General Motors’ renovated “Cadillac House” studio aims to sell a story—and leapfrog its tier-3 American brand into tier-1 luxury
First, the news: up from earlier estimates of $400,000 to $500k, the 2025 Cadillac Celestiq is now set to sticker from between $500,000 to $600,000. That’s no longer just a Rolls-Royce Ghost, but a full-on Phantom. That’s double a Merc-Maybach S, quadruple a BMW i7. That sort of spend better come with a cure for some sort of personal dysfunction, just for good measure.
Now priced past a half-million, this long-delayed Cadillac flagship is inserting itself into a league that even the Germans haven’t dared touch. What are the expectations, then? Is it still relevant after such delays? And, most importantly, is the Celestiq a credible top-tier product?
General Motors has toyed with the idea of a limited-production luxury halo for generations, but institutional will and economic conditions never quite aligned. Audiences flocked to the Sixteen show car back in 2003, for instance, a thousand-horsepower exercise which GM toured so extensively that the concept now bears more scuffs and scars than most any demonstrator of its type. The Sixteen was never truly primed for production, but feasible or not, Cadillac had some lofty ideas — and it wanted people to see them.
Spendy fantasies paused through the bailout years, but high-luxe aspirations picked up once more in the twin Ciel and Elmiraj concepts — right as Cadillac was digging itself further downmarket to capitalize on the Mary-Kay bracket.
Nine years after Elmiraj, though, Cadillac rallied with the 2022 Celestiq. Benefiting from the relative straightforwardness of a skateboard EV platform, Celestiq skipped the will-they-won’t-they with a production-ready show car. Orders opened quickly, with production planned for 2024 and a ceiling of 500 hand-built examples per year.
Cadillac has thus far maintained exclusivity by delivering just one unit for 2024. Delays are promised to yield to proper production this year, but static vehicle impressions thus far are largely limited to pre-production units. In the interim, the price has gone up: to reiterate, from an earlier estimate of under a half-million Canadian dollars, the 2025 Cadillac Celestiq is now a $500,000 to $600,000 car, depending on specification.
Farther back, a secondary turntable can showcase a second car — perhaps an example of the old Cadillac model someone mentioned having their first date in. The ‘concierge’ team works around the corner from this. A few sewing machines and sample panels line the walls, bringing the impression of a working studio, even though the serious work is performed elsewhere. A saturated blue ceiling brightens this craftier hands-on space and compliments the Saarinen campus’ vibrant accent features.
Washrooms farther back are stylishly dim and accented with purple mood lighting. These offer showers to clients who might’ve just flown in, with hefty Cadillac-embossed paper towels and plenty of space to freshen up. The former canteen’s renovations are a dramatic reconfiguration of the space and its purpose, but have made an apparent effort to honour its aesthetic heritage.
If this all sounds like a lot of setting before actually getting on to the car, you’re starting to sniff out how this works.
Luxury products can only ever offer so much innate quality, after all; it’s often the mythology around them that must set them apart. Every brand has its own angle: Rolls-Royce leans into the story of the one man who hand-paints its “coach lines”; Hermès pumps the Birkin’s consultative origins; Aston leverages pop-culture espionage associations.
Whereas the lower-end market chases rapidly evolving trends to sustain ongoing volume, conservatism and adherence to mythologized tradition better suits the luxury labels. This leaves the luxury incumbents some room for complacent reliance on established standards like the Phantom or the Birkin; consumers already covet these known quantities, whether or not they fully understand why, so there’s little urgency to radically shift product identities. Top-shelf aspirants, on the other hand, face a tall climb. They must not only develop and deliver a high-end product, but they need to be taken seriously enough to get people in the door — and then follow through with a high-calibre experience to close the deal.
Cadillac once commanded the attention of America’s newly moneyed pop-culture icons and middle-management suits alike, and at its height absolutely stood among the world’s high-end mainstream brands. Excepting the rare special commissions today found on concours greens, the brand seldom seriously challenged the likes of Bentley or Rolls, nor the once-lively coachbuilding scene.
That height slipped five decades ago, however. Instead of protecting Cadillac as a halo brand, General Motors’ push for ever-greater sales across all properties forced the brand down into the higher-volume mainstream market. A legacy of small-production icons like the original Eldorado and Coupe De Ville yielded to badge-engineered dross like the Chevy Cavalier-twinning Cimarron, or today’s Chevy Equinox-based XT4. Instead of pausing the brand through recessions and letting Buick soak up the upper-middle-class spend, management opted for a sort of quantitative easing that flooded the market with gussied-up anonymae — cashing in on and rapidly debasing Caddy’s brand capital in the process.
Today the brand identifies itself (Escalade lines and all) as a ‘Tier 2’ competitor to Volvo and Acura: still above irrelevant ‘Tier 3’ brands like Infiniti, but still beneath the mainstream’s ‘Tier 1’ Lexus and German badges. Rolls, Bentley, and Aston Martin exist beyond this, a ‘Tier 0’, as it were.
