Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Cadillac trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Cadillac trivia quiz runs the full 120-plus years of the brand, from the engineer who talked Henry Ford's jilted investors into building cars instead of liquidating, to the hand-built electric Celestiq. It covers the French explorer whose coat of arms became the crest, the Dewar Trophy that produced the "Standard of the World" slogan, the 1912 electric starter, the V8, V12 and V16 engines, Harley Earl and the LaSalle, the Phillips screw, the Army staff cars of 1917 and the tanks of the Korean War. Then it gets into the postwar glory and the stumbles: the first tailfins and the year they peaked, Dagmar bumpers, the Autronic Eye, the Coupe de Ville, the "last American convertible" of 1976, the Seville, the Cimarron that nearly killed the brand, the German-built Catera, the Northstar engine and the Escalade that hip-hop adopted. There are questions on Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, the presidential limousine known as the Beast, Motor Trend awards, the Formula One entry and the electric Lyriq. Roughly a third of the questions are easy for any car fan; the rest are for people who know their Series 62 from their Series 75. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the company, its models and the people around it before publication.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cadillac is the luxury division of which automaker?
General Motors
It sits above Chevrolet, Buick and GMC in the group's hierarchy, though many models share platforms with them.
Q 02Cadillac is named after a French explorer who founded which city in 1701?
Detroit
Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac later served as governor of French Louisiana, and no authentic portrait of him survives.
Q 03The Cadillac crest is based on what?
The founder-explorer's coat of arms
The explorer's aristocratic credentials were largely self-invented, which makes the badge a slightly cheeky piece of heraldry.
Q 04In what year was the Cadillac Automobile Company established?
1902
That makes it the fourth-oldest surviving American car brand, behind Autocar, Oldsmobile and Buick.
Q 05Cadillac was formed from the remnants of which firm after its namesake walked out on his investors?
The Henry Ford Company
The investors had called in an engineer to value the plant for liquidation; he persuaded them to keep building cars around his own proven engine instead.
Q 06Which precision engineer kept Ford's backers building cars and became Cadillac's first leader?
Henry M. Leland
He ran Cadillac until 1917 and then went off to found Lincoln, its great rival.
Q 07Cadillac's very first cars, the Runabout and Tonneau, were powered by how many cylinders?
A single cylinder
They were nearly identical to the 1903 Ford Model A and drew more than 2,000 firm orders at the New York Auto Show.
Q 08Cadillac won the Royal Automobile Club's Dewar Trophy in 1908 for demonstrating what?
Interchangeable parts
It was the first American car to win the British trophy, and precision manufacturing was already the brand's main selling point.
Q 09Cadillac won the Dewar Trophy a second time in 1912 for putting what into a production car?
Electric starting and lighting
It was the first automaker to offer a complete electrical system covering starting, ignition and lights.
Q 10Cadillac was bought by General Motors in which year?
1909
It immediately became GM's prestige division and its default source of chassis for limousines, hearses and ambulances.
Q 11Cadillac's famous slogan, born of the 1908 Dewar Trophy, was what?
Standard of the World
It was softened to "An American Standard of the World" for 1981 and dropped for "Best of All... It's a Cadillac" the year after.
Q 12Cadillac introduced its first V8, a 70-horsepower flathead, in which year?
1915
It could push a car to 65 mph, faster than most roads of the day could handle.
Q 13In 1930 Cadillac launched the first American production car with how many cylinders?
16
Only 4,076 were built over 11 years, most of them in the debut year before the Depression bit; every chassis was custom-finished to order.
Q 21Cadillac's bullet-shaped 1950s front bumper guards were nicknamed after what?
A buxom TV personality named Dagmar
They started as artillery-shell shapes just after the war, crept higher through the decade, and were gone after 1958.
Q 22Cadillac won the very first Motor Trend Car of the Year award in 1949 for what?
Its overhead-valve V8 engine
The company initially snubbed the honour and now boasts about its five wins, the latest for the 2014 CTS.
Q 23Cadillac built its one-millionth car in November 1949. What model was it?
A 1950 Coupe de Ville
Q 14In July 1917 the U.S. Army chose which Cadillac as its staff car after tests on the Mexican border?
Type 55 Touring
2,350 were shipped to France for officers of the American Expeditionary Force.
Q 15Which stylist, hired by Cadillac in 1926, ran GM's Art and Color section for three decades?
Harley Earl
His first design was a smaller companion marque named after another French explorer.
Q 16Cadillac's smaller "companion marque", sold from 1927 to 1940, was called what?
LaSalle
Marquette and Viking were the short-lived companion brands of Buick and Oldsmobile; Oakland was the parent of Pontiac.
Q 17Cadillac's "turret top" was the first passenger-car roof made entirely of what?
Steel
Before it, roofs were fabric stretched over a wooden frame.
Q 18Cadillac's numbers jumped 70% in 1934 after Nick Dreystadt got GM to scrap which policy?
Discouraging sales to African Americans
Dreystadt was promoted to run the whole division, and by 1940 sales had risen tenfold from 1934.
Q 19In 1937 Cadillac became the first automaker to adopt which fastener, invented by Henry F. Phillips?
The cross-head screw
Phillips convinced Cadillac his screws would speed up assembly; the rest of the industry followed by 1940.
Q 20Cadillac's tailfins first appeared in 1948. In which model year did they reach their peak height?
1959
They then shrank every year until vanishing for 1965, surviving only vestigially on the limousine chassis.
The Coupe de Ville, launched with Buick as the first mass-produced pillarless hardtop coupe, became one of the brand's best-sellers for decades.
Q 24From 1951 Cadillac built the M41 Walker Bulldog, which is what?
A light tank
It served in Korea and Vietnam; the brand had also supplied WWI staff cars and built aircraft parts.
Q 25The "Autronic Eye", introduced by Cadillac in 1953, automatically did what?
Dimmed the high beams for oncoming cars
Automatic headlight dimming became standard on the top Eldorado Brougham later in the decade.
Q 26The hand-built 1957 Eldorado Brougham, with memory seats and a transistor radio, sold how many units?
904
The memory-seat option then vanished from Cadillac until the 1980s.
Q 27The Eldorado name, chosen in a 1952 internal contest, is Spanish for what?
The gilded one
It also nods to the mythical Colombian city of gold; the name marked Cadillac's golden anniversary.
Q 28The 1976 Eldorado drop-top was heavily promoted by GM as what?
The last American convertible
About 14,000 were sold, many as investments, and the final 200 were identical white Bicentennial Editions.
Q 29From 1956 to 1960 the Eldorado convertible carried the name of which French seaside resort?
Biarritz
The hardtop was the Eldorado Seville, after the Spanish city, a name that later became a model in its own right.
Q 30The 1975 Seville was marketed with which phrase to take on the imports?
International size
Its 1980 successor got a controversial bustle-back tail and moved to the Eldorado's front-drive chassis.