Cadillac is reentering the market for truly ultra-luxury vehicles with price tags in the six figures, a segment it hasn’t occupied in decades. The Cadillac Celestiq was presented by General Motors on Friday (July 22, 2022), and the business expects it to surpass the best in the world.
The Celestiq, an electric car, is expected to cost as much as $300,000 when it goes on sale, a figure first reported by the Wall Street Journal and which GM has not officially confirmed or disputed. GM has not yet announced a date when actual production will begin. The vehicle GM unveiled is a Celestiq “show car,” but executives have stated that the actual model will look quite similar, with the exception of the fact that it will be highly customisable by individual buyers.
Cadillac has sold vehicles for six-figure sums in the past, but such vehicles were often slightly over $100,000 and Cadillac Escalades laden with options. The Celstiq takes General Motors’ luxury brand into direct competition with brands like Bentley and Rolls-Royce that routinely sell cars at these sorts of prices.
This is territory Cadillac hasn’t occupied since at least 1957, when Cadillac offered the Eldorado Brougham, said John Wiley, manager of valuation analytics at Hagerty, a company that closely tracks the collector car market. GM made only 400 Eldorado Broughams and they were entirely hand-assembled, not made on an assembly line.
When it was new, the Eldorado cost just over $13,000 at a time when a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud could be purchased for about $16,000, said Wiley. (Adjusted for inflation, those figures would be roughly 10 times as much today.) Ironically, as a collectible car, a Cadillac Eldorado Brougham is today worth more than twice as much as a Silver Royce Silver Cloud, said Wiley.
It’s a risky move for the business, which has spent the last two decades trying to reinvent itself. The Cadillac CTS, which debuted in 2003 as the entry-level luxury American automobile to compete with the BMW 3 Series, was the initial effort. It was a sharp departure from the cozy cruising Cadillacs of earlier years with its angular design and agile handling. But the CTS reached its apex with just over 60,000 sold in 2005. Production ended in 2019. In most years, BMW sold around twice as many of the 3 Series.
The shift towards electrification for Cadillac as well as the industry as a whole provides a unique opportunity for Cadillac to reposition itself in the eyes of customers. Customers shopping for electric vehicles have proven to be very open to trying new brands, and the Celestiq will get attention. That’s exactly what they need to do to differentiate themselves.
Brian Moody (executive editor at Autotrader.com)
Cadillac has made several attempts to reinvent itself, such as switching its vehicle names from names to alphanumeric names before switching them back. There was also an attempt at creating an exclusive engine for the brand, dubbed the “Blackwing” V8, before ending production after just two years in 2020 with fewer than 1000 made.
The Celestiq appears to be Cadillac’s latest effort to return to its roots as a one-time pinnacle of luxury.
These days Cadillac is really identified with a single product, the Escalade full-sized SUV, said Tyson Jominy, vice president for data analytics at J.D. Power. The Escalade is, by far, Cadillac’s single best-selling product, and also the one with the most pop culture cachet.
While Cadillac has had many beautiful concept cars with rare and exotic materials in recent years, such as the Cadillac Sixteen with an enormous fuel-burning engine, and the Elmiraj with an interior featuring “handpicked fallen Brazilian Rosewood.” The Celestiq is the first that will actually be put into production. It arrives shortly after the brand put into production its first electric vehicle, the Cadillac Lyriq. Cadillac will be among the first luxury brands to make the shift to being fully electric by 2030.
“The shift towards electrification for Cadillac as well as the industry as a whole provides a unique opportunity for Cadillac to reposition itself in the eyes of customers,” said Brian Moody, executive editor at Autotrader.com. Customers shopping for electric vehicles have proven to be very open to trying new brands, and the Celestiq will get attention. “That’s exactly what they need to do to differentiate themselves,” he said.
In its early days, Cadillac’s motto was “the standard of the world,” a market position it hopes to regain with this car, GM executives have said. Cars like Celestiq serve as a point of pride for GM, setting the standard for what’s possible, according to Jominy.
“This is their beacon,” said Jominy, “It’s the beacon for their employees, for their engineers to rally around. It’s the beacon for the dealers to show ‘We do things right. This is the pinnacle of what we can do.’”
Instead of a GM factory, each Celestiq will be built at GM’s Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. In addition to having numerous test facilities and wind tunnels, the Technical Center is home to GM engineers and designers. There are cars made there frequently, but they are primarily test vehicles or show vehicles rather than vehicles for sale to the general public.
The Celestiq features technology already available on other Cadillac models, like Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free highway driving system. It also has a 55-inch diagonal display screen and a glass roof that can darken to different shades in each of four different zones.
What will really set it apart will be the nearly infinite level of customization available.
“Each vehicle will be a custom-commissioned celebration of a client’s individuality, leveraging innovative design, authentic materials and the latest in automotive technology,” said Rory Harvey, GM’s vice-president for Cadillac.
Customers would be able to choose practically any paint color they want, for example, which is something that ultra-luxury car manufacturers like Rolls-Royce have been offering for more than a century. This is not something that Cadillac dealers are used to, and it remains to be seen how GM will handle the vehicle ordering process.
“The overall experience for the customer” will be an important part of what makes the Celestiq stand out, Harvey said in a statement emailed to CNN Business.
Cadillac dealers probably already have customers in mind for the Celestiq, Jominy said. These will be people with multiple luxury cars in their garages, including at least one Escalade, he said.
“They’re already buying [Aston Martins] and others and ‘Hey, let me take a chance on this, it looks interesting.”
Some might be classic car collectors who already have a 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham in their garage. They might like the modern, electric version to park next to it.
