Michael Satterfield
After 112 years in Detroit, Cadillac is pulling up stakes and moving to New York City. It seems the new boss at Caddy, Johan de Nysschen, believes he can spin the brand in a new direction and is hoping to distance it from GM much in the way that Toyota and Nissan have done with their luxury brands. De Nysschen is tasked with building the brand into a world class luxury marque to compete with the likes of BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, and others. That is a monumental task in my opinion, with the current collection of rebadged Chevrolets leaving much to be desired in the style department. I personally feel the current crop of cars from Cadillac will age about as well as their 1980’s counterparts.
The Elmiraj Concept is a step in the right direction but we have all been down the concept car road with Cadillac in the past. Remember the Cadillac Aurora concept from the 90’s that was kind of cool and futuristic in a 1990’s kind of way… yeah we got the Catera… or the Cadillac Converj that basically became the design direction of todays Cadillac… except the production cars were so watered down it seems a shame to even compare them. Remember way back in 2003 the Cadillac Sixteen, everyone loved the car and GM built the most boring CTS ever.
In the 1950’s buying a Cadillac meant you had arrived, with a Pininfarina bodied Eldorado costing as much as a contemporary Rolls Royce of the day. By the 1990’s it pretty much meant you had no taste. I think we can all say it would be a stretch to see anyone paying $500,000 for any Cadillac on the market today.
I don’t know if an address change is going to be enough to shake off the demons of the old and new GM that had dogged the Cadillac brand since the late 1970s. Let’s just hope De Nysschen is not inspired to reach out to Dunham Coachworks across the river in New Jersey for some styling tips on the new models.
Source: Fortune