Excepting the meme-machine Aston Cygnet, those ‘Tier 0’ brands have not cheapened their reputations with mass-market appliances. Rolls-Royce being part of BMW, for instance, the group strategy has other brands in separate showrooms for that. A Bentley grille still means a minimum spend of a quarter-million. A Cadillac badge, meanwhile, suggests a $50,000 XT4 discounted on a Costco member incentive, not someone who’s fetching a few pairs of Louboutins on the way home.
Reflecting on those highlight exercises like the Sixteen, though, it’s clear that enthusiasts would love to see that Mary Kay baggage jettisoned in favour of an exciting halo. Attainable or not, interesting cars’ mere existence brings colour to the hobby; the more that can reach production and succeed, the better. We should all hope to see the Celestiq prove excellent, drive interest in showrooms, and perhaps even up the pressure on incumbents.
Asked with an open but suitably critical mind, then: how does a brand that produces cheap subcompact crossovers like the XT4 credibly pitch a half-million-dollar Rolls-Royce rival?
The answer, say GM staffers, is a complete and conscious “culture shift.” No more bookkeepers holding the visionaries back, no more phoned-in ergonomics, no more cheap materials and manufacturing shortcuts, no more hollow marketing bullshit. “The product will speak for itself,” as it were.
That’s a big pitch, but let’s hear them out.
The Celestiq plan
First in this journey was a broad assessment of the market Cadillac sought to enter. Product Manager Ken Kornas explains the brand sought the perspective of ‘confidants’ who participate in the high-luxury market and consume its experiences and wares. Much like focus groups, these voices helped guide the Celestiq team’s understanding of this clientele’s preferences and expectations before and after delivery, and of abstract dimensions that do or don’t matter to them.
Next, Cadillac covertly purchased several of its competitors’ cars. More than just a path to acquiring benchmark vehicles, this equipped GM with ‘secret shopper’ insight into each brand’s customer journey and sales processes, all with an eye to matching or exceeding that specific customer experience.
In benchmarking vehicles themselves, the Cadillac team assessed competitors’ approaches to individual engineering and user-experience areas, evaluating such fundamentals as how HVAC and seat controls work. “We know what our competitors are doing,” he emphasizes.
“We don’t want to just copy the competitors… We have to be differentiated in order to be relevant, because we learned that these clients…value where you add that. They value difference. They want to show people that they’ve got basically the best of the best, that it’s a reflection of them.”
Even before these mechanics though, the first critical touch-point is the upholstery you slide in to. GM has gone for some spend, here: whereas top mainline models like the Escalade have now abandoned all leather options for supposedly “more premium” ‘vegan’ vinyl, Celestiq still gets proper full-grain cow. What’s more, some of that reverse-engineering extended into Cadillac tapping competitors’ supply chains: in the case of Celestiq, leather has been sourced from one such high-end vendor that satisfied quality expectations and the team’s preferences for the animals’ standard of treatment.
Displayed in the studio, large samples hang in several colours and textures for prospects to hold, feel, and visualize in combination with other paint and material samples. Thick with an airy softness between the fingers, it isn’t the same near-synthetic smoothness of Rolls-Royce: it feels different, pleasant, its own. Moreover, leather is applied to almost every surface not occupied by open-pore wood or metal trim. This doesn’t feel like your usual cabin appointment either: even the boot floor wears the same full-grain leather as the doors and dash; only the steering-wheel airbag pad compromises this full-grain treatment, for safety compliance.
Tailoring is guided by a ‘concierge’ working out of the Cadillac House studio. These staff come from backgrounds in fashion, interior, and materials design, and speak to customers in “high-level design language” to elevate the purchase process above the usual showroom experience. More than this, the concierge team is said to be directed to answer “yes” wherever possible, and to work out the technicalities later. Asked for examples, Cadillac reps referenced a custom storage binnacle design requested by one client.
“Everything about this vehicle is not standard, it is not common,”Kornas continues. “It needs to be exclusive to every client we have.”
Celestiq in execution
Part of this is merely an unfortunate consequence of the project’s past-due limbo: in taking so long to get its halo adjusted properly, the Celestiq seems set to arrive too late to truly offer a halo experience.
The next strike for tardiness is on styling: Celestiq’s once-bold new face, light signatures, and tail blades were surely exciting when the design team first penned them, but again, they’ve since extended the design language to downmarket models you can buy with year-end clear-out discounts on dealer lots. Instead of previewing the look of a new generation of ‘-iq’ electric product as was obviously intended, delays have surrendered that cutting-edge presence to the very Mary Kay segment it so sought to put behind.
It must again be noted of course that the car shown here is a pre-production unit, and that no media have yet driven one. Everything could be subject to improvement or change, and particularly egregious shortcomings like creaky, grinding plastics or worn-through metallic paint around the cupholders will likely be remedied. More basic bits that work well enough in mainline cars can be reasonably assumed unlikely to change, however, and in fairness: a wiper stalk is just a wiper stalk, yes?
