• Cadillac’s Sollei and Celestiq are for dreaming. That’s even more so when you see them up close.
Sterling Heights, MI – When is it easy to justify absconding from the office and jumping on a plane to see a car that might never see the light of production day? When it’s a snazzy, jazz convertible like Cadillac’s Sollei concept car, that’s when.
We’ve all seen the car, of course, but in images. And while a picture might be worth a thousand words, seeing the real thing up close is worth, well, a thousand pictures. Here thus was the occasion to see, touch (to an extent) and smell the Sollei, and it did not disappoint. This is a marvel of 60s-coastal-California-evoking styling and colours combined with modern tech and amenities. Like, for instance, real curved wood for the seatbacks (gorgeous), a foldout minibar with glasses at the ready, and a fantastic yellow finish that just whispers ‘summer’ in your ear.
The Celestiq: Heavens above
The irony is that the car we pretty much all rushed past at Cadillac’s design center to get up close to the Sollei was a car that actually is in production. That would be the Celestiq, and I should explain that “production” has a particular meaning in its case. This car is being built by hand and is as close to totally bespoke as you can possibly get with a “production” car. And yes, it has the price tag to match.
Cadillac gives the Celestiq a starting price of $340,000 in the U.S., but that’s almost a theoretical number since anyone purchasing one of these is going to indulge their inner fantasies in terms of extras and materials and such and drive the price up to stratospheric levels. As it happens, the very day of our visit marked the first sale of the model to a Canadian customer. Keep your eyes peeled everyone (actually don’t, you’ll tire your eyes in vain – that’s one unit, so far, for all of Canada, and it won’t be ready for a while. Hand-built, and all).
See: 2024 Cadillac Celestiq: Cadillac's New Flagship Enters Port
See: 2024 Cadillac Celestiq: Demand Is Outstripping Production Capacity
See: 2024 Cadillac Celestiq Gets Starting Price of $340,000 in U.S.
Sunny Sollei
It’s easy to see why Cadillac’s sunny vision of a possible future bespoke, all-electric luxury convertible can cast shadow on even something so celestial as the super-luxury Celestiq. The 4-seat drop-top has long, elegant proportions evoking classic coach-built Cadillacs and features a number of handcrafted details.
In true Californian spirit, it also seeks to reach some level of eco-friendliness, thus the charging mats and door mat pockets, for example, are made of something called Fine Mycelium, a bio-based material developed by MycoWorks and made from the root structure of mushrooms.
Like the Celestiq, the Sollei features a 55-inch pillar-to-pillar digital display, and it greets arriving occupants with exterior lighting choreography. Things can’t end there, of course, so you have a custom-made set of 3D-printed bird calls that you can listen to, with an accompanying journal it goes without saying.
Whether the Sollei has a future as a production model is anyone’s guess. Certainly we can imagine the same sort of clientele that goes for a Celestiq being tempted to add one of these to their collections. For now, Cadillac is content to call the Sollei an “imaginative design exercise”, and one that suggests what future bespoke luxury carmaking might look like in the age of electric mobility.
The company is surely also treating this as a sort of trial balloon, and it wouldn’t be the first time a trial balloon ends up landing in the production-vehicle pipeline. We’ll see.
At the least, though, we can expect certain design and technological innovations put forward here to worm their way into more regular Cadillac (or other GM) models in the coming years.
With summer receding into the deep part of the rearview mirror, it’s with a slight sense of melancholia that we take a last look, for now, at this breezy convertible. But hey, next spring is only a few months away! And who knows, if the Celestiq sells for a few more units than the 1 so far in Canada, maybe Cadillac will take the next step and make this car happen in the real world.
See: Cadillac Unveils Sollei Convertible Concept
The little Optiq
We should mention, now that we’ve had our fun daydreaming of open-top and ultra-luxurious bespoke cars that only the 1 percent can afford, that Cadillac also made time during our visit to give us a more detailed look at the upcoming Optiq. This is a much more relevant model for virtually all consumers, as it follows the trail blazed by the well-received Lyriq EV, as a more affordable luxury EV option.
The Cadillac Optiq exists to attract a wider audience to the Cadillac EV experience. In a more compact package, it imitates the Lyriq in offering a roomy interior (flat floors, remember) and large cargo area for its segment, as well as modern technologies by the SUV-load, including a large 11-inch digital instrument cluster and a 11.6-inch infotainment touchscreen with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto and such and such. All wrapped in the Cadillac EV design language, so in other words a pretty handsome package.
See: 2025 Cadillac Optiq EV First Contact: Smaller and Better?
See: 2025 Cadillac Optiq Starts at $59,999 in Canada
