Inside GM’s battle to revive Cadillac as the American luxury car brand
The “Saarinen Lobby” inside General Motors’ global design headquarters on the campus of its Warren Technology Center outside of Detroit, Michigan.
GM
WARREN, Mich. — Walking into General Motors’ global design headquarters is like taking a step back in time. Much of the midcentury-modern architecture and designs have remained untouched since the space opened in the 1950s.
The massive tech campus was built during a time when the Detroit automaker reigned supreme. It was GM’s so-called “Golden Era,” with its luxury Cadillac brand leading the way as “the standard of the world” — before decades of U.S. market share declines amid increased competition from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus and others.
GM President Mark Reuss wasn’t alive to witness that era, but he’s harkened back to it as he and his teams have methodically overseen a product renaissance for Cadillac, which wants to regain its prominence as the American luxury brand.
“There isn’t a lot of American luxury brands. There just isn’t. I think it’s time, and I’m deeply passionate about that, for GM and Cadillac to show the world what we can do,” Reuss told CNBC from his second-story office adjacent to the lobby.
Cadillac’s domestic competition has historically been Ford Motor‘s Lincoln luxury brand, which sells roughly a third of the vehicles in the U.S. as its GM competitor. Other luxury brands from Germany, Japan and, more recently, South Korea have entered the market as well. All-electric vehicle competitors Tesla and Lucid Group are also in the mix.
The luxury vehicle market is crucial for automakers. The vehicles have higher profit margins than their mainstream counterparts and cater to a more affluent customer that views them as much as a status symbol as a mode of transportation.
GM President Mark Reuss during the reveal of the all-electric 2025 Cadillac Escalade IQ on Aug. 9, 2023 in New York City.
Michael Wayland / CNBC
Reuss’ responsibilities as president include overseeing all the automaker’s products and brands, but he has always taken a special interest in Cadillac, which is on its fourth leader since 2015.
Those involved with the brand have described Reuss as a protector, vanguard and even spiritual leader of sorts for Cadillac.
While not everything has gone perfectly to plan — there have been issues with sales in China and electric vehicle production and adoption — Cadillac has largely stayed true to a plan that the company undertook to bolster the luxury brand a decade ago. It’s a not-so-easy accomplishment amid regulatory uncertainty and budget cuts in an automaker the size of GM.
“If you would have looked at Cadillac’s financials and portfolio, it was not delivering,” Reuss said. “It’s been a long road taking a 150-year-old brand from where it was, which was not healthy. It was not ‘the standard of the world.’ Still isn’t. We’ve got work to do, but the vision is there and it’s pretty clear.”
That vision currently relies heavily on all-electric vehicles, sporty sedans and the brand’s flagship Escalade — one of GM’s longest-standing and most prominent nameplates — to bring Cadillac back to prominence.
It’s a race Cadillac executives describe as having a never-ending finish line.
Resurrecting Cadillac
In the summer of 2018, Reuss, GM design chief Michael Simcoe and then-Cadillac head Steve Carlisle, among others, mapped out what they wanted Cadillac to be ahead of a broader executive rollout at GM’s renowned design dome. It was a re-evaluation of sorts of a plan laid out for Cadillac in 2015.
The overall strategy was to largely isolate Cadillac’s products from GM’s other brands and not allow the sharing of consumer-focused parts. They would share some bones, motors and other powertrain parts, but the interiors and even some of the engines would be exclusively Cadillac.
Mary Barra, chair and chief executive officer of General Motors Co., center, and Michael Simcoe, vice president of global design for General Motors Co., right, on the floor of General Motors Design West during an interview on “The Circuit with Emily Chang” in Warren, Michigan, US, on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024.
Emily Elconin | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“We wanted to lay tracks down in terms of what the brand could be. We didn’t have a very consistent approach,” Carlisle recalled during a phone interview. “Many have tried and most have failed.”
The idea was to get Cadillac’s portfolio back into shape with sporty, sleek vehicles that elevate the brand’s status and, in turn, lead to higher residual values of the vehicles. The brand also sought to lower incentives.
Reuss, around that time, described it as Cadillac’s “one chance,” saying the Detroit automaker would “leave nothing on the table.”
Cadillac has largely been able to get its house in order with most of those objectives, according to…
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