CarBrandLogos archive · Cadillac · 1914

CadillacType 51

America's first volume V8, and the engine layout the country never gave up.

Photo: Walter from Tampa/St Petersburg, Florida · CC BY 2.0

The story

A defining chapter in Cadillac history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Cadillac Type 51, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

V8 engines existed before 1915, in French racing cars and a handful of expensive oddities, but nobody had built one in quantity for ordinary customers. Cadillac did it with the Type 51, introduced for the 1915 model year at the Cass Street factory in Detroit and produced through 1923.

1916 Cadillac Victoria · Herranderssvensson · CC BY-SA 3.0

Design and engineering

The engine was a 314 cubic inch L-head V8 with a 90-degree bank angle, cast in two blocks of four on an aluminium crankcase, driving the rear wheels through a three-speed manual. It was not the most sophisticated design available — the flat-plane crankshaft made it rougher than later cross-plane engines — but it was smooth compared with the fours and sixes it replaced, it was reliable, and crucially Cadillac could build it in numbers and price it within reach of a well-off buyer rather than only a rich one.

1915 Cadillac Model 51 V8 p1 · AlfvanBeem · CC0

In production

The effect on the American industry was permanent. Rivals scrambled to answer, Packard responded with a twelve, and within two decades the V8 had become the default configuration for any American car with pretensions, a position it held for most of the twentieth century. Cadillac itself replaced the Type 51 line with the V-63 in 1924, which fixed the vibration with a cross-plane crank and set the pattern followed ever since.

1921 Cadillac Suburban · Joanne Pistorius · CC BY-SA 3.0

At a glance