about its interior and exterior appointments. James Dietzler recalls "polishe brass... smoothly rounded radii... artful pinstriping on brightly lacquered and highly polished coaches," and a "high luster of brass appointments, from radiator adornments and headlamps to windshield supports and horns" (Classic Cadillacs, James A. Dietzler, 2000).

"Even the smallest details were not ignored," writes Angelo van Bogart, noting "special split-core fasteners that locked a nut on its thread, making the use of a lock washer unnecessary" (Cadillac: 100 Years of Innovation, Krause, 2003).

In 1908, six years after Leland founded the company, Cadillac captured the coveted Dewar Trophy. The achievement landed Cadillac its famous tagline, Standard of the World.

Under William C. Durant's General Motors, from 1909 onward, Cadillac cherish that label. An unparalleled second Dewar Trophy would follow in 1912, all the more important because it would be awarded by the British - at the time, an important potential overseas market. Indeed, London importer Frederick S. Bennett would make a decent image for Cadillac abroad, promoting the legendary reliability of Leland's early cars.

Cadillac would press forward with a V8 in the mid-teens and '20s; would belie the Depression with glorious cars in the '30s, and would welcome home servicemen in the late-40s and into the '50s with ever more expressive extravagance, including machine-turned dashboards, as though crafted by the finest jeweler.

A fire at GM's Hydra-Matic transmission plant in Livonia, Michigan in 1953 saw, for a short period, Cadillacs fitted with Buick's Dynaflow transmission, rather than the superior Hydra-Matic which was shared only with Oldsmobile. Nonetheless, the rampant parts-sharing that would see Cadillac buyers finding Chevrolet engines under their hoods (and, in some cases, Chevrolet platforms under their seats) was still a quarter-century away.

Cadillac was the choice of celebrities from Ann May before the '20s, through Elvis; Liberace, and the Rat Pack in the '50s.

The mood would sober in the '60s, with the assassination of President Kennedy, and the Vietnam War. So, too, would Cadillac.


As far back as the early 1900s, Cadillac founder Henry Leland had integrated a cam-and-lever system that allowed the driver to adjust engine speed and load by varying intake valve lift. "Amazingly, Leland's cam-and-lever system can still be found on some luxury cars today," notes Angelo van Bogart (Cadillac: 100 Years of Innovation, Krause, 2003).

Cadillac is the only American manufacturer ever to have received a Dewar trophy, and the only manufacturer in the world to receive two. Over more than a century, Cadillac has given the world:

• the first mass-produced V8 (more than 180,000 built by 1925, and none of them replaced for any reason)
• the first counter-balanced V8 (to offset the vibrations caused by the pistons battling each other)
• the first V-16 passenger car
• hydraulic brakes and knee-action suspension (engineered by Maurice Olley of Rolls-Royce and released in 1934)
• electric starting

In 1948, Cadillac's new 90-degree, overhead-valve V8 was a revelation, "reflecting the ideology that had won Cadillac the Dewar Trophy twice in the past: the main block; crankcase, and cylinder heads were comprised of separate, interchangeable components" (Classic Cadillacs, James A. Dietzler, 2000).


Mounted front-and-center on most Cadillacs since 1907, Cadillac's crest dates back to the founder of the company's hometown, Le Sieur Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.