Walking home from brunch at the Gallery Pastry Shop one fine June day in 2017, I spotted one of the rarest and most unusual cars I've ever run into just out and about. Built in 1932 for the president of General Motors of Canada, this is one of the last Madame X Cadillacs to be sold. (It's car number 5131 at this online registry.)
The "Series 452" referred to the displacement of the mighty V-16 OHV engine in cubic inches. There was also the V-12 Series 370 and the V-8 Series 355. It wasn't until 1936 that Cadillac switched to the two-digit Series designations that they used for the next forty years and the V-16 halo cars became the Series 90.
The V-16 was a narrow-angle 45° vee pushrod motor in an era when most American cars were still using flathead valve-in-block powerplants. These early Series 452 engines were essentially two separate straight-eight motors driving a common crank and made 165 horsepower, which could propel these massive cars to eighty or a hundred miles per hour, depending on the axle ratio ordered by the purchaser.
With electric start and Synchro-Mesh manual transmissions, these were truly advanced vehicles for the time, and priced like it. The top-of-the-line Madame X series cars were essentially bespoke creations that went for over $7,000, which is as close to $180k in today's money as makes no nevermind.
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