GM Investing $175 Million in the Next Generation of Cadillac Sedans
Don’t expect Cadillac to become a crossover brand anytime soon.
While Ford is planning a sedan genocide for the U.S. and the rest of the industry braces itself for the crossover revolution, Cadillac has a different plan. Automotive News reports that General Motors just confirmed a $175 million investment in the next generation of Cadillac sedans, which means America's luxury brand isn't going all-SUV anytime soon.
That money is going into the Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant in Michigan, which currently builds the Cadillac ATS and CTS and the Chevy Camaro, all of which are built on the GM Alpha platform. The working plan is for Cadillac to discontinue the ATS, CTS, and XTS sedans and introduce two new four-doors slotted below the CT6—the CT5 and the CT4. This will give Cadillac a cohesive lineup of small, medium, and large sedans with a consistent naming scheme.
Cadillac is already ceasing production of the ATS sedan, with production of the CT5 expected to start next year followed by the smaller CT4. All this comes despite GM's plan to make "significantly lower investments" in sedans in North America, and it's a big step in Cadillac’s goal of introducing a new model once every six months from now until 2021. Assuming the first one of those was the XT4 unveiled in New York earlier this year, there are seven more vehicles on the way.
Two of them will be the aforementioned sedans, but what will the remaining five new vehicles be? Will Cadillac follow through on building a production version of the Escala concept? Dare we dream of the Elmiraj coupe or the Ciel roadster? Will we see dedicated hybrid/EV Cadillacs? Will it just be five more crossovers?
Time will tell—GM certainly won't right now—and in the meantime, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope that we’ll get proper V variants of the CT5 and CT4 when they arrive in the next couple years.
