Cadillac Celestiq Show Car Looks To Map Caddy’s Return To Top
The flagship of Cadillac’s EV future, the Celestiq sedan show car oozes opulent luxury & will ride on GM’s Ultium platform.
Even while sharing a world with Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac was once considered beyond those automakers in terms of being the standard of the world. In the advent of the advancement of those foreign ultra-luxury titans, in combination with General Motors’ struggles at the turn of the century, Cadillac became the odd man out, some would say even barely a step above its GM stablemate, Buick. Thankfully, the Crest has enjoyed a rebound in recent years with blade-sharp styling, new driving technology like Super Cruise and a seemingly farewell-to-internal-combustion lineup of fire-breathing V Blackwing sedans. As it looks to keep the momentum, sparked by its Lyriq EV SUV, Cadillac reveals a show car called the Celestiq, an EV which seeks to be a world-beater in the world of opulent automotive luxury.
Born form its heritage
Cadillac’s sedan was recently revealed, showing of a dramatic raked roofline in the back at an angle so steep you may mistake it for a station wagon. The Crest says the design that went into the Celestiq was on the same level of detail that went into the V-16 coaches of the prewar era and the 1957 Eldorado Brougham. Away from their automotive history, Cadillac drew inspiration from the mid-century masterpieces of Eero Saarinen, who was a Finnish-American architect who designed the St. Louis Gateway Arch and several famous airport terminals, from Dulles (Washington, D.C.) and the TWA Flight Center (now TWA Hotel) in New York.
Welcome aboard
Inside each Celestiq will be a 55-inch uninterrupted LED display (which includes a feature that allows passengers to watch movies while blocking it from the driver’s view), a Smart Glass Roof that will allow for four different zones of lighting, and Ultra Cruise, which GM says will allow for true hands-free driving “across 95% of driving scenarios,” and will ultimately allow for “door-to-door hands-free driving on all public paved roads in the U.S. and Canada.”
American built
While the Celestiq will look to become a world-beater, it will still use GM’s Ultium EV platform, the same that underpins the GMC Hummer EVs and the aforementioned Lyriq. Caddy says it will be built at GM’s Global Technical Center in Michigan (which was also designed by Eero Saarinen), making the Celestiq the first production vehicle built there since 1956. The Celestiq is set to enter production phase in late 2023.
Images: Cadillac