END OF AN era

Let’s talk numbers. In 1976, Cadillac broke their own annual sales record from 1973, selling 309,139 cars. Of those, 114,482 were Coupe de Villes, advertised that year as ‘America’s favourite luxury car’ – with good reason, you’d have to agree. This two-door, six-passenger car sat on a 10ft 10in wheelbase with an overall length of 19ft 3in and pushed its 5025lb mass around with a 500cu in (8.2-litre) V8 engine, the largest in the industry.

Look back at some of the older Cadillacs in this issue, say the 1957 and 1960 convertibles on pages 28 and 36, and you’ll find cars a few hundred pounds lighter and a few inches shorter, powered by engines that were still large without being quite so immense as this version. They were products of a company making less than half as many cars in the late 1950s as they were in the mid 1970s, yet Cadillac had been growing steadily and strongly from a deep dip at the worst of the Depression in 1933, when they sold