Long before Opel became a donor for the badge-engineered Cadillac Catera and Buick Regal, the then GM-owned company shifted its own cars on North American soil. Today’s Rare Ride is a very early example of such a North American offering: It’s a two-door Rekord sedan from 1960.
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Tag: Cadillac
Three large and luxurious sedans compete for around $70,000 of your hard-earned and imaginary Internet dollars. Surely this is a segment where compromise will not be a concern, right?
Nope.
It’s no wonder the Cadillac brand is having a rocky time of late — the marque fields only two crossovers, and one of those, the XT4, only reached lots at the end of September. Having pledged to return its headquarters to its ancestral homeland of Detroit, Cadillac also plans to unveil a new vehicle there in January.
The XT6, not to be confused with the marked-for-death CT6 sedan, will bow at NAIAS 2019, the automaker has stated. With this vehicle, Cadillac gains considerable coverage of the light truck field. (Read More…)
General Motors’ full-size, body-on-frame SUVs are growing long in the tooth, but man, are they popular. It helps that The General keeps finding ways of sweetening the pot here and there, all while ticking the MSRP slightly skyward. By all accounts, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship between consumer and manufacturer.
Last year brought the RST (Rally Sport Truck) versions of the Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban, which GM followed up with this year’s appearance of an extra half-step of luxury in the form of the “Premier Plus” trim. For the extra expenditure, customers gained newfound access to the company’s coveted 6.2-liter V8 and refined 10-speed automatic.
Cadillac Escalade buyers don’t have that desire, as the top-flight powertrain comes standard in all trim levels. They might, however, wish to look meaner. And Cadillac’s banking that they’ll pay more for the privilege. (Read More…)
Last month, Cadillac launched a round of advertisements promoting the 2019 XT4 — including television spots. While the commercial is still set in New York City, it avoids the other trappings of the brand’s previous “Dare Greatly” campaign. There is very little screen time without the crossover blitzing through the streets, backed by a high-energy soundtrack, and at no point does the brand try to encourage the viewer to assume its corporate philosophy. It’s just a straightforward car commercial — or so we thought.
Apparently, there was a hidden element we all missed. (Read More…)
A few months ago we selected a General Motors C-body from the three on offer in the mid-1990s, right at the end of the front-drive platform’s lifespan. Today’s trio is a variation on that theme, as suggested long ago by commenter Sgeffe.
He wanted to talk about rear-drive C-platform offerings — the full-size GMs available shortly before everything started going awry for the large sedan customer. Let’s go.
As one hat joins the wardrobe, another leaves the closet for a trip to the goodwill store. Cadillac’s flagship CT6 appeared at dealers in early 2016 with a range of powerplants in tow, most notably a plug-in hybrid promising 31 miles of gas-free driving. Big, traditional, American luxury sedans needn’t be dinosaurs, Cadillac said of the lightweighted plug-in.
Well, an asteroid just fell on a new, green Detroit. (Read More…)
Book, also known as “BOOK by Cadillac,” is General Motors’ entry in the burgeoning luxury car subscription market, though the fledgling service’s first cities — New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas — will soon have to get used to going without.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, GM’s pulling the plug on Book, at least for the time being. Get those Cadillacs back to where you got ’em. (Read More…)
General Motors vacated the continent in fine style last year, flushing the Vauxhall and Opel brand to Groupe PSA in a deal worth about 2.2 billion Euro. However, it turns out Ren Cen remains as a lingering presence in moving metal across the pond.
All this was spurred by a tweet by David Shepardson of Reuters revealing The General sold about 3,000 vehicles in the first nine months of 2018, compared to 684,000 during the same period one year ago. This makes sense, given the sloughing of Vauxhall/Opel.
Since the word “Europe” shows up exactly zero times in GM’s Q3 earnings report, it left your author wondering: what models comprised those sales? Not the ones I thought, as it turns out.
GM’s snazziest brand may have vacated the Big Apple in a New York minute, but that doesn’t mean they’re taking a break on research and development. It’s been 15 years since the marque appended the consonant “V” onto trunklids of its fastest sedans, so the company is rolling out a new trim to mark the occasion.
The 2019 ATS-V and CTS-V will be endowed with a limited run of these Pedestal Editions. While Pedestal may not have the same gravitas as Talisman, these new whips do a dandy job of cranking the wick to eleven.
You Might Not Want It, but That Doesn’t Mean There Isn’t a Case to be Made for a Hotter Cadillac XT4
Exactly were the Cadillac XT4 lands in terms of sales volume remains to be seen. The brand recorded its first sales of the just-released compact crossover in September, with 212 examples leaving U.S. lots.
Offered with just a single engine (a healthy turbocharged 2.0-liter four) and single transmission (nine-speed automatic), the XT4 is Cadillac’s desperately needed entry in the premium compact CUV market — a hot segment where Cadillac’s tardiness puts it at a disadvantage. But perhaps this XT4 is just a starting point.
A rendering spotted on Cadillac’s XT4 show-and-tell page suggests the brand may hold loftier performance expectations for the little ute. (Read More…)
Cadillac suffered no dearth of cultural relevance back in ’92, but mercifully today’s tone deaf marketing digs make way for a move back to Detroit. And while my heavily East Asian/European design influences at CCS were no harbinger of global platforms, inauthentic proportioning and ridiculous alphanumeric names, I secretly wish Kanye’s CCS mic-drop coulda done me a solid and went there instead.
No matter. The “Without the Escalade, I don’t know where we would be” situation is proof that brand-relevant design must remain in modernization/globalization’s righteous quest. (Read More…)
Perusing the responses to Matthew Guy’s QOTD post about the ideal $40,000 vehicle, three sedans kept surfacing in the comments. All three were compact, all of them had engines of identical displacement, and all of them were restrained by a price ceiling — meaning no optional extras.
Today we’ll narrow the $40,000 field to these three, and see which one you’d buy with your own bank’s money.
General Motors joined the vast majority of its automotive colleagues in having a crappy sales month in September, posting an 11.1 percent year-over-year volume loss. The issues facing OEMs last month were many. As interest rates rise and the market cools, automakers looking to capture more for their coffers are trending towards reduced fleet sales and lowered incentive spending. Hurricanes also played something of a role.
At GM, which graces us with sales figures just four times a year, what was likely a poor showing in September dragged down the third quarter as well as year-to-date sales, with volume since the start of the year now down 1.2 percent. That doesn’t mean several GM models didn’t have good quarters, or haven’t had good 2018s. Some 18 models can boast of YTD sales gains.
Of those 18, however, just four are passenger cars, and one member of the group already has one and a half feet in the grave. (Read More…)
Today’s subjects are ponderous, expensive, and very heavy. No, we’re not talking about state government representatives; we’re talking about full-size SUVs.
Come along, and we’ll select a big truck to burn.
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