No one expects the Cadillac Celestiq to be a big seller for the brand. It’s a hand-built electric vehicle that costs $340,000, and it can take customers weeks or months to finalize the design. So Cadillac won’t be popping them out like Escalades.
Tony Roma, Cadillac’s chief engineer of performance cars, revealed in a recent episode of Jay Leno’s Garage that the automaker doesn’t expect to make more than 250 cars per year in the United States. “This is super low volume,” Roma told Leno. “We’re not announcing the exact volume, but think more like hundreds, not thousands.”
For some context of the Celestiq’s rarity, Bugatti plans to build just 250 examples of the Tourbillon, its V-16-powered hybrid hypercar.
The Celestiq is the car Cadillac plans to use to fight Rolls-Royce and Bentley—not easy targets. The automaker revealed the production version two-and-a-half years ago, showing off a sleek sedan with a longer wheelbase than the three-row Escalade.
The Celestiq is a flagship for Cadillac brand, with a pair of electric motors making an estimated 650 horsepower (more than previously announced), which will help motivate the 6,300-pound sedan. It’s also an important car for General Motors, utilizing the automaker’s new Ultium architecture that’s underpinning a wide range of vehicles from the American automaker.
It has all the luxuries you’d expect from a $340,000 sedan—Super Cruise, air suspension, four-wheel steering, and tons of technology. It has a four-quadrant tinting panoramic roof, a pillar-to-pillar HD display, a 38-speaker sound system, heated armrests, and more.
The Celestiq looks production-ready in Leno’s video, and we rode one last year. But don’t expect to see them everywhere anytime soon.
