The CELESTIQ and Cadillac’s Long History of Automotive Innovation

A century or so ago, Cadillac lived by a simple, if confident, slogan: The Standard of the World.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the brand’s cars stretched the boundaries of what automobile – a still relatively novel idea – could be. They boasted elegant styling and cutting-edge features, including ever-larger engines with more and more cylinders.

The trend reached its zenith in 1934, when the carmaker revealed the V16 Aerodynamic Coupe. As the name suggested, its engine packed 16 cylinders, which combined to make a then-mighty 185 horsepower. With a price tag of $7,850, it cost nearly six times as much as the average American household’s income and more than 13 times the typical new car of the day.

After a lull in the 1940s (as with the rest of Detroit, Cadillac’s factories were too busy serving as the arsenal of democracy to build new cars for civilians), the brand returned to its roots by the 1950s, pushing into new eras of design and pioneering the definitions of American luxury for the forward-looking, post-war era.

The Eldorado Brougham of 1957 served as a high-water mark for the age, boasting looks peeled off the company’s latest concept cars and a suite of luxury features that seem positively futuristic, from memory seats to automatically dimming headlights. It was, arguably, the finest proof of the brand’s innovative, opulent spirit to reach the streets for many subsequent decades.

That is, until the CELESTIQ came along. Cadillac’s new halo car, first revealed in 2022, represents the brand reestablishing itself at the top end of the automotive luxury world.

“It’s exactly what Cadillac had been known for in decades past: doing something bold,” says Tony Roma, Executive Chief Engineer for the CELESTIQ. “That was our mission on CELESTIQ. We’re making a statement to the world.”

The CELESTIQ’s uniqueness extends all the way to its construction: much like the V16 Aero Coupe of the 1930s and the Eldorado Brougham of the 1950s. The new ultra-luxury sedan is hand built to the clients specifications at the Artisan Center – a dedicated facility on General Motors’ Technical Center campus in Warren, MI, roughly 10 miles north of downtown Detroit. But while the manufacturing process may seem like a throwback to the brand’s 20th-century glory days, one glance at the car makes clear that this car is anything but retro.

“It’s not about taking literal inspiration from the past,” Erin Crossley, CELESTIQ Design Director, says, “but more about taking the essence of what Cadillac flagships have always been – these really bold and dramatic design statements.”

Bold and dramatic are certainly appropriate terms to describe CELESTIQ. At just over 217-inches long, the CELESTIQ is about five inches longer than the Cadillac Escalade. But with a much lower height and comparable size 23-inch wheels, CELESTIQ delivers a unique long, low and lean stance. The CELESTIQ profile is like nothing else. Even the windshield angle or rake is more akin to high-performance rather than ultra-luxury vehicles, contributing to not only the CELESTIQ dynamic silhouette, but also contributing to CELESTIQ being the most aerodynamic Cadillac ever. The CELESTIQ proportions are more akin to what is often shown on design concept vehicles rather than production vehicles.

That, in no small part, is due to the fact that the CELESTIQ did in fact start out as a design philosophy. In its original form, the car’s exterior was meant as a “vision model” for the brand’s recent array of electric vehicles, the IQ series: LYRIQ, OPTIQ, VISTIQ and ESCALADE IQ. It was strictly an artistic piece; the original proportions were so aggressive that there was no room for an actual human to fit in the cabin. The CELESTIQ’s engineering and design teams, Roma says, were challenged to take that model and transform it into a production car that would be, as he put it, “the ultimate expression of Cadillac.”

“The engineers helped the designers express their truest vision,” Roma says. “We do that on every product, but this was an immense opportunity to invent and innovate together. In this case, it was more like, ‘Okay, this is what you want. We don’t know how to do that, but we’ll go figure it out and come back.’ And I’m pretty proud of how close we got to the original statement.”

The vehicle architecture is unique and specific for CELESTIQ only. A massive 111-kWh lithium-ion battery pack stretched low across the chassis beneath the cabin is paired with dual electric motors – one powering the front axle, the other the rear – to generate a 650 horsepower and 646 lb-ft of torque, which the brand says can push the sleek sedan from 0 to 60 miles per hour in a Cadillac-estimated 3.8 seconds. With a full charge, it can travel a Cadillac-estimated 300 miles without stopping for electricity, and thanks to its ability to recharge at up to 200 kW, it can add 78 miles of range in 10 minutes at a public DC fast charging station.

CELESTIQ was created to be a flagship for the brand – a way to demonstrate the brand’s breadth of capabilities a quarter of a way through its second century. Unsurprisingly for a luxury brand’s flagship, it’s laden with cutting-edge innovation with hundreds of patented and patent-pending technologies and executions.

