Cadillac
Cadillac’s crest comes from a coat of arms its namesake invented for himself.
Antoine Laumet, a magistrate’s son from Gascony, reached New France around 1683. By 1687 he was calling himself sieur de Cadillac, with a coat of arms copied from a neighboring baron’s. He founded Detroit in 1701. Historians rank him among the worst scoundrels ever to set foot in New France. In 1909 General Motors paid $4.5 million for the car company named after him.
Sources: Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Wikipedia, The (New) Cadillac Database, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, History.com
Cash, Not Stock
When Billy Durant came to buy Cadillac in 1909, its backers were ready to sell, and they sent Henry Leland’s son, Wilfred, to bargain. Durant paid for most of the companies he gathered into General Motors with its stock. Wilfred would take only cash, and when Durant offered him a kickback to lower the price, he refused it. On July 29, 1909, General Motors paid $4.5 million in cash for a company whose backers, by Wilfred Leland’s own count, had spent $178,000 on three attempts, two of which failed, before they got a car into production.
Sources: Ate Up With Motor, American Heritage, History.com, Founders
Walked Out at 74
Henry Leland had expected war in Europe since 1910, and when America entered it in April 1917, his son Wilfred asked Billy Durant to let Cadillac build military aircraft engines. Durant, a pacifist by inclination, would not let General Motors do any military work, and Cadillac’s founder and his son resigned. Henry Leland was 74. He took many of Cadillac’s engineers to a company of his own, Lincoln, which by the end of August had a contract for 6,000 Liberty aircraft engines. In 1922, in receivership, Lincoln was bought by Henry Ford, whose abandoned company Leland had turned into Cadillac.
Sources: Ate Up With Motor, American Heritage, Detroit Historical Society, Wikipedia
Air Bridge
The bodies of Cadillac’s Allanté roadster of 1987 were built and trimmed by Pininfarina near Turin, then flown to Detroit 56 at a time in specially fitted Alitalia and Lufthansa 747s, three flights a week, to get their engines. “It was called the longest assembly line in the world,” said Bill Buschman, who ran its manufacturing. “Nearly 7000 miles long.” It started at $54,700, when other top Cadillacs cost under $30,000, and was forecast to sell 6,000 to 8,000 a year. Cadillac built just over 21,000 in seven model years. It was expected to pay its own way, said John Grettenberger, who ran Cadillac. “I don’t think it ever did.”
Sources: Hagerty, Hagerty, The New York Times
The Beast
The presidential limousine that went into service in September 2018, nicknamed the Beast, is a Cadillac believed to be built on a heavily modified Chevrolet Kodiak, a heavy-duty GM truck, and weighs about 20,000 pounds. Its walls are believed to be eight inches thick and its doors as heavy as a Boeing 757’s. It can lay down a smoke screen and an oil slick, its door handles can be electrified, and it carries a refrigerator stocked with blood of the president’s own type.
Cass Street
Henry Ford walked out of the Henry Ford Company in March 1902, and its backers, William Murphy and Lemuel Bowen, called in the engineer Henry Leland to value the plant for liquidation. Leland told them they were making a great mistake in going out of business. He had brought an engine with three times the power of the one he made for Oldsmobile, and it was not temperamental, he said, which made the room laugh, since most cars broke down. On August 22, 1902, the firm became the Cadillac Automobile Company, in Ford’s old factory at Cass Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Detroit. Its first car, finished that October, was practically identical to the Ford Model A of 1903.
A Thousandth of an Inch
Henry Leland had found fault with bearing maker after bearing maker before Cadillac gave its order to Hyatt, and then he refused Hyatt’s first shipment, its bearings not alike to a thousandth of an inch. He called in the man who ran Hyatt, Alfred Sloan, showed him a yard of axles whose bearings had broken and crumbled under the Cadillac load, and promised Hyatt’s a place beside them. “Mr. Sloan, Cadillacs are made to run, not just to sell.” Sloan went home determined to be as fanatical about precision as Leland, and went on to run General Motors. When he bought a car for his own use, it was a Cadillac.
Half Their Pay
By the summer of 1910 General Motors needed $15 million to survive, and of its 13 carmakers only Buick and Cadillac made money, with Buick in decline. That September Billy Durant took Henry Leland’s son, Wilfred, to meet five banks in New York. The day went badly, but for Wilfred’s account of Cadillac, soundly run and free of debt. The bankers asked to see him alone that evening, and by morning they had agreed to the loan. GM’s new board then set its yearly loan payments at nearly all of Cadillac’s income, gave the Lelands GM’s other divisions to reorganize as well, and cut their salaries in half.
