2003 Cadillac Sixteen Concept - For the Haves
While last year's Cien concept could be analogized to an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, the wreath crested company's latest design exercise might be more akin to a B-2 Spirit, the massive bomber that shares the fighter's sharp-edged and angled stealth design architecture. The Sixteen dwarfs all other Cadillacs currently available. It's even longer than the extended-wheelbase Escalade ESV.
Why so long? It's all about creating the presence necessary for GM's top brand to reinvent itself as the 'Standard of the World', a slogan it used many years ago when custom-built Fleetwood coach cars ruled the roads of America. Cadillac literally made some of the world's best built automobiles.
That was a time when large displacement V8 and V12 engines sped the upper class from eastern seaboard summer homes to their metropolis towers, the great monoliths of the industrial age. It was an era of rapid progress, meteoric development and rampant excess. Ironically the beginning of the end of this era of unprecedented wealth coincided with the launch of the biggest engine of the time - the Cadillac V16 in 1930.
To be fair, any North American past the age of 16 could tell you the great depression started in 1929, not 1930. A few might be able to expound that it actually began with a decline on October 3 that led a series of events resulting in near total collapse during a two-week period from October 29 through to November 13, 1929, when stock prices hit their lowest point. Overall more than $30 billion disappeared from the American economy.