The 2023 Cadillac Lyriq will utilize Cadillac’s new torque-based badging and will introduce a new ‘E’ designation to the badge to signal its battery-electric powertrain, as reported by our sister publication, Cadillac Society.
Cadillac introduced the torque-based badges a couple of years back and as of 2020, all of the automaker’s products utilize the naming scheme. The torque-based badges use the powertrain’s torque rating as measured in newton-meters, rounded up to the nearest 50.
The first units of the Cadillac Lyriq feature a single rear-mounted electric motor producing 325 pound-feet of torque – equivalent to 441 newton meters. Cadillac’s naming scheme rounds up to the nearest 50, hence the ‘450’ badge. Meanwhile, the ‘E’ signifies the vehicle’s battery-electric powertrain. Similarly, Cadillac vehicles with turbocharged internal combustion engines add a ‘T’ suffix onto the number to signify the presence of a turbocharged engine, while the ‘D’ suffix indicates a diesel engine.
It’s not surprising to see Cadillac apply the torque-based badges to its EVs, as the looming introduction of battery-powered vehicles was the entire reason the automaker introduced it to begin with. Torque ratings can be applied to both electric motors and internal combustion engines, so these badges are indicative of a Cadillac vehicle’s performance level whether it has an electric motor or an internal combustion engine.
Previously, Cadillac vehicles were identified with engine displacement numbers. For example, 3.6, 2.0T, or 3.0TT, with the “T” and “TT” denoting the aspiration type (turbocharged and twin-turbocharged, respectively). Electric motors cannot be measured in displacement, so the switch to torque-based badges will allow Cadillac to have a uniform badging strategy across its entire model lineup while it produces both ICE vehicles and EVs.
Cadillac will eventually produce only electric vehicles, so this new badging strategy is likely here to stay for the foreseeable future. That means you can expect future electric Cadillac product, like the Celestiq flagship sedan, to feature these torque-based badges as well,
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Comments
That’s rather confusing. GM may as well put the car’s top speed in knots and round up by 25.
Agreed Richard….. Dopey labeling – but then if you want REAL INFORMATION on something a New Electric Car buyer would want to know – such as its CHARGING SPEED AT HOME, is pretty much unavailable, or GM tells different things to different people..
GM Authority states that the 19.2 kw charger will be standard, as does the official Cadillac Brochure which at least strongly hints the same..
Then they tell Green Car Reports and Inside EVs that 11.5 kw charger will be standard and 19.2 kw will be optional at extra cost!
I am not sure this matters as most homes in the USA will need an upgrade on the utility side to support 19.2 kW chargers as even though most houses in the USA have 200 or 320 Amp electrical services , the utility serving them does not size their gear for that much current. I am a developer, so I understand this well, typically with gas heat a utility will connect 4 -3000 sq ft homes to a 25kW transformer (15 year old neighborhoods have 8 homes hooked to single 25 kW transformers in many cases) , and they do a volt and flicker calculation to determine compatibility with air conditioners. If utilities set up every house for maximum possible current, transformers would be much larger, as would service leads entering homes, and the utility hookups would be dramatically more expensive. On the land we develop, we use larger than standard numbers to base the energy calculations after I had project destroy some utility equipment on Thanksgiving 20 years ago. We had a 100 house development pop the main shotgun breaker while everyone had their turkey in the oven. That was before EV’s became a factor, this is why utility companies ask specific questions about a house’ loads when it is connected to the grid, and a 19.2 kW continuous load sends red flags up all over the place. We size every new home for A/C and 12 kW car chargers now, and install NEMA 14-50 plugs in every garage for car chargers, this supports 9.6 kW charging safely, although some people might push it beyond the 40 amps continuous current recommended for a 50 amp 240v circuit.
Yes exactly – in my locale it depends on which private “Investor-Owned” utility it is.
