Caddy Future
While BMW and Mercedes are getting ready to bring out cheaper, big-volume models to cash in on their cachet with buyers, Cadillac hopes to keep rebuilding an image tarnished largely by a similar decision two decades ago by going even more upscale.
It is ironic, to say the least, that GM's premiere division is just now managing to overcome a slide that began with a product step that the two German firms are about to take.
In the early 1980s, GM launched ''Cimarron by Cadillac'' in an effort to give its luxury brand a low-cost, fuel-efficient model, and it was a disaster of epic proportions. Not only was it a pretty bad car, it managed to do serious damage to the brand's reputation for luxury and exclusivity.
No one's suggesting that either the BMW 1-Class or the Mercedes-Benz Smart ForMore or any other cheaper models will be bad cars when they come to Canada, though neither company is at the top of the quality standings these days.
But there's absolutely no doubt that such cars will directly attack the German firms' reputation for offering vehicles that only the successful can afford.
Cadillac knows from harsh experience what a mistake debasing your brand can be, which is why everyone in the division as well as senior GM management is committed to offering nothing less expensive than the $40,000 CTS and to moving into the ultra-luxury levels.
''The question is not should we do ultra-lux products,'' says Cadillac general manager Mark LaNeve. ''It's how, what and when -- so stay tuned.''
That's going to mean a car to compete with the BMW 7-Series and the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, and probably one beyond that as well.
There's still a lot of work to do on this, LaNeve says, so we shouldn't expect to see the next level of Cadillac until near the end of the decade.
It's possible that the car beyond the 7-Series fighter will look and be something like the fabulous Cadillac Sixteen, which was the smash of the North American International Auto Show in 2003.
LaNeve will only say that ''thematically we might go in that direction, but nothing's certain. We're talking now about the concept, what it would look like, and what platform it would use.''