How to buy THE PERFECT FIFTIES CADILLAC

You probably don’t need to be told that Cadillac ruled the roost in the postwar years. From the beginning they’d tied technical innovation to sky-high build quality, but from the late Forties they added increasingly eye-catching doses of style, too. It reached a peak in 1959, of course, when Cadillac’s cars came to sum up the fins ’n’ chrome era.

This makes the ’59s the most expensive of the bunch and it also outshines a more important fact about Cadillacs of this era: they were the best cars in the world. Owners of Rolls-Royces and Mercedes 300s can form an orderly queue to debate this, and while they do, we can ask them who Rolls-Royce licensed their automatic gearboxes from, and why it took Mercedes until 1955 to offer an auto option of any kind. And that’s before we get into performance comparisons, electric windows, power steering, air