Sources: Ate Up With Motor, American Heritage
Without a Crank
Before the First World War most cars were started with a hand crank, which could kick back and break bones, and carmakers assumed an automatic starter would cost too much to be practical. Henry Leland, horrified by the injuries and deaths, a friend’s among them, declared that Cadillac would build one. The bankers who now ran General Motors asked why Cadillac should pay for it when a crank was good enough for every other carmaker. When Leland’s own engineers could not make a starter small enough, he turned to Charles Kettering’s company, Delco, and the 1912 Cadillac came with electric starting, ignition and lights in one system. Britain’s Royal Automobile Club gave Cadillac its Dewar Trophy a second time.
Sources: Ate Up With Motor, Wikipedia, Founders, Wikipedia
Sixteen Cylinders
From 1926, in great secrecy, Cadillac worked on an engine smoother and more powerful than any other. It showed the result, a car with 16 cylinders, at the New York auto show on January 4, 1930, two months after the Wall Street crash of 1929. By April it had built 1,000, by June 2,000. Then orders fell away. In October 1930 the factory built 54, and in November 1931 just six. The V-16 stayed on sale through 1940 at about 50 cars a year, and Cadillac later estimated that it had lost money on every one it sold.
Sources: Wikipedia, Hooniverse
$2 a Part
Nicholas Dreystadt, who took over Cadillac in June 1934 after talking General Motors out of shelving it, had trained as an apprentice at Mercedes-Benz and never lost his Swabian accent. He wore tweed jackets with holes burned by his pipe, and his secretary kept a pair of dress shoes handy for the days he came in wearing two that did not match. “If someone else made a part for $2, why did ours have to cost three or four?” one executive remembered him asking. In less than three years a Cadillac cost no more per car to build than a Chevrolet, and in 1937 Cadillac sold more cars than in 1928.
Sources: Forbes, Jalopnik, Cars & Culture, Wikipedia
One Fin Taller
In the spring of 1941 Harley Earl, General Motors’ styling chief, took his designers to Selfridge Field near Detroit to see the Army’s new P-38 fighter, with its twin tails. After the war Frank Hershey’s team put fins like the P-38’s on the rear fenders of the 1948 Cadillac. Earl ordered them removed and threatened to fire Hershey, until GM’s chairman, Alfred Sloan, and its president, Charles Wilson, said they liked them. Cadillac’s new general manager, Jack Gordon, then asked for the fins to be cut by three-quarters of an inch. Bill Mitchell made one fin taller instead, and Gordon came back the next day and said he had been right, they looked better shorter.
Sources: Ate Up With Motor, Hagerty, Wikipedia
Last of the Convertibles
In April 1976 Cadillac announced that the Eldorado would be its last convertible. “Like the running board and rumble seat, the convertible is an item which history has passed by,” said its general manager, Edward Kennard. It sold over 14,000 that year, the final 200 identical in white with red and blue stripes, and buyers locked theirs away. In 1984 Cadillac brought out a new Eldorado convertible, and Abraham Korotki, a Baltimore lawyer, sued General Motors for $50 million on behalf of the 14,000 owners. The suit was dismissed, and by 2015 a low-mileage 1976 convertible often brought no more than $30,000, less than its price new after inflation.
Sources: Jalopnik, Hagerty, HowStuffWorks, Wikipedia
Lest We Forget
When Cadillac set out to turn GM’s J-car into a small Cadillac, GM’s president, Pete Estes, warned its general manager, Edward Kennard, “Ed, you don’t have time to turn the J-car into a Cadillac.” The car went on sale for 1982 as the Cimarron by Cadillac, and salespeople were told not to call it a Cadillac at all. It sold just under 26,000 in its first year, about a third of what Cadillac had expected, and 6,454 in 1988, its last. In 2006 Cadillac’s product director, John Howell, kept a picture of it on his office wall, captioned “Lest we forget.”
Sources: CarBuzz, Wikipedia, Car and Driver
Limp Home
Cadillac’s Northstar V8, new for 1993, had a limp-home mode for an engine that had lost all its coolant. Its computer shut off up to half the cylinders, so that they pumped air through the engine and kept it from overheating, and by one account the car could be driven up to 100 miles that way, though GM said no more than 50. Within a few years early Northstars were losing their coolant on their own. Their head bolts were threaded too finely and stripped the threads out of the aluminum block, letting coolant into the cylinders and the oil, usually somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 miles.
