Cadillac V-16

This is the catalogue record of the Cadillac V-16, one of 128 models Cadillac has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1930. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Cadillac V-16 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1930s were the streamline decade, when aerodynamics entered body design, independent suspension spread, and grand-prix engineering began flowing into road cars even as the Depression thinned the industry. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Chrysler Chrysler LeBaron, the Bentley Bentley 8 Litre, the Talbot Talbot 105 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Cadillac V-16 reads like this: the record lists its engine as Cadillac V16 engine; kerb weight is recorded at 5300 -; drive goes through 3-speed synchromesh manual; the layout is FR layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Cadillac story

Within Cadillac's own catalogue the Cadillac V-16 sits alongside the Cadillac 353, the Cadillac ATS, the Cadillac ATS-L, the Cadillac ATS-V. Design is credited to Harley Earl. Assembly is recorded at United States: Detroit, Michigan (Detroit Assembly).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

Reading a sparse record honestly

Some pages in this library brim with specifications; others, like corners of every archive, are thin. The honest response to a thin record is to say so, not to pad it. What is shown here is exactly what the public record supports today — and because the harvest re-runs nightly, the page you are reading is the fullest version of this car's open record that existed the last time the site was built.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Cadillac V-16 was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.