I have a friend who owns and is the GM of the local Cadillac dealer. For some years (at least 5), GM has been showing dealers a mockup of a halo sports GT. I even saw a future products comparison sheet he had which had that car (and another one) in silhouette. And when the Corvette C8 was in development, does anyone remember the leaked photos of the key fob where there was a Chevy version AND a Cadillac version? A Cadillac GT car has been lurking for years now.
Of course, any car like this will have to deal with the history Cadillac has had in the last 35 years with cars like this. The Allante was a handsome vehicle and an interior that was pretty good for the day. It was saddled by three problems:
1. Uncompetitive engine. The HT4100/4500 engines just did not compete well against Mercedes OHC designs and Cadillac was still reeling from the original HT4100's reliability problems. A FWD shortened Eldorado chassis probably didn't help.
2. Leaky convertible top. This took far too long to redesign and get fixed.
3. Unprofitable business case. The "build it in two countries" approach was interesting marketing but terrible for cost control when Cadillac's market share was eroding fast from their height in the mid 70s.
By the time the '93 Allante debuted, it was too late.
Fast forward a decade and the XLR is introduced. Again, a GT car with lots of promise, but unable to crack competitive pressures due to poor design choices including:
1. A design that looked something like the Evoq show car from 1999 but lost something in the translation. Still, it didn't look like anything on the road, then or since.
2. Interior design that managed to have less room than the Corvette it was based on. The HVAC controls were literally the same unit as found in the $30,000 CTS, for more than twice the money. And somebody at Cadillac thought a cross branding with Bvlgari would impress customers, but most people could care less.
3. Performance. The Northstar V8 was fine and early kinks had been worked out, but the car was a little under-tired according to reviews and the car's demeanor didn't seem to know what it wanted to be. The XLR-V raised the stakes but it was too late to save initial impressions of the car.
4. The folding top. Cadillac farmed development out to a company who had done the folding tops of other European competitors. But somehow it came to market as a one piece roof which means that you had no cargo space when the top was down. When it debuted, rivals (using the same company for the roof) had a folding design that didn't take up nearly the space. So the best feature was uncompetitive from the start.
So now there has been a GT lurking out there for some time. Will we ever see it? Who knows. But there is an opportunity in the race to electrify the product line. GM has already been working on high performance versions of Ultium powered cars like the Hummer EV and upcoming Corvette hybrid.
But like with everything else, execution is everything. And Cadillac has not executed across all major selling points on most of their products for years. Escalade went to market pretty fully formed. But most others have come with flaws either interior, exterior or drivetrain that drag down the final product. Ironically one of the best interior executions in the last decade was the ELR and that car was hobbled by the unmodified Volt drivetrain in 2014 and the warmed over version in 2016.
The Lyriq needs to be pretty perfect out of the gate and that car already gets launched without the AWD version, which is inexplicable in the premium electric car wars. And whatever the Celestiq ends up being, that car needs to be really special. Like Eldorado Brougham special. Cadillac V16 special. No excuses.