Sources: Engine Builder, Motor Authority, The Truth About Cars
143,000 Applicants
General Motors reportedly paid a $450 million fee, more than twice what was first asked, to put a Cadillac team on the Formula One grid in 2026, running Ferrari engines until its own are ready for 2029. Its first team principal, Graeme Lowdon, said 143,000 people applied for its jobs. At Monaco, its sixth race, Sergio Pérez finished 10th, which would have been the team’s first point, until a 10-second penalty for a front wheel outside his grid box at the restart dropped him to 15th.
Another Eldorado
On September 27, 1717, less than a month after he came home to France, Antoine Laumet and his eldest son were locked in the Bastille, where they stayed until February 8. Laumet, who as Cadillac had founded Detroit in 1701, had just come home from Louisiana, recalled as its governor. The company that held the colony’s monopoly was describing it to would-be settlers as another Eldorado, the mythical land of gold, and he had protested loudly that it was a monstrous confusion. In 1952 Cadillac chose Eldorado as the name of a show car for its 50th anniversary.
Sources: Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Wikipedia, Wikipedia
Car No. 13
The first three Cadillacs shown to the public, cars 10, 11 and 13, went on display at the New York Automobile Show in January 1903. William Metzger, who was selling them, declared Cadillac sold out after taking as many as 2,286 orders, each with a $10 deposit. Car 13, the oldest Cadillac known to survive, was bought by the owner of the Thomas Winery in Cucamonga, California, and shown there until it was sold in 1973. By then the winery had been sold and the car sat in a garage full of old refrigerators and washing machines. Restored, it sold at auction in 2007 for $330,000.
Sources: Sports Car Market, RM Sotheby’s, Wikipedia
Harlequin Cars
In March 1908 Britain’s Royal Automobile Club had three Cadillac Model Ks taken apart at the Brooklands track, scrambled into one heap of 2,163 pieces, with 89 of them swapped for spares from the London dealer’s shelves. A mechanic, E. O. Young, and his assistant, M. M. Gardner, rebuilt the cars from the heap. The original cars had not been painted alike, so the rebuilt ones came out in mismatched colors, and people called them the harlequin cars. All three then ran 500 miles, and one went on to win its class in the club’s 2,000-mile reliability trial that June. Cadillac won the Dewar Trophy for 1908, and the judges’ citation gave it a slogan, Standard of the World.
Sources: Wikipedia, Old Cars Weekly, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Simanaitis Says, Auto123
Penalty of Leadership
In 1914 Cadillac brought out its first V-8, and rivals inside General Motors and out sniped at it. Henry Leland and his son had Theodore MacManus, chief copywriter at Cadillac’s advertising agency, write a reply. “The Penalty of Leadership” ran once, in The Saturday Evening Post of January 2, 1915, and never named Cadillac or a car: “When a man’s work becomes a standard for the whole world, it also becomes a target for the shafts of the envious few.” Advertising Age later ranked it among the century’s 100 best campaigns. In 1967 Cadillac mailed it to its customers as a scroll, and Elvis Presley framed his and hung it by the desk in his office at Graceland.
Sources: Ate Up With Motor, Ad Age, DBusiness, Wikipedia, Elvis Presley Enterprises
Stupid Wooden Bumpers
Cadillac went back to building cars on October 7, 1945, before there were materials enough to build them properly, and some of its first postwar cars left the factory with plain wooden planks for bumpers. Dealers were told to swap them for chrome ones as supplies came in. Strikes and sheet-metal shortages held Cadillac to just under 30,000 cars for 1946, and by 1947 some 96,000 orders were waiting. In a scene cut from The Godfather, which is set in those years, Clemenza complains that his new Cadillac came with wooden bumpers.
Sources: The Autopian, RM Sotheby’s, Jalopnik, Wikipedia
Gladys’s Fleetwood
On July 7, 1955, Elvis Presley, touring with his band, bought a new Cadillac Fleetwood after his bass player wrecked his Lincoln and a used pink Cadillac burned by the roadside. The new car was blue with a black roof, and he had it painted pink to match the pink and black of his suits. On September 2 it was damaged in an accident while the band was playing in Texas. Presley had it repaired and repainted pink and white, then gave it to his mother, Gladys, who had no driver’s license.
Sources: Graceland, Old Cars Weekly
Lip and Eye Palette
In 1967 Mary Kay Ash, four years into her cosmetics company, ordered a Cadillac and had it painted to match the pale pink of the lip and eye palette she carried in her purse. Legend has it a Lincoln salesman in Dallas had told her to come back with her husband. In 1969 she gave her top five sellers the use of pink 1970 Coupe DeVilles, and by 2019 more than 24,000 had qualified for a pink Cadillac. GM keeps the color, Mary Kay Pink Pearl, for her company alone, and a pink Cadillac returned at the end of its lease is repainted before it is sold again.
