Yet the new alphanumeric naming convention seems so European, so German.
Yes, I know, I know, and everybody is accusing me of lip service when I say we are not German and that’s a good thing, and how I want to reinforce the Americana. But honestly it is not [lip service]. My issue is that we need to give our cars proper mental places in our own hierarchy and across the competition. And ATS, CTS, XTS, you need to be in the car industry to figure out where they are size-wise. When you say A4, A6, A8, 3-series, 5-series, 7-series, you immediately realize. My argument is simple: BMW, Audi, Mercedes have a clearer nomenclature than we do. Many others as well. We need to play within the laws of the brands that make 80 percent of the volume of luxury cars. And our customers come to our showrooms and—whether we like it or not—they say stupid things like, “Cadillac, what’s your 5-series? Cadillac, what’s your A4?” Hierarchy is not a German invention, they just adhere better to it.
But you have such a rich history of evocative names—Seville, DeVille, Eldorado . . .
Yes, DeVille was far more exciting, Eldorado was far more exciting. But I don’t want nameplates to be exciting, because I want to build a Cadillac brand. The brand must be the driver of passion, and the cars and nomenclature should just sort themselves out. So I take all the blame—oh boy, and I have tons of it, on my desk, on all the blogs—and I fully accept it, but there’s no way around it. Don’t forget, we will expand our product portfolio, and if we keep the three letters, we will definitely confuse customers.
So I know [the nomenclature] sounds German, although it isn’t—it’s just logical and hierarchical. People outside of car nuts and automotive journalists have a hard time memorizing all the names Cadillac used in the past anyway. They are no longer meaningful. Let’s face it, those cars weren’t anywhere near as good as today’s cars are, so those names are not arousing for those that still remember them.
I might not agree with all is points in the article, but I'll give him this: At the very least he's passionate about the brand and where it's going. That doesn't seem to have existed at Cadillac's front office for some time.
I get his point about past names and the like. And no one can contest the fact that the products of today are vastly better than the products of yesteryear (with a few possible exceptions for subjective things like styling, etc). On the one hand he's saying that he doesn't want to be Germanic, but then adopts a Germanic naming scheme. However, to give him the benefit of the doubt, I suppose what he's really saying is that --- for good or for ill --- this is the
de facto way that mainstream luxury customers view their vehicle portfolios. Can I truly blame him for going the route that he has? Perhaps, but I also understand the logic behind it.
However, to retort to his comment about "...if we keep the three letters, we will definitely confuse customers", I'm not so sure about that. They could have made everything CTA, CTB, CTC, CTD. However, looking at it globally, perhaps it seemed a bit too much like what Lincoln has done with their MK* scheme.
So we have what we have and no amount of complaining will change that. All hail the CT6 and it's progeny.
I think my problem with the whole thing is that I don't like CT* and XT*. I'd almost get behind the whole revised alphanumeric scheme if they came up with a different rubric; something more appealing. The justification for using the "CT" was because it was the close to Caddy's most recognizable product, the CTS. If that was the rationale, then I suppose that using "SR" would have made sense over "XT" since the SRX was/is a huge seller (though I'm sure they would have run into trouble since Toyota uses the SR5 moniker on a version of their trucks).
And what does the "T" stand for in their rubric? Is it "touring" the way that the original Seville STS was different from the Seville SLS?
It's just my two cents, but I would pay homage to city their namesake founded: Detroit. In doing so, I'd use "DT*" or just "D*" would have worked better than "C". And for the crossover/SUVs, I'd think that "DX" or "XD" (I'm sure no one would confuse a Cadillac XD3 for a Scion xD).
But what do I know.
