Coys Auction
Fine Motorcars & The Jaguar Legend
Blenheim Palace
Woodstock
Oxfordshire OX20 1PX
Saturday 18th July 2009
Registration Number: TBA Chassis Number: TBA
Since the day it first claimed to be laboring under the "penalty of Leadership,” Cadillac pressured itself to live up to the lofty status the statement implied. Then came the 1930-1940 Cadillac V-16, a lasting monument to that struggle.
Looking back today, there seems to have been no sensible reason for building a 16-cylinder Cadillac. By 1930, the luxury car industry had settled on and refined both the inline- and vee-eights. Builders of some of the finest cars in the world saw no reason for more than eight cylinders.
Cadillac’s Sixteen also arrived precisely in time for the Great Depression, when the few people who could afford cars tended to think in terms of four or six cylinders and the handful who could still afford Cadillacs often preferred to keep a low profile in a Chevy or Ford. But from a purely practi