The Cadillac Celestiq concept has been unveiled as a dramatically styled hatchback sedan with futuristic lines and features, yet full of nods to the brand’s history.An all-wheel-drive electric powertrain will be standard; it uses General Motors’ Ultium battery technology.The production Celestiq will be built—by hand—in limited quantities at GM’s Warren, Michigan, Technical Center, and buyers will be able to customize the car any way they like.Cadillac has revealed its most ambitious project in modern times, the Celestiq concept sedan. The concept previews a production model that will serve as the brand’s halo model in its EV era. Cadillac has pinned high hopes on the Celestiq, which was designed from the outset to live up to the brand’s now obscure Standard of the World slogan from way last century.
But the Celestiq is not a mass-market sedan in the vein of the now discontinued CT6. Nor is it a merely a generously equipped EV meant to challenge the Lucid Air or the Mercedes-Benz EQS—although it is that, too. Cadillac is taking a page from the Rolls-Royce playbook and will employ a small team of craftspeople to hand-build each Celestiq onsite at GM’s Global Technical Center in Warren, Michigan.This isn’t going to be the first hand-built Cadillac, but the Celestiq will be the first production vehicle built on the company’s engineering and design campus since the property was built in 1956. GM says it’s investing $81 million to retrofit a low-volume assembly line for the Celestiq inside an existing building on the campus grounds. The production version of the Celestiq is expected to debut as a 2025 model. It is a pleasant surprise that, according to Cadillac, the concept you see here is essentially production intent.Modern Design with Vintage RootsCadillac’s designers and engineers chose to mold the Celestiq into a four-door sedan rather than an SUV, a deliberate decision that underscores the car’s retro-future motif. Throughout the design you’ll find a number of clues to Cadillac’s past, including an image of the brand’s Flying Goddess hood ornament from the 1940s carved into frosted glass trim on the car’s front quarter-panels.
The Celestiq’s long hood, sloping roof, and hatchback-style rear end give it a sleek silhouette, and although it shares some design themes with the Lyriq SUV—namely the grille and hockey-stick-shaped taillamps—it manages to look completely original. The two Cadillac EVs were penned by the same designer, Magalie Debellis, who told Car and Driver that the first version of the Celestiq’s design was striking enough to cause GM leadership to fall in love with the car. Perhaps it was the emotional connection that helped get the Celestiq greenlit as Cadillac’s next flagship sedan, but it took a team effort to pull it off.”It helps the entire company and engineering to work collaboratively with design to really make the car become a true story,” Debellis said.
That collaboration is expected to pay off in more ways than one, according to chief engineer Tony Roma. Building to the Celestiq’s unique design required some innovative engineering, which he said will trickle down through the Cadillac lineup moving forward.
The Celestiq’s luggage compartment, for example, is open to the rear seats without a bulkhead; this created the issue of how to reduce road noise from entering the passenger compartment, which Roma’s team had to solve to keep the designers’ vision intact. Luckily, the electric powertrain—which utilizes GM’s Ultium battery technology—eliminates the traditional burble of a gasoline engine, allowing engineers to focus on dampening other noises instead. High-Tech Meets High-EndThe Celestiq’s cabin is the place where digital and analog mingle the most. A 55-inch curved display stretches across the car’s dashboard from A-pillar to A-pillar, but it’s accented by interior details seemingly pulled directly from 1960s and 1970s Cadillac sedans, including high-pile carpeted floor mats, a large-diameter steering wheel with metal accents, and the show car’s signature bright-red leather upholstery.
The four-seat interior is spacious and quite grand, to say the least. Each of the seats is modeled after the famed Eames chairs of the 1950s, with decorative bent-wood backings that wrap around to the sides to create a streamlined appearance. Sprouting from the bent-wood panels on each of the front seats is a large entertainment display for the rear passengers. A full-length center console runs the entirety of the Celestiq’s cabin, and a smaller display mounted between the two rear passengers provides similar access to the car’s infotainment and navigation systems that is afforded to front-seat occupants. The aforementioned trunk is lined with matching red leather and features metal inlays embedded in the floor to keep cargo from marring the upholstery.The Celestiq’s glass roof panel can be set to opaque or transparent, which isn’t a unique feature in and of itself, but the fact that it’s arranged in a four-place grid that allows each passenger to control their own corner of the panel is novel.
Materials have been painstakingly chosen here for maximum impact. Laetitia Lopez, lead color and trim designer for the Celestiq, explained that the bold red color was chosen for the show car’s interior for the theatrical effect that it creates when you open the door. Hand-brushed metal trim and wood panels along each of the doors have been perforated to allow LED backlighting to shine through. Those are just a few of the details that showcase the level of craftsmanship that Cadillac is putting into its new flagship.Lopez revealed too that while sustainable materials have been incorporated into the design, the team was careful to keep things genuine where it mattered.”The goal was not to have anything that our clients will be unused to in any way, so you know if it’s leather, it has to be real leather. If it’s metal, it has to be real metal,” said Lopez.
The leather is, however, tanned using 40 percent less water than traditional methods, and the black sections of the upper seats have been dyed using fair-trade coffee-bean shells rather than chemicals. The car’s carpeting is made from eucalyptus fibers, and Cadillac says the interior’s wood trim is also ecologically sourced.Concours Quality and Extravagantly PricedTargeting Bentley and Rolls-Royce models means the Celestiq’s price will be out of reach of much of Cadillac’s current customer base. Base MSRP has yet to be announced, but we expect to see it start in the high-$200,000 to low-$300,000 range. Customers will be able to customize their Celestiq to a large degree, similar to what Rolls offers with its Bespoke program and Bentley with its Mulliner division.”I feel like it’s more like a piece of art, something you will want to collect,” said Lopez. “So it’s not something you would use everyday.” Even so, Cadillac says it’s bringing plenty of features to the Celestiq that might make it an attractive daily driver, including GM’s next-generation hands-free driving system called Ultra Cruise. Road-tripping will certainly be in the Celestiq’s wheelhouse too, as we expect it to offer a large battery pack with at least 300 miles of driving range. The electric powertrain is likely to offer brisk acceleration, although we’re expecting the Celestiq’s road manners to be more like a DeVille than a Blackwing.
Such a car is a bit of a risk for Cadillac since it will potentially cost twice as much as the brand’s current priciest entrant, the $151,490 Escalade V. “That’s something that Cadillac as a brand has been missing for a long, long time, that ultimate aspirational moon shot that other brands have got,” said Roma.We couldn’t agree more. Cadillac has been struggling to be taken seriously by luxury buyers for many years, losing out to European luxury players such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Perhaps, then, the Celestiq’s success will be measured not by how many orders are taken but by the interest it draws to other models in the lineup.
Cadillac hasn’t announced how many it will build, but production will be purposely kept at low volumes to ensure exclusivity. So don’t expect to see unsold Celestiqs lining dealer lots. “These are all 100 percent custom ordered,” said Roma. “You’re going to work with someone, design your car, and we’ll build it and deliver it.” Customers will be able to outfit their Celestiq any way they’d like, which the Cadillac team hopes will help foster a personal connection with both the car and the brand.”We’re not rushing an EV luxury car into production,” said Roma. “This has been a painful process of iteration and design, and that’s going to be something that I think any American would be proud to say that it’s an American Cadillac. That’s our goal.”
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