14 Mar 00
Cadillac? To us Brits that means a vast boat of a car that's big on chrome and small on subtlety. The sort of car you see in nostalgic American films of the '50s and '60s, and the sort of car that you hardly ever see over here. This isn't surprising, because they didn't go on sale here until 1998. Sadly for Cadillac, they're still pretty rare, because the Seville STS isn't really finding widespread favour. It might be a Cadillac designed for European roads, but it's not modern enough to compete with the best from Mercedes, Jaguar, BMW and Lexus.
Even so, it's vastly better than other recent Cadillacs. This premier American make, which has been around since 1902, used to produce some of the best cars in the world, pioneering features and technology that are commonplace today. But over the past 25 years, Cadillac's position as an innovator - both in technology and styling - has slipped. Now, however, the company is enthusiastically reinventing itself, and has revealed a couple of stunning concept cars to prove it.
At the Detroit Motor Show in January we saw the Evoq coupe and at the Geneva Show this month the Imaj, designed by Brit Simon Cox, and built in Birmingham. So we can look forward to a rejuvenated Cadillac over the next few years - and hopefully some cars that us Europeans (at least, the well-off ones) might want to get the (company) chequebook out for.
But in the meantime, here are 12 mildly surprising things you may not have known about Cadillac:
