The other was a large, low, sleek fastback sedan called the Celestiq. Very long, very wide, the Celestiq is to serve as a new flagship and halo vehicle for GM’s global luxury brand. It will be hand-built, with a degree of customization Cadillac has never offered. According to GM Product Chief Mark Reuss, it will also be the first vehicle fitted with Ultra Cruise, GM’s next generation of autonomous driving system following its current hands-off Super Cruise highway system. 

In July, GM unveiled the Celestiq concept to the world—and confirmed very low-volume production to start in model year 2025. It features a 55-inch dashboard display that lets a front passenger view video content that’s not visible to the driver. There’s also a glass roof with four individual quadrants that each passenger can customize to let in more or less light, as they wish. The car will be hand-built at GM’s Global Technical Center starting late next year—in volumes of just 400 per year. 

The Celestiq is an audacious bid to take Cadillac back into the highest end of the ultra-luxury vehicle market. It will be priced at $300,000 and above, putting it above top-end models from Audi, BMW, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz, and up against more rarified marques: Bentley, Rolls-Royce, and perhaps Mercedes-Maybach. The US brand hasn’t played in the highest end of luxury in many decades. Its hand-built Eldorado models of the late 1950s may have been the last truly ultra-luxury models it offered—and that was at least three generations of car shoppers ago.

The Celestiq is not a make-or-break car for Cadillac. You could view it as an experiment, a low-volume attempt to see whether the brand can reach customers for whom money is truly no impediment, but who value rarity, exclusivity and features found in no other vehicle driven by their peers. 

China likely has more of those buyers than does North America, and they may be less resistant to a very, very high-end Cadillac. This is a market in which the brand has the advantage of novelty, and a chance to build a new image from the ground up, unencumbered by previous decades of missteps and multiple reinventions. 

The China Syndrome

It’s China that may determine Cadillac’s future more than North America. The Lyriq is designed as much for that market as for US buyers. Deliveries of locally-built Lyriqs in China will start in late September or early October for the rear-wheel drive version, said Mike Albano, Executive Director of Cadillac Communications. The all-wheel-drive version will follow by the end of the year. 

How important is China to Cadillac’s future? The brand’s best year in the US this century was 2005, when it sold 235,000 vehicles. But Cadillac sales in China surpassed those in its home market back in 2017, and the numbers have been steadily diverging ever since. That year, it sold 173,000 vehicles in China, versus 156,000 in the US. 

From 2018 through 2021, the disparity between sales in the world’s two largest auto markets grew. In 2018, Cadillac sold 228,000 vehicles in China against 155,000 in the US. For 2019, it was 214,000 vs 156,000. In the two Covid years that followed, China sales were 231,000 and 233,000, versus 129,000 and 118,000 at home.

China is by far the most aggressive global market in promoting electric vehicles. It intends to capture the world’s biggest share of EV sales and EV battery production, and government policy is oriented toward that goal—just as it has already captured the world’s biggest share of solar photovoltaic cell production. In 2021, 31 percent of vehicles sold in China had plugs—versus 19 percent in Europe and just 5.2 percent in the US.

So, you can view the new electric Cadillacs as largely aimed at young, affluent, entrepreneurial Chinese buyers seeking the cachet of a Western luxury brand that differs from the same old German brands their friends drive. A couple of hundred ultra-pricey Celestiqs provide a halo effect to the Lyriq crossover they are more likely to end up buying. If, that is, all goes right for Cadillac in China—which is always an uncertain prospect. 

Meanwhile, US consumers who can overlook Cadillac’s recent history will be offered some very advanced electric luxury cars—that aren’t the same old Teslas their friends drive. We look forward to driving them.