According to The Wall Street Journal, General Motors has decided to bring Cadillac back to Detroit. The luxury brand’s headquarters has been located in New York City for the past four years. Why did Cadillac move to the Big Apple in the first place? Because it desired a higher level of autonomy from GM and the rest of its brands, all of which are headquartered in Detroit.
But now that Cadillac has a new president, Steve Carlisle, there were bound to be some changes. Carlisle replaced Johan de Nysschen, who was fired earlier this year due to disappointing sales. He also strongly supported the move to NYC, but perhaps the Motor City is Cadillac’s one true home.
“We have a huge number of launches ahead of us,” Carlisle told WSJ. “We’ve got to think about how we take inefficiencies out of the communication process between the Cadillac team and the GM partners.” However, Cadillac’s new Detroit HQ will not be located at GM’s Renaissance Center, but rather a newly renovated space in Warren, Michigan, a nearby Detroit suburb. Conveniently enough, this new HQ will be located very close to GM’s technical center. We don’t think that’s a happy coincidence.
You see, Cadillac, especially under Carlisle’s watch, wants to forge ahead with new technologies and advanced engineering and design. Having the capability to work hand in hand with the technical center will be of great value.
Cadillac will begin a new product onslaught that’s likely to get underway at Los Angeles in November. Following that event will be Detroit where the XT6 three-row luxury crossover is expected to debut. Cadillac has already confirmed its ATS and ATS-V sedans have been discontinued, but the coupe variants should stick around for another model year. The CTS is also living on borrowed time.
Cadillac plans to replace both with a single all-new model, the CT5. We don’t expect it to be much smaller than the CTS, but it’ll definitely be larger than the ATS. In the meantime, the all-new XT4 crossover is now arriving in dealerships.
