Cadillac
Cadillac was formed from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company. After a dispute between Henry Ford and his investors, Ford left the company along with several of his key partners in March 1902. Ford's financial backers William Murphy and Lemuel Bowen called in engineer Henry M. Leland of Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing Company to appraise the plant and equipment in preparation for liquidating the company's assets. Instead, Leland persuaded the pair to continue manufacturing automobiles using Leland's proven single-cylinder engine. A new company called the Cadillac Automobile Company was established on 22 August 1902, re-purposing the Henry Ford Company factory at Cass Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It was named after French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who had founded Detroit in 1701.
Cadillac Runabout and Tonneau
Cadillacs of 1903 sometimes are identified erroneously as the Model A; in fact, they were known simply as the "Cadillac Runabout" and the "Cadillac Tonneau". When a new Cadillac was introduced in 1904, it was designated the "Model B"; meanwhile, production of the earlier runabout and tonneau models continued through a second year. Only at that time did Cadillac began to designate them as Model A cars to distinguish them from the new, 1904 models.