Cadillac Celestiq EV: Extremely limited hand-built ultra-luxury car with 480 km range

General Motors was founded in 1908 and it took only years for the company to purchase 22 brands, including Cadillac, Buick, and Oldsmobile, whilst also getting ye close to acquiring Ford's operations as well. Today, GM sells SUVs, trucks to luxury cars, and also electric ones. Since small cars have gotten the axe in recent years and GM has been about bigger is better, Cadillac holds great importance to the company. But lately, it'd been struggling to keep up with modern-day luxury brands.

This is where the Cadillac Celestiq comes in. It has the air of low-volume, ultra-luxury sedans from the likes of Rolls-Royce and Bentley. How do you manage this with mass manufacturing automated factories where volume is in the tens of thousands?

The Celestiq is aimed only at those who'd be willing to fish out at least $300,000 (approximately Rs 2.5 crore). The all-electric four-passenger electric car is now in its production version. But it is a throwback to how cars were built about a century ago when Cadillacs were open-top with wooden frames, built completely by hand.

Celestiq, set to launch in 2023, gets its own production facility at GM's Warren, Michigan, technical centre where it will be hand-built at a pace slower than two cars a day (which is only about 500 cars a year).


While a throwback to coachbuilding, the Cadillac Celestiq is a thoroughly modern car with a body-on-frame Ultium architecture that uses a 111 kWh battery pack likely to produce some 600 hp, letting the sleek electric car dash to 100 km/h in 3.8 seconds through a two-motor all-wheel-drive system.

The sales format for the Celestiq will be as fancy as well, with customers invited to Warren, and sip champagne while picking from a library of colours, materials, electronics, leather, types of wood, and other details. The Celestiq will be available “by waitlist only,” and the first customers should receive their vehicles in early 2024. The Celestiq could perhaps be a turn around Cadillac needs or the grandeur would trickle down to other mass production models.

Discover everything about the automotive world at Times of India.