The first hands-on experience I had with the $360,000, ultraluxury Cadillac Celestiq was as a backseat passenger. It was mid-April, and I was on the way to a dinner in West Hollywood. While GM insists most Celestiq buyers are drivers, the company wanted to create a vehicle that could be especially compelling for those who prefer to be chauffeured.
Once known for its behemoth, bespoke luxury vehicles, Cadillac is working to get its mojo back with the all-electric Celestiq. A 655-horsepower fastback that seats four, the Celestiq is perhaps the most extravagant vehicle Cadillac has ever released — and certainly its most customizable.
Cadillac is returning to its 1960s land yacht era with the Celestiq, which it thinks can rival offerings from Bentley and Rolls-Royce. The automaker is also hoping that the Celestiq can help the brand return to its 40-plus-year moniker as the “Standard of the World,” and offer high-end, American-made, luxury vehicles in a new era of electrification.
“The idea was to make the best looking car in the world, but just happen to make it an EV,” says Tony Roma, executive chief engineer for Celestiq.
Image: Cadillac
The luxury is striking, even from the back seat.
The second row is large and luxurious with a pair of multiway adjustable seats, with massaging capabilities and an eight-inch central touchscreen where you can adjust everything from your own microclimate to the way that the massive glass roof is shaded.
That roof is something of a technological marvel. It’s not only one of the largest in the automotive world, it’s also made of Smart Glass, which allows each of the four occupants to set opacity in each quadrant using the touchscreens in the front and back seats. According to Roma, the glass travels around the world (starting in Peru and ending up in Michigan) because the technology and coatings are so specialized.
Even getting into and out of the Celestiq is a high-tech affair
Even getting into and out of the Celestiq is a high-tech affair — the doors are all powered (similar to those in the Escalade IQ), allowing you to use the touchscreen controls to open and close the doors from the front or back seats. That presented a new challenge for the electrical engineers, because translating a gesture on a touchscreen to the physical action of unlocking and opening heavy doors took a lot of work, according to Kelly Drexler, senior quality engineer at GM’s Electrical Integration Systems Lab in Warren.
In front is a massive pillar-to-pillar, 55-inch-diagonal advanced HD display that handles everything from infotainment (with Google built-in) to safety controls. The screens are remarkably clear and bright, even in the Southern California glare. Cadillac says that they have pixel density comparable to 8K resolution televisions.
The automaker worked closely with Dolby Atmos to bring cinematic sound to the interior, and the soundscape and quality are impressive thanks to the 38-speaker AKG system, complete with speakers in the headrests.
Outside, there are plenty of other hidden but remarkable features. The sensors and cameras used for GM’s hands-free driving system, Super Cruise, get an upgrade on the Celestiq. Call it “Ultra Cruise” or don’t, the system is powered by cameras and radar, as well as LiDAR, for use on secondary roads. While it’s not yet available, Celestiq gets the equipment to ensure it works in the future when GM gives it the green light. Sensors are hidden under carbon-fiber body panels that look like metal so they can “see” through them. The enormous clamshell frunk cover is also one huge piece of carbon fiber, which allowed designers to move the cut lines lower into the side panels and keep the Celestiq’s low-slung looks.
Image: Cadillac
A head-turning fastback with GM power and engineering underneath
Roma isn’t only in charge of Celestiq. He’s also the executive chief engineer for Corvette and GM’s performance cars, and his decades of experience with this segment have largely informed the way that Celestiq drives on the road. Some of GM’s best engineering has come from the suspension and powertrain engineers that work on Corvette — like those that Roma oversees.
While the vehicle weighs more than a gas-powered Escalade (more than 6,000 lbs), it can do 0–60 in under four seconds. Even with all that weight, it corners surprisingly flat, and while it doesn’t “waft” over the rough roads like its German competitors, it feels a lot more connected than any other uberluxury four-seater on the market.
Part of the route took us up to Angeles Crest, one of the famed windy roads that Southern Californians frequently enjoy hooning. I expected the 18-foot-long vehicle (longer than an Escalade) to feel like a beluga whale swimming toward Big Tujunga Canyon, but the Celestiq ate up the curves at a blistering speed and nary a complaint from the special Michelin Pilot Sport EV tires.
I expected the 18-foot-long vehicle to feel like a beluga whale swimming toward Big Tujunga Canyon
It was comfortable when pushed, and the suspension absorbed every bit of the sun-bleached mountain roads thanks to GM’s Magnetic Ride Control system, pioneered in the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing. It’s one of the fastest responding suspension tech on the market — and by far one of the best we’ve experienced. The system uses electromagnets and magnetorheological fluid inside the shock absorbers to adjust damping rates in response to road conditions, tech that exists on the Corvette today.
That set up gives you four drive modes: snow, sport, tour, and a customizable “my mode,” which allows you to set your steering, throttle, and suspension modes and save them for easy access.
