Ah, Cadillac! The undisputed king of General Motors, the car that every American at one time aspired to own. They don’t call the most expensive health care plans “Cadillac” for nothing! Well, unfortunately the moniker now applies more to insurance than it does to actual automotive status. These days, Cadillacs are sort of cool if you want to evoke the “Mad Men” era, buck the new money types who drive BMWs and Audis, or need a hulking Escalade to, you know, drive your and your family to airport while wearing a black suit, if you catch my drift.
In this context, electrification is the best thing that ever happened to Cadillac. I was in Detroit for a battery showcase at GM, on the eve of the COVID-19 lockdowns, when CEO Mary Barra and President Mark Reuss stressed that Cadillac was going to become the General’s lead electric brand, carrying it into future battles against Tesla.
Progress has been made! Cadillac is now selling four pure EVs, all of which are SUVs: there’s the compact Optiq, the midsize Lyriq, the three-row Vistiq, and the huge Escalade IQ. Well, it’s actually five EVs if you count the bespoke Celestiq, a hand-built four-door grand tourer that will set you back something like $350,000. As CBNC reports, capturing a whole gaggle of newbies to the 122-year-old brand. A whopping 8 out of 10 buyers choosing one of the brand’s EVs are Cadillac first-timers.
Tesla’s loss is Cadillac’s gain
This isn’t going to shock anybody, but many of the buyers are being, in the parlance of the auto industry, “conquested” from Tesla. The trend makes sense for two reasons. First, Tesla is barely supporting the increasingly slim part of its portfolio that competes with GM’s luxury marque; the Model S sedan and Model X SUV have basically been left to wither. The Model 3 and Model Y aren’t particularly luxurious, and to top matters off, Cadillacs such as the Optiq, Vistiq, and Lyriq all look appealing, once you get past the goofy naming convention.
Second, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has done just about everything he can think of in the past year or so to alienate customers and inspire defections from the brand. I’m reminded, without putting too fine a point on it, of people who back in the 1980s would never consider a German car because of, you know, the war. Volvo and Saab benefited greatly.
For my money, the new Optiq somewhat defies the timeworn advice to never buy the cheapest Cadillac. At about $54,000 for the Luxury 1 all-wheel-drive trim, notching 302 miles of range, it’s a proper sweet-spot vehicle for a lot of entry-level EV buyers who have some financial means. They don’t want a cheap EV, but they don’t want to shell out for the larger and slightly pricier Lyriq, especially when the base trim is a single-motor rear-wheel-drive model.
Getting out of a Tesla
According to CNBC, citing Edmunds analyst Joseph Yoon, Cadillac EV buyers aren’t actually cross-shopping Tesla — they’re Tesla owners who want to ditch their rides. 10% of Caddy’s trade-ins are Teslas, and when it comes to the Lyriq in particular, 25% of customers have traded in a Tesla. It’s easy to blame that urge on Elon. But one might also want to figure that anybody who has owned a Model S or Model X for a while and has grown weary of Tesla’s relatively spartan attitude toward luxury is naturally eyeballing Cadillac because, well … it’s Cadillac!
Before we get too excited, however, let’s note that while that 80% headline figure is impressive, Cadillac isn’t exactly setting the world on fire with sales overall. The division’s dealers moved about 42,000 vehicles in the first quarter of 2025, with the Escalade leading the way at 12,683 units. At 4,300 cars sold, the Lyriq accounted for 1,500 fewer cars than in Q1 2024. It was Escalade and the CT5 sedan, both burners of a lot of good old-fashioned gasoline, that carried the quarter.
The obvious question in this budding Caddy versus Tesla showdown, of course, is will the battle ever actually be joined, or is the sudden surge in Cadillac EV interest a fluke? Smart money might be on the former. Tesla has shown little interest in expanding its portfolio and now seem to be preoccupied (obsessed?) with developing a robotaxi service. Cadillac has the EVs — now what it needs to do is prove that it can sustain that impressive first-time interest in the brand.