Sure — except for when it isn’t, that is. Our upcoming review of the Aston Martin DB12, for instance, highlights the impact that thoughtful execution of a typically unremarkable part can be. Even that car’s sun visors are gorgeous in material, ergonomics, and tactile experience. This exercise in luxury — a sun visor, remember — answers a normal-car shortcoming you likely wouldn’t have even thought to care about, and does that so effectively that you start to feel disappointed when others aren’t up to that new standard.
Who’s going to trade in their Rolls-Royce?
Good efforts on CMF, then, if with some pre-prod teething issues and silver-painted plastic shortcuts that accounting hoped we wouldn’t notice. Even were it a faultless product, however, there’s still the question of who it’s for — and how to get them in the door.
The luxury clientele is a different space — and one that GM can’t simply hope to chart through reverse-engineering or consumer-side intel.
Unlike the relative impersonality of mass-market premium products, such a designer-couture segment relies on more targeted sales to known buyers. At the top of this exists a push-pull dynamic that isn’t quite what you’ll see in even a high-end S-Class context. Elite manufacturers know — individually — who their ‘top buyers’ are. In the typical ‘pull’ transaction, these customers can be counted on to show up and place an order for each new mainline product. Approached personally though, brands may also ‘push’ previews, bespoke specials, or proposed halo projects to these few.
Such deep relationships — both in client trust and manufacturer vetting of de-facto brand ambassadors — are typically established through years of transactions spanning several product generations. Celestiq is the first attempt of its kind for GM, however — and one that is plainly unlikely to be succeeded by another. This leaves Cadillac without connections of quite the calibre that Bentley and Rolls enjoy, and presumably without a future path to concretize new relationships borne of the specification process.
Regardless, that specification process is to be a crucial part of the Celestiq experience and relationship — or not, depending on who you ask. Messages are mixed, here: some reps emphasize enthusiasts’ personal participation and relationship-building in the customization process, while others carry that Celestiq’s buyers are so elite that they have personal shoppers or other such delegates to source and spec their cars.
Of the former, an enthusiast collector clientele will certainly place orders for collection’s sake. Industry confidants suggest that Celestiqs will likely find their way into perhaps a few hundred 30- to 100-car collections, and we can only hope that this crowd makes the most of Cadillac’s design-trained concierge team to marry some of the more inspired selections from the secret-agent wall.
The latter simply seems an odd boast — as if to say that ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) clients don’t care enough about their product to participate in the process themselves, that the Celestiq is just a car with a price tag.
Collectors satisfied, it sounds as though the clientele will lean more American athlete than traditional aristocrat. The Escalade showed that there’s plenty to be made here, and the added allure of such low volume will draw a crowd that craves what nobody else has. Finally, there’s the domestic allure of an all-American alternative to the stuffy British incumbents.
Overpromised, undelivered
Is the Celestiq a credible $500k to $600k Phantom competitor? From what we’ve seen and felt so far, no. While bounds better than anything we’ve seen from modern-day Detroit, there’s still a sumptuousness missing, an air of ‘wow’ beyond mere long-car footprint. There’s also the lack of delivered vehicles.
Does the Celestiq offer “a level of craftsmanship not seen here in the U.S.”? Of the mainstream manufacturers, perhaps; of bespoke-market handcrafting, no. Singer appoints 911s for less money, and with more luxurious distinction to their smaller cabins. The Celestiq is materially credible as an S-Class competitor, just for quadruple the price.
Does its outlandish price matter? Probably not particularly. If the goal is just to sell to a small number of collectors rather than thousands of conventional customers, such a high sticker arguably serves buyers by cementing the exclusivity of their spend. Could there be money in vying for EQS or i7 market share? Scaled to conventional production methods, perhaps — but then, shopping on actual value propositions would put most of those buyers in i7s anyway.
Does any of this matter? No, for the Celestiq exists to sell in addition to rather than in competition with the old labels. No, for GM history reflects an indifference to accolades. And no, for more souls own Ferrari F40s than ever will a Celestiq.
Timeliness does matter to an ambitious halo project, though, and GM really needs to get a move on. Failure of such a giant to deliver on time will surely fall short of UHNW buyers’ expectations, and even more damaging is the resultant erosion of core qualities once meant to set the Celestiq apart. That the buck has been kicked so far, that mainstream models were allowed to cash in on special bits’ novelty before a flagship could introduce them as halo parts, that the fulcrum of such new-dawn Cadillac optimism is still so forgettable and invisible to the popular consciousness — it’s a tragically familiar GM tale.
The even greater shame in the Celestiq is that there’s clearly such passion and expertise behind it. Even if some bits now feel familiar, the colour and materials folks have elevated the Celestiq’s available paints, upholsteries, and contrasting finishes above what we’re used to seeing in the rest of the brand’s portfolio. So many teams so clearly did their job as this car was readied so many years ago, but like a freelancer waiting on an editor who forgot to publish their big scoop until the story broke elsewhere, every day’s delay further dilutes appreciation of what should’ve landed as an impressive accomplishment.
It’s cool that Warren finally found space for a long-awaited realization of the Sixteen dream. Now it just needs to honour its employees and deliver some of the things before the car — and half of its clients — age out.
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