The gigantic car also gets (much-needed) active rear steering up to 3.5 degrees, which makes it much easier to negotiate in small parking lots. The route took us down into downtown LA (during rush hour), where we had to make a U-turn across two lanes of traffic to arrive at a destination. To say that was a hairy experience in a $360,000 car is an understatement, but the Celestiq made the turn just fine, though its turning radius is still huge at 45 feet.
The Celestiq also turns heads on the streets of Los Angeles. During the event, we made a stop at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank to get a closer look at how Cadillac and their audio partner, Dolby Atmos, worked together to bring a very impressive sound to the vehicle. On the way out, a director in a golf cart spotted the vehicle and drove over to ask about it, commenting on how striking it looked gliding down the street.
A design and engineering challenge
What makes the Celestiq so striking belies a tremendous engineering challenge: The Celestiq was jointly designed by car designers and engineers who worked very closely together to cook up something unique.
Designers threw down the gauntlet for the engineering team, insisting on keeping Celestiq’s roofline low and long. At the same time, the engineers wanted the vehicle to get at least 300 miles of range, which requires a certain number of battery cells. Those batteries take up interior space for passengers, which poses a problem for design and passenger comfort.
To meet in the middle, engineers had to make some changes to the 111kW Ultium-based battery pack that underpins the Celestiq. Most battery packs are completely flat and lay under the floor of the vehicle. Engineers initially thought they’d be able to use the Lyric battery layout to meet the range demands for the Celestiq — but it would have meant raising the roofline to keep rear passengers comfortable. On a flat floor, rear occupants would have had to sit with their knees up around their ears. The design and engineering teams compromised, and as a result, the engineers moved batteries from the floor to a “fake” transmission tunnel so that designers could lower the footwells in the back seat for comfort. The batteries stack from 9 to 12 cells high in the interior of the Celestiq.
Engineers had to make some changes to the 111kW Ultium-based battery pack that underpins the Celestiq
Celestiq is also the first vehicle to be “hand made” at GM’s Artisan Center at the Warren Tech Center in Warren, Michigan. Six aluminum mega castings (whose forms are made of 3D-printed sand) make up the lower portion of the vehicle, representing the first time that the company has used the technique on a larger scale. There are more than 115 3D-printed parts on Celestiq.
A team of 12 artisans hand-assembles each Celestiq at six stations in the Artisan Center, and Roma says that at maximum output, the team can build two Celestiqs per day, with a total output of 400 per year. Currently, the Artisan Center has room for a second line if demand increases. If a customer requests everything stock (meaning the color, materials, etc, are all non-bespoke), Cadillac says it takes 12 weeks to fully assemble.
The sky’s the limit when designing your own Celestiq. “The only limit is how much money you want to spend,” Roma says, noting that there are more than 350,000 different color and material combinations that you could opt for. According to the company, around 40 percent of the customers who have ordered Celestiqs have opted to go outside of those multiple combinations for full customization.
The concierge team at the Warren Tech Center’s Cadillac House, where high-end customers come in to design their Celestiqs, is one of the first entry points for these wealthy individuals. Concierges there say that customers can get as wild as they like with materials and colors, provided that the requests don’t impact the safety or engineering of the vehicle. Anything that raises safety or build concerns (for example, if you decided you wanted a ground-up meteorite in your paint, which could interfere with Celestiq’s safety sensors), the concierge team takes it back to the other teams to test before Cadillac agrees to the request.
The design team went so far as to customize bolts inside the vehicle. Each visible bolt is stamped with “Standard of the World,” and could conceivably be changed to an owner’s name or a special date, for example. The company uses techniques borrowed from jewelry making to customize these features.
The concierge team has already had some pretty wild requests, including one that they call the “Game of Thrones” car. While the vehicle may or may not go into production, it was currently being designed with red velvet seat covers (something the safety team would have had to test to ensure that airbags would work if deployed), and a dark exterior color. There were conversations about using stone in the interior as well.
That level of personalization isn’t just for show — it underscores Cadillac’s commitment to authenticity and craftsmanship at a price point that demands both.
Image: Cadillac
“You can get in some of our competitors, and you can find the components that they reuse, and they’re very obvious, and I understand why they did it,” Roma says. “Cadillac is competing in a price segment and at a tier that we haven’t even tried in such a long time. So we really wanted to make sure that every single detail was authentic.”
That authenticity translates into a vehicle that costs nearly as much as the average house in the US.
Whether Celestiq will raise the company to the brand level of some of its German competitors is another question altogether. GM has been waging a decades-long battle to get back to its heyday as a luxury American brand, and it’s been slow going — the automaker revamped its image in 2018. It’s taken seven years for the Celestiq to make it to production, and customer deliveries are supposed to start in about a month.
Everything the company has thrown at Celestiq will trickle down to Cadillac’s other offerings. It’s clear that GM is doubling down on the high-end market and using engineering, technology, and design to continue to try to reestablish themselves as the new standard of the world.