The history of the Cadillac brand dates back to 1890, when Henry Leland set up a small workshop in Detroit in which steam engines and gasoline engines were first produced for boats, followed by gears for the Oldsmobile car factory. In 1899, Henry Ford founded the first Detroit Automobile Company in Detroit, which he handed over to Leland after a few months. In August 1902, William Murphy and Lemuel Bowen, two investors at Ford, who were not satisfied with their previous cooperation with Ford, and wanted to withdraw from business, appeared in Leland's workshop. Leland interested his guests in a motor which tried unsuccessfully to sell the Oldsmobile brand and the proposal to create their own brand, which Cadillac called after the French cavalier - Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, founder around 1701 in Ville d'Etroit on the west side of the lake Erie, which in time grew to the size of a large city, and in the twentieth century became the center of the American automobile industry and began assembling cars with components purchased from other manufacturers. So in 1903 he built the first vehicle of the brand - the Cadillac A model equipped with a single-cylinder 10 HP gasoline engine .
In 1909, for the first time, he used a four-cylinder engine. In 1909, the brand was taken over by the domestic automotive concern General Motors, retaining its original name. In 1912, the production of the first vehicle equipped with electric lighting and electric starter started, and a year later the first eight-cylinder gasoline engine in the V-system with the power of 71 hp was developed. In 1930, the V16 engine was introduced in the Sixty Special model. For several years during World War II, the brand disappeared from the market. Shortly after the end of the war she returned again.