Whatever your motoring preferences may be, it’s difficult not to be thrilled by the roar of a V8 engine.
As electrification takes over, there may not be many more of these in future, even though new ones are still being developed today. But when the last V8 goes out of production, we will still be able to look back at the great examples of the past.
General Motors has a particularly fine – though occasionally patchy – history of V8 engines which extends back more than a century. Here we take a look at the good and the bad, in chronological order.
Cadillac L-head (1914)
V8 engines were rare, though not unheard of, in 1914, but the Cadillac engine of that year is regarded as the first to have gone into mass production. It made its debut in a car officially called the Type 51, but generally known simply as the Cadillac V8, and was still being used, after several updates and capacity increases, two decades after it first appeared.
Thankfully Cadillac had recently developed the electric starter; hand-cranking a heavy V8 engine would have been a nightmare for owners.
PICTURE: Cadillac Type 53 pickup
Cole-Northway (1915)
In 1909, the Northway Motor and Manufacturing Company became one of the earliest of many firms to be taken over by General Motors. For several years after this, it was a leading producer of engines for GM’s car brands.
But there was more to it than that. Just a year after the Cadillac V8 arrived, Northway began supplying a similar engine to Indianapolis-based Cole for a high-class model pitched as an alternative to Cadillac. This was a rare, but not unique, case of a company owned by GM providing an engine to a direct rival.
PICTURE: Cole Aero Eight
Oldsmobile Light Eight (1916)
Northway also created the first V8 used by Oldsmobile. The 4.0-litre engine was similar in design to the Cadillac V8 and produced 40 horsepower. It was used in the first two generations of the Oldsmobile Light Eight, which had model names ranging from 44 to 46.
PICTURE: Oldsmobile Light Eight Model 45 Touring
Oakland flathead (1916)
Yet another Northway V8 was adopted by Oakland – which, by a complicated process, can be considered the predecessor of Pontiac – for its Model 50. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this engine bore some resemblance to the Northway units adopted by Cadillac, Cole and Oldsmobile, but it was significantly larger at 6.0 litres.
Chevrolet Series D (1917)
The first of many Chevrolet V8 engines was designed around the time the brand was incorporated into General Motors. Unlike all the units mentioned so far, whose valves were mounted alongside the cylinders, Chevrolet put them in the cylinder head. Although this design is now outdated, it was still novel in 1917, and had been popularised by Buick only 13 years before.
Chevrolet fitted this engine to the Model D, which was in production only very briefly. There were to be no more Chevy V8s until the 1950s.