National Grid will these days will typically have 50 kva (208 amperes continuous 24/7) for 8 homes or less… They’ve been going around and doubling the size of all the cans in most neighborhoods – AS IF they are expecting a HUGE amount of people going the EV Route.
Nyseg (NY State Electric and Gas – we used to call them NYS flicker and flash) on the other hand, would typically have 8 – 1500 sq foot homes with oil heat (meaning electric water heater, cooking and clothes drying) with 6 of the 8 having central air and the other 2 having plenty of window units run everything off of a 10 (!) Kva transformer… ( That’s 42 amperes continuous load, or 5 1/4 amperes per entire house. ). By the end of a summer day – I’m sure the oil needs to cool down for the next day, and EVs added to THAT mix will eventually cause some of them to blow their tops).
Apparently utilities nationwide typically do things more like Nyseg, than National Grid….. I used to see ad’s in Electrical World decades ago where pictures of typical neighborhood pole transformers (cans) would typically be just 10 KVA feeding multiple homes. They depend on many hours of zero use to allow the oil to cool down- but the times – they are a changin’.
How can the most relevant figure to a car’s acceleration make less sense than something as meaningless as displacement?
Displacement doesnt mean anything, torque does. Some people are just stuck in their ways.
Sorry V and Monsoon – you guys are sorry to say both wrong.
The devil is in the details.
A 1 horsepower, 1750 Revolution per minute Electric motor will develop 3 foot-pounds (36 inch pounds) of torque, when loaded down 1 hp.
A 1 horsepower, 175 RPM electric motor will develop 30 foot-pounds (360 inch pounds of torque) when loaded to 1 hp.
I have news for you….. The second motor will not accelerate the vehicle any faster than the first motor – even though it has 10x the torque.
For heavens sake just stop with copying Germans’ cringe gimmicks already. Just give me a clean classy car that not covered with meaningless alphanumeric character salad.
Okay….Cadillac Lyriq. The 450E is just like having a 5.0 badge on a Mustang.
That sure is a nice looking vehicle. I hope it looks like that when it comes to production. I’m not really an SUV type of guy, but I think it looks pretty awesome. Hopefully GM won’t let us down again and water it down. And I don’t care what they put on the trunk. Newton meters torque blah blah blah who cares?
That is the production model…
Yes this is production. https:// www. cadillac .com/electric/lyriq?
The EV manufactures need to come up with a standard power rating. Horse power rating for EV’s will have to be a thing of the pass. Briggs and Stratton has to re-label their engine ratings to a torque max rating only and no longer publish a HP rating. I think it was a law suit by the feds because how HP was being rated on the labels. Similar to LED light bulb ratings. Lumens has more meaning than a watts rating for light output. You’ll notice led boxes now have lumens in a larger print than watts.
Until the consumer can get used to a new rating standard, either torque, kilowatt motor ratings and battery power, it’ll be a mix bag of numbers for a while.
Since one HORSEPOWER is the same as 746 watts – a rating system giving only HORSEPOWER tells you all you need to know about the drive train’s power output. Electric motors in the US for the past 140 years at least have only been rated in horsepower… The rest of the world uses watts – and since as mentioned both are straightforwardly converted from one to another – there is no point in changing anything…
Torque on the other hand doesn’t tell you anything about the power output of the drivetrain. See my comment below.
I used to like to look at gasoline powered yard equipment at the big box stores, but now that they list only the cylinder displacement I can’t be bothered since it tells you next to nothing.
As far as lumen output of light bulbs – that is perfectly fine – of course I want to know the ACTUAL POWER CONSUMPTION of the bulb, in addition to its light output – not supposedly what kind of old bulb it is supposedly replacing.
Well I believe that the Torque rating is GM’s way to try to give a better accurate number to the vehicle power. The HP numbers being used by a number of MFGs as HP has been figured six ways to Sunday and it has not always been honest.
Tesla has fudge the power and charge times much in how they present their numbers. Kind of like their max charge times are limited and not full time.