Sources: Mary Kay, Automotive Fleet, Jalopnik
$250 for a Backhoe
In 1974 Stanley Marsh 3, an Amarillo oil and gas millionaire, paid the Ant Farm, a San Francisco art group, $2,000, with $3,000 to buy ten old Cadillacs and $250 to rent a backhoe. They buried the cars, models from 1949 to 1964, nose-first in a field beside the highway and called it Cadillac Ranch. “It’s such an irrelevant and silly proposition that I want to give it all my time and attention so I can make a casual judgment of it,” Marsh had written back to their proposal. Visitors covered the cars in graffiti, and by 2024 his son had a truck at the site selling cans of spray paint.
Sources: Hagerty, Route 66 News
No Negatives
Cadillac’s first small car went on sale on May 1, 1975, as its answer to Mercedes-Benz and the other European imports. Its planners first suggested calling it Leland, after the company’s founder, but most buyers would not know the name, and Henry Leland had gone on to found Lincoln, Cadillac’s rival. LaSalle and the designers’ choice, LaScala, lost to Seville, which, said marketing director Gordon Horsburgh, “had no negatives.” At $12,479 it cost more than any Cadillac but the limousines, and from May 1975 to April 1976 Cadillac delivered 44,475 Sevilles, against 45,353 Mercedes-Benzes of every model.
Sources: Wikipedia, Hagerty, MotorCities National Heritage Area
Knock-Down Kits
From 1978 General Motors Iran assembled Cadillac Sevilles from kits shipped from Detroit, the only Cadillacs then built outside the United States, and sold them for some $35,000, more than Americans paid. After the 1979 revolution the Americans left, Iran nationalized the plant as Pars Khodro, and the leftover kits kept it building Sevilles for several more years. GM was later awarded some $20 million by the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal. In 2023 a restored Seville could fetch as much as $40,000 in Iran.
Sources: The Boston Globe, Voice of America, Wikipedia
V8-6-4
For 1981 every gasoline Cadillac got the V8-6-4, a six-liter V8 whose computer could switch off two or four cylinders at a steady cruise to save fuel, with a dashboard display showing how many were running. The computers of 1981 could not keep up. The engine hunted between eight, six and four cylinders, bucking and shaking in what were meant to be America’s most refined cars, and owners sued. Cadillac issued 13 software updates, none of which fixed it, then dropped it after one model year and sent dealers a kit to switch it off in the cars already sold.
Sources: Mac’s Motor City Garage, Top Gear
Center Caps
By 2002 Jay-Z, Big Tymers and Da Brat were rapping about the Escalade, Jennifer Lopez put it in a hit, and Mike Myers sang “Give me an Escalade” in Austin Powers in Goldmember. The first one, a 1999 model rushed out in ten months to answer Lincoln’s Navigator, had been little more than a GMC Yukon Denali with Cadillac’s crest in place of GMC’s logo on its center caps. Sales jumped 84 percent in the first seven months of 2002, and Cadillac neither gave rappers Escalades nor paid them to mention it, said its marketing director. In 2025 Cadillac sold 49,366 gas-powered Escalades, the most since 2007.
Sources: Autoweek, MotorTrend, Wikipedia, Carscoops
Poolside
The ELR, a plug-in coupe built on the Chevrolet Volt’s drivetrain, went on sale for 2014 at $75,000, $35,000 more than the Volt. Cadillac launched it with Poolside, a 60-second commercial in which the actor Neal McDonough strolls past his pool praising Americans for taking two weeks of vacation where other countries take four. It ran during the Winter Olympics and the Academy Awards, and Ford answered with a parody. Sales were so slow that Cadillac skipped the 2015 model year, and it sold 1,024 ELRs in the United States that calendar year. Production quietly ended in February 2016.
Sources: Wikipedia, USA Today, HybridCars.com, Adweek
SoHo Lofts
In September 2014 Johan de Nysschen, newly hired from Infiniti to run Cadillac, said its headquarters would leave Detroit for modern loft offices in SoHo, in New York, in 2015. “There is no city in the world where the inhabitants are more immersed in a premium lifestyle than in New York,” he said. Engineering, design and the factories stayed in Michigan, and about 110 people worked in SoHo. De Nysschen left abruptly in April 2018, and that September his successor, Steve Carlisle, said Cadillac was moving back to Detroit to take “inefficiencies” out of its work with GM.
