Into the breach once more for Cadillac.

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

Detroit. With the announcement that the new Cadillac ELR plug-in electric luxury coupe will be priced at $75,995 ($68,495 minus the federal tax credit of $7,500) when it hits showrooms around the first of the year, GM’s luxury division is trying yet again to establish Cadillac as a Most Valuable Player in the luxury space.

The billion-dollar question is will it work this time? And the follow-up question is why should this time be any different?

To be sure, Cadillac has been on a constant drive for respectability ever since GM put into motion its plans to resurrect the luxury division back in 1999. Since then it has been a excruciating grind of designing, developing and building competitive upmarket products, and getting its dealers to fully understand how to sell those products to import-oriented buyers who have only a fleeting interest in giving Cadillac a chance, if that.

And it hasn’t been easy.

Cadillac has raised the ante considerably in terms of its competitiveness by offering an impressive array of vehicles that for the first time can stand on their own when viewed objectively. The new ATS, XTS and especially the thoroughly revamped CTS are fine vehicles, and of course the new Escalade looks to be another fountain of money for Cadillac, even in The New Green Era we’re living in.

In this latest Cadillac renaissance we have seen some exceptional vehicles reach the consumer - the current CTS-V Coupe being example No. 1 - and I have no doubt whatsoever that the True Believers at GM in the Design, Engineering and Product Development functions are as talented and as capable as any in the world at what they do.

But is that enough?

Here we are in the teeth of the rejuvenation of Cadillac, fresh off the launch of the ATS and the new XTS, with the impressive new CTS and Escalade right around the corner, and dare I say a shred of actual momentum in sight, yet when Cadillac prices the new ELR at $76,000 all hell breaks loose.

Why? If I could sum up the criticism in one amalgamated phrase, it would go like this: “Really? How does Cadillac have the temerity to charge that for a dandified Volt?” And it went downhill from there. As if Cadillac was committing some sort of insult against everything that was good and righteous in the automotive world.

To that I have to say, really? Remember this is an automotive world where VW prides itself on using a single vehicle architecture to create seemingly endless model variations for its multiple brands that in turn generate piles of money. And I mean piles of it.

But GM uses the hundreds of millions of dollars that it spent in developing the technology that underpins the Volt to create a Cadillac luxury plug-in electric vehicle in an effort to move the needle in the touchy-feely Green enclaves around the country and it’s an affront to all consumer kind?

What a bunch of unmitigated bullshit.

Is the Cadillac ELR the greatest thing since sliced bread? No, of course it isn’t. But it is a worthy entry and in terms of its design presence it will have a legitimate shot at turning a few heads and attracting consumer interest, and for Cadillac’s sake maybe even more than a few buyers.

But let me go back to that aforementioned phrase - when viewed objectively - because that’s the essence of what we’re talking about here for Cadillac.

As I’ve said in previous columns, GM’s luxury division is on an endless quest for legitimacy in the luxury space. But it’s a fight that they may never win and it will, at the very least, take years to see any concrete results. Not a couple of quarters or a couple of model years from now, but a couple of decades.

This doesn’t sit well with the Shiny Happy – and impatient - minions down at the Silver Silos, or with their relentlessly reality challenged CEO, but that’s the heart of the matter because Cadillac will never be viewed objectively. Not by its competitors, not by its own marketers and especially not with consumers, who have an image of Cadillac that has been built-up in this country and handed down from generation to generation for well over a century.

A reservoir of objectivity simply doesn’t exist for Cadillac and it’s not hard to see why. Cadillac’s legacy is as an American luxury car. And for years that meant nothing but good and singularly defining things, like making a rolling statement of success, with the dazzling glint from the chrome matching the hopes and dreams of a country on an upward trajectory.

And then, of course, it turned bad, Cadillac becoming smothered in a haze of vinyl roofs, Vogue whitewall tires and a brace of wildly cartoonish, uncompetitive vehicles whose buyers were literally dying off which each new model year.

Today we live in a world filled with imported luxury machines from Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, et al. that have moved the discussion into a totally different place, to the point that for years Cadillac was simply left for dead by the side of the road, a casualty of a Starbucks-fueled nation of consumer zombies looking for The Next Big Thing.

Given all that has transpired, Cadillac is still only an interesting American automotive sideshow that’s slowly but surely gaining a modicum of respect from consumers shopping in the luxury segment. (And that’s a mind-numbing reality for GM, which has spent in the neighborhood of around $9 billion dollars on Cadillac since 1999.)

Admittedly it doesn’t help that the new Cadillac ELR has been put in a frighteningly similar position to the Cadillac Allante, which was overhyped and overpriced and an ill-timed attempt by Cadillac to jump-start its cool, and the Corvette-based Cadillac XLR, which was also overhyped and overpriced and launched within the context of a Cadillac resurrection that hadn’t even gotten off of the ground yet.

Then there’s the price point for the ELR, which is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t proposition for Cadillac. If the ELR were to be priced too low, it wouldn’t be perceived as being special enough, or worthy of an image-elevated Cadillac. But if the ELR is priced too high, then the naysayers in consumer-ville will either deem it as not being ready for prime time, a glorified Volt, or even worse, ignore it altogether. (I happen to think the ELR should have been priced right at $60,000, but Cadillac marketers have put their sword in the ground, and they will most assuredly fall on it if they can’t draw consumers in.)

But as I said earlier, will that be enough? Will dropping a bright shiny new luxury plug-in electric on the touchy-feely enclaves in this country finally help Cadillac climb out of its perpetual state of almost good enough for prime time but never quite good enough?

Probably not.

Cadillac’s brand image is still barely registering on American consumers’ radar screens, so to expect the ELR to be anything more than an interesting sidebar in the Green “intelligentsia” conversation is asking too much and expecting too much.

But Cadillac has to go into the breach once more with the ELR, because being part of the conversation – albeit a very small part – is better than not being in the conversation at all.

And that’s the High-Octane truth for this week.

(GM)
The Cadillac ELR plug-in electric luxury coupe is expected to arrive in showrooms after the first of the year.