370E-40 Special Imperial
In 1935, the year of the Cadillac Series 370E, simply owning a car was something special. Automobiles still shared the road with horse-drawn buggies; an early scene in O, Brother, Where Art Thou will give you an idea of how those roads looked. The automobile had yet to become a status symbol for the rest of us; in the midst of the Great Depression, owning a car was still the province of the leisure classes. Owning an exclusive car like the Cadillac V-12, as cars of the 370E Series were known commercially, was even more special. Cadillac sold only about a thousand of them that year.
Background of the Cadillac 370E
The Cadillac Series 370 was in production during the first half of the 1930s. Its identifying characteristic was its 12-cylinder engine, which is why the cars were marketed with the name Cadillac V-12. When the V-12 engine debuted, it had a 135 horsepower engine, but that increased to 150 horsepower by 1935, the model year of the Series 370E. Although it was an extraordinarily powerful car for its time, with a hefty price tag to match the strength of its engine, it was not the strongest one; Cadillac also made a V-16 engine in the early 1930s.
The Cadillac Series 370 began in 1930 with the Series 370A, which made a strong first impression by being used as the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 that year. Unfortunately, the car came along just as the Great Depression was putting a serious damper on people’s ability to buy expensive consumer goods like cars. Therefore, for most of its run, sales of the Cadillac Series 370 were low, with the worst sales year being 1933, when only 953 cars of the Series 370 were sold. They perked up a bit in 1934 and 1935, whether because of buyers’ optimism in relation to the New Deal or because of Cadillac’s fancy changes to the cars’ design. In 1936, Cadillac stopped using the name V-12 and instead called its 12-cylinder cars Series 80 and 85; starting in 1936, all Cadillac cars with V-12 engines had bodies made by Fleetwood.
What Is So Special About the Cadillac Series 370E?
In the days of the Cadillac 370 Series, all cars were special. High-end cars like the Cadillac 370 Series tended to have custom-made bodies. This especially makes sense when you consider that cars were produced in much smaller numbers in those days and were much more of an elite product than they are today. In the early days of Cadillac and including the 1930s, Fisher was the default company to make the bodies for Cadillacs. The Fleetwood company, with its headquarters in Pennsylvania, far from the Michigan factories where Cadillac engines were made, also supplied custom-made bodies for some high-end Cadillac V-12 cars. Fleetwood bodies are so closely associated with prestigious Cadillac models that Cadillac has produced entire series of cars with Fleetwood bodies, including Series 80 and 85, the successors to the Cadillac 370.
