Despite the recession that hit much of the world in the aftermath of World War I, there were still plenty of wealthy customers in the 1920s looking for the latest and most opulent carriages to transport them across Europe or the United States. Expensive cars...
In 1926, perceiving that its customers wanted more power and greater refinement, U.S. luxury car maker Cadillac began developing a new breed of multi-cylinder engines. The result was the extraordinary V16, intended to outdo the V12 of its main competitor, Packard....
The Type 35 Bugatti was emblematic of France’s racing prowess in the 1920s. In motor sport, it was the French equivalent of the legendary British Bentley. The Bugatti was the product of an engineer born into a family of artists: For Ettore Bugatti, aesthetic perfection...
The 1920s saw rapid technological progress in the world of competition cars, as the emphasis moved from proving road cars by racing them, to developing and testing advanced engineering in race models—and then adapting it to road cars. This decade saw innovations such as multiple...
Strictly speaking, only one Rolls-Royce is named Silver Ghost: the unique, silver-painted, 40/50 hp open tourer with silver trim that was used in 1907 for a 15,000-mile (24,000-km) reliability trial. The title has, however, been retrospectively applied to all examples of the 40/50 hp made...
Car makers saved their finest work for their richest customers. Such customers would not tolerate unreliability, and demanded cars that gave far greater performance than traditional horse-drawn carriages. They also demanded comfort—an important factor on the rough roads of the early 20th century—and luxuries such...
Cadillac is one of America’s oldest makes, and it has been mass-producing cars of quality ever since the company was founded in Detroit by Henry Leland in 1902. For more than 90 years, Cadillac has been at the core of General Motors (GM), and it...
The idea of proving the speed and durability of new cars by pitting them against each other—in long-distance trials, hill climbs, or circuit races—came early in the history of the motorcar. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, motor sport was...
Henry Ford’s iconic Model T-the car that would turn millions of Americans into drivers following its launch in 1908-was remarkable for more than the efficient production-line methods used to build it. The “Tin Lizzie,” as it became known, also boasted many novel engineering features, particularly...
The Model T led an industrial and social revolution, introducing mass-production techniques to car manufacturing and motorizing the United States. Thanks to Henry Ford’s 1913 introduction of a moving assembly line, production hit 1,000 per day in 1914, and U.S. output peaked in 1923, when...