“Conceived to lead Cadillac’s electric future and inspired by the brand’s 120-year heritage, it serves as a touchstone for the Cadillac design and engineering teams, who continue to develop CELESTIQ as it moves closer to production.” A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Wordsĭetails about the Celestiq are few and far between, but the company is at no loss for words about its wonders in its press release, which insists on writing the name in all caps, a silly convention we refuse to abide by. With the Celestiq, the company expects to regain its status as The Standard of the World again. It wasn’t until it took a Chevy Suburban, slapped a Cadillac logo the size of a dinner plate on the grille, and called it an Escalade that it began to regain some of its swagger. That brief history lesson is necessary to educate readers to the mindset at Cadillac, which has limped along for years trying to find its footing in an era where the market called for smaller, more efficient cars and most of its models were warmed over variants of a Chevrolet ( Cimarron) or Opel ( Catera). Just as the original V-16 Roadster came along at a bad time economically, the V-16 Concept landed at a time when fuel economy was foremost on Americans’ minds and never went into production. Under the hood was a bespoke 829 cubic inch (13,584 cc) 16-cylinder engine that cranked out more than 1,000 horsepower and 1,000 lb-ft of asphalt melting torque. Then in 2003, when Bob Lutz was running the show at General Motors, the company rolled out its Cadillac 16 Concept, an exercise in wretched excess that took the classic “long nose, short deck” concept to the extreme. Over the years, it continued to push the envelope of automotive design with such creations as the 1953 Cadillac Eldorado and then the vehicle that came to symbolize the wretched excess of post-war America, the 1959 models so outrageous in design they inspired songs by Bruce Springsteen and others who referred to them as “ tail fin road locomotives.” The hand-built battery-electric sedan/shooting brake is supposed to re-establish Cadillac as the Standard of the World, a phrase it bestowed upon itself after it introduced the V-16 Roadster in 1930. The Cadillac Celestiq was officially unveiled on July 22.
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