I don't remember much about my paternal grandmother, except that she was kind, smothered me with love, and would arrive in the late 1960s in the driveway of our Glasgow home in a blue Ford, writes Jeremy Grant in Chicago
It wasn't until a few years ago that I discovered she'd once been a fully paid-up member of the aspiring classes: back in the early 1920s, my father explained, she'd driven a Cadillac. The vehicle belonged to her father, who had allowed himself a couple of luxuries after selling his cooperage business to William Younger & Sons, the Scottish brewers, in 1919.
"Cadillac Gertie", as granny was apparently known in those days, would hurtle from one tennis tournament to another in her whites, six tennis rackets piled up in the passenger seat of her father's 1918 Cadillac Type 57 Phaeton. A photo, possibly taken around 1925, shows her posing next to the vehicle, parked in a terraced street in Glasgow's West End.
That was then, of course, but if GM has its way, it will also soon be now, and Cadillacs will once again be seen on the streets of Glasgow and across the world. The world's biggest car maker, which has owned Cadillac since the early 20th century, is reviving the luxury car brand in an effort that contemplates nothing less than restoring "Caddy" to the glory days of the 1950s and 1960s, when chrome, tailfins and technology helped define it as the "Standard of the World".
Csaba Csere, editor-in-chief of Michigan-based Car & Driver magazine, says it is "a sweeping, grandiose effort that is one of the biggest automotive rebranding exercises ever attempted".
The big push, which has so far soaked up about $4 billion (about €3.2 billion) of investment by GM, has been under way for about three years in the US. There, a stream of new products - an angular sedan, a beefy sports utility vehicle, an $80,000 (about €65,000) convertible - has hit the market in a bid to wrest back from BMW, Mercedes and Lexus the luxury car initiative that Cadillac let slip in the 1970s and 1980s.
Thus, this Monday, Prague is the setting for the unveiling of the Cadillac SRX sports utility vehicle, part of Cadillac's re-emergence in Europe. The SRX is the third Cadillac to be introduced on the Continent this year.
And earlier this month, Cadillac was even relaunched in China. Mark LaNeve, Cadillac's marketing manager, says the country will soon become the brand's second-biggest market after the US, accounting for up to 20 per cent of global sales volume by 2010.
So why all this effort now? Actually, let's start with: why Cadillac? For those in Europe who, like me, were born too late to have seen Cadillacs sailing down the street, the whole exercise does seem like too much, too late. Even Bob Lutz, GM's 72-year-old vice-chairman admits that the last Cadillac that anybody in Europe saw or heard of "probably belonged to an American serviceman, driving a Cadillac with bad tyres and rusting sheet metal, best typified by the phrase 'Yank Tank'."
But, he insists, that's the whole point: the luxury brand awareness is still there, however dim. Cadillac was the most aspirational, and glamorous car of the last century, favoured equally by Hollywood stars and heads of state. And, argues Lutz, Cadillac today offers a convincing alternative to the luxury European brands. Especially since the new Cadillacs are beating BMW and Mercedes in the US industry quality rankings - an amazing achievement for a brand that as recently as the mid-1990s had resorted to supplying rental fleets just to keep sales up.
There is, of course, more to the global Cadillac revival than harking back to a nostalgic past; there is raw business necessity. The preponderance of baby boomers with high disposable incomes has prompted car makers to spend more time developing luxury vehicles in the $30,000-$35,000 bracket and over, because that is where the margins are in today's intensely competitive motor industry. And, since the only luxury car brand in GM's stable was Cadillac, had the car maker abandoned Cadillac to its fate as a source of plush rental cars, GM might have floundered.
Such is the importance to GM of Cadillac's luxury status that it has also committed to building a "super luxury" Cadillac priced at up to $100,000 that would provide an American alternative to Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Maybach, the revived German ultra-luxury marque from DaimlerChrysler. Called "The Sixteen", it harks back to the 1930s, when Cadillac was the first car maker to build vehicles with a V16 engine. Only one Sixteen has been made and not long ago, I drove it.
With its leather-lined dashboard and all-glass roof, it seemed a world away from Gertie's 1918 Phaeton. But I'm sure she'd be heartened to know there was still plenty of space in the passenger seat for six tennis rackets.
- Financial Times