Sources: Motor Authority, Motor Authority, Wikipedia
880 Dealers
In 2020 General Motors told its 880 Cadillac dealers in the United States that selling its coming electric cars would mean spending at least $200,000 each on chargers, tools and training. About 150 of them, some 17 percent, took buyouts ranging from about $300,000 to more than $1 million and stopped selling Cadillacs. In May 2026, less than four years after the first Lyriq, Cadillac passed 100,000 electric cars sold in the United States.
Sources: CNBC, GM Authority
Malenfant
On June 25, 1687, in Quebec, Antoine Laumet married Marie-Thérèse Guyon under a name he had made up, Antoine de Lamothe, esquire, sieur de Cadillac. He had landed in Acadia about 1683, the son of a humble provincial magistrate in Gascony. He took his titles from a nobleman near his birthplace, the baron of Lamothe-Bardigues, who was also lord of Cadillac, and lightly altered the baron’s coat of arms for his own. On the wedding certificate he even changed his mother’s surname, to Malenfant.
Sources: Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Wikipedia, The (New) Cadillac Database
Chrome Bullets
Cadillac’s bumpers began sprouting small pointed guards in 1941, and they grew. By 1952 they were part of the bumper itself, big chrome bullets, and Americans named them after Dagmar, born Virginia Ruth Egnor, whom the comedian Jerry Lester had renamed when he hired her in 1950 for NBC’s first late-night show, Broadway Open House, and who soon drew more attention than he did. The 1955 and 1956 Cadillacs carried the biggest. After years of snide press and jokes, the 1957 guards came out decidedly smaller, with black rubber tips, and the 1958 ones smaller still. For 1959 they gave way to turn signals made to look like the intakes of a jet.
Sources: Curbside Classic, Street Muscle
Arpège
The Eldorado Brougham of 1957 was built by hand, with a roof of brushed stainless steel and the first four headlights on an American car, at a time when two were all the law allowed. Its glovebox held six silver magnetic drink tumblers, a leather cigarette case, a vanity kit with a lipstick holder, a powder puff and a comb, and an atomizer filled with Lanvin’s Arpège perfume. It cost $13,074, more than a Rolls-Royce of the day.
Lisa Catera
Cadillac sold the Catera, a German-built Opel Omega with Cadillac badges, as “the Caddy that zigs,” with a cartoon bird named Ziggy, one of the birds of the Cadillac crest given big feet and a beak and turned around. In 1997 a Catera commercial played on its own line, “Lease a Catera,” by asking “Who is Lisa Catera?” John Tinker, a producer of the TV drama Chicago Hope, gave the show a Dr. Lisa Catera, played by Stacy Edwards. GM became the show’s main advertiser and gave Edwards a free three-year lease on a Catera. In 2000 Cadillac took the birds off its crest.
Sources: Wikipedia, Jalopnik, Cadillac V-Club, The (New) Cadillac Database
Flatbed Thieves
In 2011, for the fourth year in a row, the Escalade topped the Highway Loss Data Institute’s list of the vehicles with the highest rate of theft claims. It had always had an immobilizer to stop thieves hot-wiring it, but they could still tow it away on a flatbed truck. GM added a steering column lock in 2010, and for 2012 a sensor that sets off the alarm when the vehicle’s angle changes. By 2013 the average theft claim on an Escalade had fallen from $11,934 to $6,508, and the Ford F-250 had taken its place at the top.
By Hand in Warren
In June 2025 Cadillac delivered the first Celestiq, an electric sedan built by hand to each buyer’s order on a line General Motors spent an estimated $81 million to set up in Warren, Michigan. Buyers design theirs with a concierge at Cadillac House at Vanderbilt, named for Suzanne Vanderbilt, a Cadillac designer from 1955 to 1977. Many of its parts are 3D-printed in aluminum, titanium or stainless steel, and its price starts in the mid-$300,000s, rising with what each buyer chooses.
Sources: Wikipedia, Electrek, CleanTechnica
Past Audi
In 2025 Cadillac sold 173,515 vehicles in the United States, up 8.3 percent and its best year in a decade, and moved past Audi, whose sales fell 16 percent to 164,942, to become the country’s fourth best-selling luxury brand. Electric cars made up 28.3 percent of its sales, the highest share of any luxury brand. Its best seller was still the Escalade, at 57,481, counting 8,115 electric ones.
Sources: Motor1, General Motors, Yahoo Autos