Much of this technology, of course, is designed to be apparent to the driver and occupants: Super Cruise hands-free driver assistance technology, the sweeping 55-inch diagonal 8K display spanning the dash, the fixed Smart Glass roof with four individual zones of adjustable tinting and so much more.

Cadillac, Roma says, wanted to ensure that the CELESTIQ was built to an unquestionably high standard, and spared no expense in using advanced tech and techniques to make that possible. “We’re very sensitive to the fact that folks were going to come at this looking for evidence that Cadillac can’t execute on some arbitrary thing,” Roma says. “So we really obsessed in a way I’ve never seen a team do in my career.”

(That’s no small boast; Roma has been at GM since 1993 and played a key role in developing some of the carmaker’s most impressive vehicles. In 2024, he was additionally named the Global Chief Engineer of the Corvette, putting him in charge of America’s most iconic sports car.)

“We’ve been able to use all this really innovative, forward-thinking technology – things that won’t make regular series production cars for another 10 or 15 years,” he adds.

Pressed for an example, Roma reaches for an unexpected choice: the metal D-ring that holds the safety belt above the driver’s shoulder, known as the seat belt adjustable guide loop. “We didn’t have one on the shelf that we liked, that was exposed and beautiful and polished,” he says. So the team turned to additive manufacturing – better known to the layperson as 3D printing – to create the perfect version. The resulting piece is General Motors’ first 3D-printed safety-related metal part. “That’s fantastic technology to make a safety-critical item, but it’s not yet cost-effective to do it at scale.”

Indeed, additive manufacturing is responsible for 115 different parts across the vehicle, making the CELESTIQ by far GM’s most expansive use yet of the process in a production car. The window switches, grab handles, steering wheel center – all 3D-printed, enabling the designers to have unparalleled opportunities to make them just the way they desire.

“If you want to have your dream window switch, what would you make it out of? How would you do it?” says Crossley.

“You poke something on the interior, and if it looks shiny, it’s metal,” Roma says with pride. He adds that even the tiny trim pieces that are practically impossible to see when sitting in the car have been crafted from real steel, aluminum and other metals, rather than the silver-colored plastic often used to fool the eye for little-noticed parts in luxury cars. “If you think that’s not metal, just flick it with your fingernail. Nope, that’s metal.”

Given the amount of work put into making the CELESTIQ second to none in the ultra-luxury sedan world, it’s not surprising that taking one home is a more unusual process than, say, swinging down to the local dealer to snag an Escalade off the lot. As part of the development process, Roma and Crossley ordered a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce from their respective dealerships to benchmark the CELESTIQ against, while also giving them a first-hand look at the purchase experience buyers shopping in that tier encounter. The Cadillac team took it as a challenge. They would offer clients something far more bespoke: not just limitless personalization, but a chance to be deeply involved in the process.

“It was all really part of building not only a statement and flagship vehicle, but a statement and flagship experience to go along with it,” Crossley says.

Once a potential client is approved for purchase – the carmaker is selective about who can fork over the $340,000-plus needed to take one home – they’re invited out to Cadillac House, the company’s Eero Saarinen-designed design studio on the Technical Center campus. There, Crossley and her team sit down with the client and help them craft their dream. (The process can also be done remotely, if a buyer doesn’t want to trek all the way to the base of Michigan’s thumb.)

Considering there are countless configurations to choose from, speccing out a CELESTIQ can be a time-consuming process. Crossley reveals that some clients have spent months on their own personal design journeys, sifting through the nearly infinite palette of colors for paint, leather and trim. “Curating and speccing your own one-of-one vehicle should be personal,” she says.

So far, the clientele has been wide-ranging, from people who have never owned a Cadillac in their lives to others who are long-time fans of the brand. (For one purchaser and his wife who had their first date in an 1961 Eldorado, the team rolled out an Eldorado of similar vintage to greet them.) Some of the high net-worth individuals fall into expected buckets, such as professional athletes and famous musicians, but other buyers have a far more low-key profile than you might predict for buyers of such an outgoing automobile.

The clients, to put it succinctly, are not just casual buyers; they’re the sort who will bring their CELESTIQS to Pebble Beach decades down the road and showcase them alongside those classic Eldorados and Aero Coupes on the concourse lawn. Cadillac plans to build fewer than two CELESTIQS per day, and while the brand isn’t revealing how many it intends to build in total, representatives told Car and Driver that planned production is around one-tenth that of the Rolls-Royce Ghost – which is in and of itself hardly a mass-produced vehicle. And with the remarkable levels of customization on tap, the odds of any CELESTIQS looking alike land somewhere between being struck by lightning and winning the Power Ball.

“Nothing about this vehicle is standard,” Crossley says. Except, perhaps, the standard of the world.