It may be up to the SAE and the automakers to agree on a standard for the industry to put this all on equal footing.
But Torque is the best way to show the power of an electric motor so I expect that GM is on the right path here.
Torque is just turning force and NOT POWER. I think all these arbitrary decisions are just beyond dumb.
As any GEARHEAD knows, a diesel will provide HUGE amounts of torque at a low speed, such as GM’s current Diesel engines (usually peaks around 1,600 rpm) – and it is much, much higher than the gasoline version even though the POWER RATING (that is, Horsepower) is slightly less.
I currently have ALL ELECTRIC yard equipment (Including a 220 volt 3 hp (develops around 6 hp in a pinch) CASE 724 Snowblower that originally came with a 7 hp Kohler engine – but was sold with the junk engine ‘blown’.
I put a Harbor Freight Tools 3 hp electric motor on it – and even though it is a ‘Smith and Jones’ brand (typical Chinese Surnames I’m told) – the Motor works exactly as expected. You’d expect a pricey BALDOR or LEESON US – Made motor to work well, but other former US brands like Emerson, Marathon, Century, and US Motors all come from China, or Mexico. Some of them come ‘Dead’ right out of the box – so while HFT does sell much junk – these motors are just great for the price.
Any of the battery operated stuff the BIG-BOX stores are pushing seem to me to just be plastic toys. Assuming the thing survives one season – the ‘One Hour Runtime’ I’m sure is around 5-10 minutes, and you can’t plow a driveway during a heavy snow event that way.
The only store-bought electric thing that I have that is any good is the SNAPPER ‘Commercial Grade’ push-electric lawn mower….Nice heavy steel deck but a lot of money – and the batteries are more than the mower itself.
I used to look at Gas-Powered engine yard equipment all the time – but now that they don’t list the Horsepower it is just meaningless for me to do so. And the Volume Displacement (always in cubic centimeters, – never in cubic inches for a long time now) has little to do with the ultimate power any engine can produce. As an example the 2,700 cc GM 4 cylinder engine is more powerful than the much larger displacement old v-6 it replaced.
They are worried about all this silly meaningless labeling when they put silly troublesome items on the car – such as that motorized ‘Fender’ Charge port which I’m sure will work just peachy dandy during a February Sleeting event. I had mentioned several times that such an idiot feature would be a deal breaker for me…. What a shame.
An intelligent- fact -filled comment – correcting the misinformation of previous commenters who apparently are clueless as regards the meaning of Turning Force, Power, and Energy – which are 3 completely different things and cannot be interchanged.
No wonder the corporations couldn’t care less what is typed here – since only the intelligent comments get down-voted.
You get downvoted because you are long winded, and way off topic in most of your comments… You don’t like the label, we get it… Thats all you have to say. You don’t want to buy LYRIQ because it has a cool motorized charge door, OK, Don’t buy it… GM will still sell every on they can produce, and if you listen to GM, they are hoping their EV’s sell well in places like WA, OR, CA, NY, where they are under represented currently. The goal of the Ev programs initially is to attract new customers to GM, and drive growth in markets they are weak in, these also happen to be markets where EV’s sell better typically, and are more practical with current public charging.
Oh man – another Big Expert.
In the past ten years I’ve purchased 6 plug-ins – with 4 of them being NEW GM products and also 1 used volt.
I think that kinda gives me the right to Critique their upcoming product offerings….
As far as being long-winded – there is more Meat and factual information in my comments per word typed than yours – No offense !
