Following its major North American rivals, General Motors has just come onto the UK market with a right-hand-drive car in the form of the Cadillac Seville. This is the best-selling luxury sedan in the United States, but the fact that GM's ambitions for it are not confined to its home continent was demonstrated at the launch of the 1998 model year types.

They were unveiled, not in the US, but at the Frankfurt Show. In fact, the company hopes that a fifth of all sales will be export, and Cadillac is re-entering the UK market exactly 90 years after its first sales here.

Although two versions of the Seville were exhibited at last November's Scottish Motor Show, only the 301bhp STS (Seville Touring Sedan) with its suspension modified for European conditions is imported at the moment. Hovering in the wings is the "softer" specification SLS (Seville Luxury Sedan).

The STS is fitted with the all-alloy 4.6-litre 32-valve V8 Northstar engine, in a state of tune which makes it the most powerful front-wheel drive saloon on the world market It comes as standard with a top class Bose audio system not available in any other car, and front seats which adapt to the occupant's physical dimensions.

The Seville features an ingenious ''limp home'' system which allows the car, in the event of losing all its coolant water, to run on one bank of cylinders while the other takes in cool air. Then they swap roles, so that a Seville with a damaged radiator may be able to make it to the repair shop. The car has many other well thought-out features. So the Seville is, in many ways, a really up to the minute design. But Cadillac goes back a long way, and its history has some curious side turnings.

In the early years of the century, it was the Henry Ford Company of Detroit, a place already well on the way to becoming America's Motor City. However, Henry fell out with his partners, and resigned in 1902 to set up the new Ford Motor Company which finally put him on the road to fame and fortune.

Henry Leland, a precision engineering expert who was also, of all unlikely things, the inventor of the barber's-shop hair clipper, took over the original business.

He reorganised the company and, needing to give it a new non-Ford name, decided to commemorate the Frenchman Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who had founded the city of Detroit something like 200 years before. A little later on, Cadillac merged with Buick and Oldsmobile, and that group was the nucleus of General Motors. Cadillac was promoted as a prestige make, a status it holds in North America to the present day.

At intervals through the years, it introduced the all-synchromesh gearbox, was one of the very few companies ever to market a V16-engined road car, pioneered American-style tail fins as well as lights which turned on automatically as dusk fell, and, in 1970, came out with one of the most gargantuan road car engines of its era, an 8.2-litre V8.

There is a lot of modern American know-how in the 1998 Seville. It is a fine looking, well proportioned car with a restrained styling approach, and it will be intriguing to see how Scottish executive car buyers take to it.