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In 1927, GM transferred the UK Cadillac concession to Lendrum & Hartman, which opened a grand showroom in Mayfair, the place the Kind V-63 could be offered alongside GM’s lesser La Salle and Buick vehicles.
Two years later, Cadillac made one other engineering innovation: a V16 engine for its new limousine. “It should actually be one of the fascinating machines of current years,” stated Autocar because it “created fairly a sensation in America”.
Little surprise Brits thought-about Cadillac as belonging to the best echelon of manufacturers, alongside Rolls-Royce. L&H might have offered solely a handful of Cadillacs every year, however the patrons had been aristocrats and celebrities – though the Prince of Wales ordered a Buick as a substitute, because it got here from his dominion of Canada.
L&H resumed promoting new vehicles comparatively promptly after World Battle II, and Cadillac embraced space-age styling in all its glory, chrome-plating its already glamorous picture. Autocar first skilled certainly one of these trendy ‘Caddies’ in 1961, courtesy of L&H buyer Joseph Bamford. The JCB founder had purchased the world’s largest manufacturing automotive: the nine-seat, 6.2m-long, 2m-wide Fleetwood 75 limo.
“In nearly each respect, its mechanical behaviour conforms with the extremely civilised luxurious of its appointments,” we reported. “It’s all the time fascinating to pattern the perfect that any nation’s automotive trade can produce. Definitely the USA are effectively and actually represented with this fantastic Cadillac.” Bamford lent us a number of extra of his L&H-supplied Caddies for street assessments: Coupe de Villes of 1964 and 1968.
Spectacular these might have been, however their monumental measurement and the unquenchable thirst of their 7.0-litre-plus V8s significantly diminished their attraction right here, and so by the mid-Seventies a lot of L&H’s enterprise was funnelling vehicles to the Center East.
The onset of Detroit’s ‘malaise period’ made the pitch even more durable, however L&H persevered till January 1987 earlier than succumbing to insolvency.
Cadillac surprisingly returned in spring 1998, properly promoting a small, FWD saloon however unwisely doing so through Vauxhall sellers. Worse nonetheless, the Seville STS was effectively under class requirements: we deemed it the worst automotive we drove that yr. Gross sales had been dismal, so Cadillac gave up in 2002.
