Cadillac Marries Art And Science With Cut-And-Sew Interiors

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to climb into a premium luxury car, you know the difference between a conventional, cost-saving interior, and the look and feel of a genuine cut-and-sewn cabin. Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Infiniti and other luxury car manufacturers have long used the process in their top-of-the-line models because nothing quite says quality like carefully stitched leather pieces wrapping the dash, console and steering wheel.

But Cadillac takes that process a step further, being the only full-line automaker in the world to offer cut-and-sewn interiors on every single model in its lineup.

From the entry-model ATS, all the way up to the ELR and Escalade, Cadillac opts to assign the task of crafting interior wrappings to a handful of skilled workers, and a few computer-automated machines. The entire process fuses art with science in a way that befits Cadillac’s self-proclaimed design philosophy; lasers cut the perforations in the material used to cover air bags, and computers use 3D modeling to calculate the optimal way in which pieces should be cut and fitted together.

That’s the science. The art comes from the battalion of trained employees who manually sew those pieces together, and then apply them to the interior of each and every Cadillac model by hand during final assembly.

“There are other mass-produced processes that are less expensive, more efficient and don’t require as many people, but when you see the real thing you know that it’s genuine”, says Cadillac Interiors Director of Design Eric Clough.