You can critique all you want, but is it completely necessary to go so far off topic in doing so? As for meat of factual information in our comments, I am involved in many direct meetings with GM and other auto company execs, and get invited to certain investor events as a large scale investor, and what I stated in the post above is word for word what Mary Barra and others stated the goals for the Ultium program are. Now, you can be offended by the product, critique all you want, but GM has a long list of people who cannot wait to throw down their money for these products. If you make your car buying decisions over whether a car has a powered charging door or not, well, I see that as just a bit petty. I have a Tesla Y with a powered charging door, works fine, and I have an Audi E-Tron with a powered charging door (mechanism looks similar to lyriq), and no problems with that one either. Now if you want to argue with people over torque vs horsepower, have at it… I am here for the $1B discussions, not the $.01 discussions. I do know the difference though, and have worked on diesels that make 2400 ft lbs of torque at 1200 rpm, and gas turbines that make 900 ft lbs of torque at 18K rpm. I own both of those engines.
When I worked at Sears (a side job) and also as a test engineer at the same time for one of the world’s largest worldwide corporations, Sears started the HP wars. Emerson Electric made the shop vacs and tecumseh or briggs made the gas engines for the lawn mowers. Shop vacs were being labeled as 5hp, 6hp or 7hp. I had a lot of customers (engineers) that came into the store to buy asking how that can be. A real 6HP motor would be in the order of of 4200+ watts from 120v outlet which is impossible. 1800 watts would be the safe limit on a 12 circuit. The lawn mowers started the same HP wars. The magic to it all was performance (a virtual number). That meant a shop vac rated at a so call 6HP performed as if it was a 6HP motor but in fact it might have been 1/2-3/4 HP motor. Briggs did the same, performance peap HP for a short time, a few seconds perhaps, as if it was a true 6hp motor. So for small engines for walk behind mowers, CC displacement and torque is now the standard. You cannot fake displacement nor torque numbers. However, for the larger lawn tractors and commercial mowers, HP is still used., usually 18 HP and up engines.
If you look up the EGO product catalog for battery power lawn products, horsepower is not listed anywhere.
egopowerplus (dot) com/media/productattach/custom/ego/21_0204_EGO_2021-Product-Catalog_LN.pdf
From a google search;
Why is 1Hp equal to 746 watts?
1Hp = 745.69 Newton meter per second.
Yes, that is also an alternate definition for a Horsepower…
Newton meters per second is a unit of Power, therefore it is consistent.
Sears along with many others used to sell dippy, dinky compressors and call them ‘5 hp’ – whereas the 3 or 5 hp compressor in the local garage was 10 times the size. Quincy and Ingersol-Rand used to call them “Cheater 5’s”.
This kind of thing went on with home stereos….. They’d be rated 2,000 watts IPP (Instantaneous Peak Power), which was the amount of power you’d get out of thing for a millisecond until the Storage capacitor ran out of juice….. So now such an amplifier must run a two-tone test continuously at a 70% power level before calling this a ‘music power’ level. Since the heat dissipation at the heatsinks was generally the greatest here. it was a valid test and this amplifier might be rated 20 or 25 watts root-mean-square with all channels driven.
Hot Tubs continue this legalized lying – 2 hp legitimately is now 6 1/2 ‘Brake Horse Power’ – indicating the people making the hot tubs don’t know what that means either!
But that is no reason why they can’t give out REAL HONEST INFORMATION on gas engine products.
“Why is 1 HP equal to 746 watts?….”
Seeing as 1 Newton meter per second is by DEFINITION “1 Watt” , it doesn’t take a great deal of intense analysis to understand why…… By any second grader – of course.
Meaningless garbage!
Please GM get rid of those Badges….there is no way anybody likes them
A lot of this type of discussion may have been the same over one hundred years ago when the auto industry was gearing up. Now, for a whole new generation of people that grew up with smart phones, tablets and computer touch screens, it’s an all new challenge and change coming in this industry which globally impacts virtually every country in the world. Food production, energy generation and since the pandemic, medical developments are as important to the change and challenges this world is going through. So my granddaughters of baby boomer grandparents will have the challenge to continue and change for a better world. Many know without change you’ll be left behind.
For Marry Barra she is directing a new path for the future and is probably the first GM exec to plan for decades to come, not next quarters financials.