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Cadillac is a brand of luxury vehicles owned by General Motors. The majority of their vehicles are produced and sold in the United States and Canada. In the United States, the name became a synonym for "high quality", used in such phrases as "the Cadillac of watches," referring to a Rolex. In English usage outside North America, other brands are used in such phrases - usually Rolls-Royce. Cadillac's current slogan is "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit," in reference to the inalienable rights mentioned in the United States Declaration of Independence. 
Cadillac was formed from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company when Henry Ford departed along with several of his key partners and the company was dissolved. With the intent of liquidating the firm's assets, Ford's financial backers, William Murphy and Lemuel Bowen called in engineer Henry M. Leland to appraise the plant and equipment prior to selling them. Instead, Leland persuaded them to continue the automobile business using Leland's proven 1-cylinder engine. Henry Ford's departure required a new name, and on August 22, 1902, the company reformed as the Cadillac Automobile Company. The Cadillac automobile was named after the 17th century French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who founded Detroit in 1701. 
Somewhat surprisingly for a model with such a strong design heritage, Cadillac has recently resisted the temptation to produce any "retro" models such as the revived Ford Thunderbird or the VW New Beetle, and has instead pressed ahead with a new design philosophy for the 21st century called "art and science" which it says "incorporates sharp, shear forms and crisp edges — a form vocabulary that expresses bold, high-technology design and invokes the technology used to design it."
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