Cadillac : Brand of luxury

Founding

Cadillac was formed from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company when Henry Ford departed along with several of his key partners and the company was dissolved. With the intent of liquidating the firm's assets, Ford's financial backers, William Murphy and Lemuel Bowen called in engineer Henry M. Leland to appraise the plant and equipment prior to selling them. Instead, Leland persuaded them to continue in the automobile business using Leland's proven 1-cylinder engine. Henry Ford's departure required a new name, and on August 22, 1902, the company reformed as the Cadillac Automobile Company.

The Cadillac automobile was named after the 17th century French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, founder of Detroit, Michigan in 1701.

Contributions to the Automotive Industry

Cadillac helped to define advanced engineering, luxury and style early in Automotive History. Precision manufacturing of truly interchangeable parts was an award-winning industry first in 1908. Cadillac was the first manufacturer to release cars with a fully enclosed cab as factory equipment in 1910. Standard electric engine starting & lighting was another award winner for 1912. Cadillac introduced the first production V8 engine for the 1914 model year. Cadillac was the first manufacturer to utilize the skills of a designer to produce a car's body instead of an engineer (1927). This gave the public a car that looked as good as it performed. Cadillac's engineers were first to design a manual transmission with synchronizers for increased drivability (1929) and were instrumental in the early development of the automatic transmission, beginning in 1932. Cadillac offered a production V-16 engine from 1930 through 1940 and introduced the production independent wishbone front suspension in 1934. The marque introduced tailfins for 1948. From the late 1960s onward, Cadillac offered a fiber-optic indication system which alerted the driver of a failed light bulb.

General Motors

Cadillac was purchased by the General Motors conglomerate in 1909.

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 latter three of which were custom built by aftermarket manufacturers: Cadillac does not produce any such vehicles in factory.

In 1911, Cadillac was the first gasoline internal combustion engine auto to incorporate electric start, as opposed to earlier crank start. Originally marketed as a convenience device for female drivers, the electric starter developed by Charles Kettering was first used on the production models of 1912. Other innovations included the first V8 engine in mass production in 1915; shatter-resistant safety glass in 1926; and the first fully synchronized transmission (with gears "locked" in relation to one another to prevent clashing upon execution of a shift) in 1928. About this time, automobile stylist Harley Earl, whom Cadillac had recruited in 1926 and who was to head the new Art and Color section starting in January 1928, designed for 1927 a new, smaller "companion" car to the Cadillac which he called the La Salle, after another French explorer, René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. That marque remained in production until 1940.

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