Cadillac has proved it can produce incredible sedans and coupes. Unfortunately, that competitive advantage comes at a time when more luxury buyers than ever are stepping into crossovers and SUVs.
During the launch of the 2017 Cadillac XT5, brand president, Johan de Nysschen, was outspoken about the brand’s future product, and described how its autonomy in New York City will help it succeed.
de Nysschen spoke of 11 new products in the pipeline, and the 2017 XT5 being the first of four new crossovers coming by 2020. We’ll likely see the next wave of Cadillac product next year some time.
But, specifically, de Nysschen spoke of Audi, and how Cadillac needs to follow in the brand’s footsteps from an organization point of view.
“There is nobody at Audi who also works on VW,” he says. “They have dedicated resources. They spend their entire working day planning for utter and complete annihilation of the competition,” he stated, according to The Detroit News.
“I was one of the original Audi brand warriors,” continued de Nysschen, recalling VW CEO Ferdinand Piech’s shakeup of the company when he took over in the early 1990s. “In the mid-’80s, Audi was like Opel, it was nothing special. Piech … gave Audi the autonomy it needed and said: ‘Go for it.’ When I came over to the U.S. in 2004, [it] was the last major market to set up the brand separation.”
And look what Audi is capable of today. Numbers and product don’t lie.
He ended stating the Cadillac team has been rallied by the move to New York City, and everyone is as bullish as ever surrounding the future of the brand.
“In the last 12 months we’ve made massive progress,” he said. “I consider Cadillac on a whole the most underrated brand on the market.”
Comments
I agree that autonomy will help separate Cadillac from the rest of GM and that will help with the perception of the general public and potential buyers. Also more autonomy from GM on the product side (ie. having exclusive features and equiptment) will help with brand equity.
JdN’s philosophy is sound. We will have to wait to see how the execution goes.
Here’s to hoping that it’s not all about feature and equipment, but that the autonomy starts with platforms and architectures, which should be RWD. The time for Cadillacs with FWD and transversely-placed engines should be over and done with, with the XT5 hopefully being the last.
I’ve seconded that since the very first spy shots rolled in on this website, Alex. Autoblog, Jalopnik, and the other publications just reviewed the XT5 yesterday. They haven’t ignored the platform and the driving dynamics. Autoblog even compared it to the Lincoln MKX.
Perhaps that’s why Ellinghaus is toying with the idea of 5 new CUVs instead of 4. Hopefully they’re all RWD/4WD.
Plus, Buick is moving upmarket, maybe not in price, but in buyer perception, features, and interior quality. So much so, that very soon the ONLY things separating Cadillac and Buick are driving dynamics and design language, which justifies the price difference.
Cadillac can’t keep building FWD Cadillacs; Buick is becoming FWD Cadillac.
still can’t help it that the fact that the XT5 exterior still looks weird…..maybe Cadillac CUVs just look plan weird and unbalanced……the XT5 still has that wedged shaped body that has gone old and boring on Cadillac cars.
Rye — you keep coming back to state the same ill-fated opinion about Cadillac’s design language. You know how the nice people in this world say that opinions can’t be right or wrong? Well, I will be the first to tell you that in this case, you opinion is wrong, plain and simple.
So do us all a favor: get your eyes checked and stop spreading your incorrect opinion over and over and over again. It’s simply in bad taste.
at least the XT5 looks better than the Buick Encore.
the XT5 doesn’t look bad….it looks better and bolder than the outgoing SRX…and the XT5 is pretty nice.
maybe it just looks bad in photos….and maybe I just have to see it in person.
“like Opel, it was nothing special”; eejit!
Meaning that it (Audi) wasn’t considered a world-class luxury brand whose vehicles are desired and listed after globally… which they are today.
That XT5 is Beautiful, they slap a Comfortable third row (Extended) in it and I’m All In!!! 😉
Brand autonomy will never happen. GM’s unions will make sure of it, inso far as isn’t it cheaper to produce the same radio, and switches, and door handles for 100k Tahoes/Yukons and Escalades, then a slightly different one for 15k Escalades, as an example.
Everything Cadillac should be unique, and its own, but it won’t happen with the massive union control that GM is under. They’ll have to produce x number of vehicles at x plant for union requirements. To make proper margins on making those vehicles at x plant, they need to come in under x price. A $50 door handle from the GM parts bin is good enough then spending $175 on the Caddy door handle, as when you add all those parts up (never mind specific engines and drive trains), that car comes in at $15k more then if you used shared parts. And then produce enough speicific parts to sit in a parts wearhouse for the next decade for repairs etc.
You’ll get some executives on board time to time to keep the Cadillac books as far away from the other GM books and it may work for a while…but when things get tight, margins get cut and/or the union starts pushing and/or a new executive/executives take over, the quickest and easiest way to create efficiencies is to conglomerate similarly based GM vehicles together for engines, drivetrains, and parts…rinse and repeat as has happened over the last decades.
Simply, GM is too big to really pull off one brand being independent from all others. Only way would be to cut brands (ie Buick). Left with GMC for SUV’s, Chevy for trucks, cars, crossovers, and Cadillac for upper scale.
Don’t get me wrong, as I’ve said here many times, there are some fantastic cars that GM has, and continues to produce, under the radar and with little fanfare, where you can tell the car guys/engineers were allowed to do somethings off the beaten path on smaller scales (CTS V, CTS Wagon, SSR, LNF Turbo, GTO, SS, Sky/Solstice/HHR SS etc), but those are one offs, unsupported with ads or retail marketing; trying to be that unique for an entire brand lineup of 10+ luxury models all at once is a whole different story.