Why Cadillac really matters right now
It looked like the storied US car maker’s glory days were long gone. But now it’s back, with upmarket electric cars, an imminent entry in Formula 1 and a thriving endurance race team. What’s behind the miraculous resurrection, and where will it end?
Cadillac. Once, as its 1908 advertising slogan proclaimed, the Standard of the World. The company that built cars with V16 engines years before Rolls-Royce debuted its first V12 Phantom; that built cars with a four-speed automatic transmission, air suspension, power steering, air conditioning, power seats and windows, central locking, automatic dipping headlights and cruise control when Harold Macmillan was telling Brits driving wheezy Ford Anglias they’d never had it so good. For decades Cadillac defined automotive luxury – American automotive luxury – and its cars reflected the brash optimism of the American Dream.
It couldn’t last. A misguided attempt by General Motors in the 1970s to democratise its luxury brand led to the 1982 launch of the Cadillac Cimarron. Essentially a Vauxhall/Opel Cavalier with delusions of grandeur, the Cimarron delivered a body blow to the Cadillac brand from which it still has not fully recovered.
Not that GM hasn’t tried to fix the damage. In 2003 it launched the edgy, wedgy Cadillac XLR, a two-seat sports car built on the chassis and powertrain hardware that would underpin the following year’s C6 Chevrolet Corvette. In 2004 it unveiled a high-performance variant of the Cadillac CTS saloon, the CTS-V, powered by a 400bhp V8. The second-generation CTS added stylish coupe and estate models to the CTS-V mix, powered, like the saloon, by 556bhp supercharged V8s and available with a manual transmission.
The problem was none of those cars resonated with the core DNA of the Cadillac brand, American luxury. By the fuzzy logic beloved of automotive marketing types, they were indeed luxury cars, but their flavour was more European; quietly restrained and clinically logical, with none of the exuberance expected from a brand that for many was still defined by the big and flamboyant cars that once reflected the upbeat aspirations of a generation of Americans.
There were some at GM who understood what Cadillac could be, should be, including design chief Wayne Cherry, whose extravagant 2003 Cadillac 16 concept, powered by a 13.6-litre V16 engine made from two V8s joined together, still looks stunning today, and Bob Lutz, who in 2007 was pushing hard for a V12 Cadillac sedan to be built on a stretched version of the rear-drive Zeta architecture that underpinned Holdens in Australia and would be used for the reinvented Camaro. But America had by then fallen out of love with the car in favour of the SUV. Cadillac’s Escalade, which had started life in 1999 as gussied-up Chevy truck, had become a new – and, to the delight of GM’s beancounters, highly profitable – definition of American luxury.
It still is. Cadillac today builds three car lines, led by the CT4 and CT5 sedans, the top-of-the-range CT5-V Blackwing sedan a legitimate BMW M and Mercedes-AMG rival that has a 668bhp supercharged V8 under the bonnet and can be ordered with a six-speed manual transmission and carbon-ceramic brakes. The other eight name plates in the current Cadillac catalogue are all SUVs.
And the hulking Escalade, which might now have air-sprung independent rear suspension, rich leather and real wood inside, and GM’s impressive Super Cruise hands-free driving system, still rolls on a truck chassis and still has an overhead-valve V8 under the bonnet and is still one of Cadillac’s best sellers. It’s far from ‘the Standard of the World’. And yet… Cadillac appears to be the on-ramp for GM to again be a car maker with a global presence.
GM is today a shadow of its former self. The company that from 1927 until 2008 built and sold more vehicles around the world than any other manufacturer was last year only the world’s fourth largest car company, behind Toyota, Volkswagen Group, and Hyundai Motor Group. In the aftermath of its shocking 2009 bankruptcy, GM relentlessly downsized, selling factories and brands in Europe, Asia, and Australia to concentrate on the North American and Chinese markets.
For all the misfires and missteps of the past 50 years, Cadillac remains GM’s only luxury brand
GM no longer makes and sells Opels in Germany, Daweoos in Korea, Holdens in Australia. But Cadillacs are now available in each of those countries. Cadillacs are now also on sale in Japan and Korea, France, Sweden, and Switzerland, and throughout much of the Middle East. Most are SUVs, with the new electric-powered Vistiq, Lyriq, and Optiq models at the forefront, though versions of the Escalade are available in much of the Middle East as well as in Japan and South Korea.
Moreover, there are signs GM’s luxury brand may again become famous for more than building the world’s most luxurious trucks. Cadillac is in the FIA World Endurance Championship, its thundering V8-powered V-Series.R hypercar securing a front-row lockout for this year’s Le Mans 24-hour race back in June. Cadillac is joining Formula 1 in 2026, with GM president Mark Reuss declaring: ‘This is a global stage for us to demonstrate GM’s engineering expertise and technology leadership at an entirely new level.’ And Cadillac has finally launched a car that properly hews to its luxury traditions, the Celestiq.
Not quite as long overall as a Rolls-Royce Phantom, but lower and wider, the Celestiq is a grandiose hatchback with a 655bhp, 646lb ft dual-motor electric powertrain, a bespoke modernist interior, and stunning road presence. Priced not far short of Rolls-Royce levels, the Celestiq is hand-built, like Cadillac’s 1957 Eldorado Brougham, which at the time was the world’s most expensive car. Constructed at the Cadillac Artisan Center in the Eero Saarinen-designed GM Tech Centre complex in Warren, Michigan, each Celestiq takes about 12 weeks to complete, and production is limited to fewer than 300 cars a year. It’s at once a 21st-century homage to Cadillac’s heritage and an impressive statement of intent.
The Celestiq is already being trailed on Cadillac websites in the Middle East and in South Korea, where the streets of the trendy Gangnam district of Seoul are awash with Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. Could it come to Europe? Perhaps. Meeting Europe’s different lighting standards would be a costly part of the homologation process for this extremely low-volume car. Nevertheless, Cadillac could decide to leverage its presence in F1 to sell small numbers in Europe as a brand halo for the electric-powered Vistiq, Lyriq and Optiq models, all of which share some of the Celestiq’s design cues – and in the case of the high-performance Lyriq-V, some powertrain components, too.
Beyond that, GM is rumoured to be looking at building a two-seat Cadillac sports car, based on the platform being developed for the electric-powered C9 Corvette, with design cues lifted from the V-Series.R Hypercar. What’s giving the project oxygen inside GM headquarters is the sobering realisation that American buyers are not yet ready for an electric-powered Corvette. Allowing the C9 architecture to underpin a Cadillac (just as the C6 Corvette hardware underpinned the Cadillac XLR more than 20 years ago) would allow GM to build it in lower volumes and charge a higher price. And Europe, where EV adoption rates are relatively high, and where Cadillac will have a big on-track presence in F1 and WEC, would be a logical market for the car.
For all the misfires and missteps of the past 50 years, Cadillac remains GM’s only luxury brand. It is also now the only GM brand other than Corvette the company can leverage outside North America and China. For that reason, Cadillac is now more important to GM than at any time in its history. Cadillac matters.