Cadillac To Take On Rolls-Royce & Bentley With $300,000 Celestiq EV

Caddy’s future all-electric flagship sedan will be a Bentley-style luxobarge with a price to match.

(Cadillac)

Presumably dissatisfied with merely being America’s foremost luxury car marque, Cadillac is preparing to challenge the world’s most famous automotive coachbuilders with a flagship sedan called the Celestiq.

According to a widely-cited Wall Street Journal report, the EV will start at around $300,000 before options push the price up even higher. Not only is that firmly in Bentley Bentayga/Rolls-Royce Ghost territory, but it’s double what people will pay for the 2023 Cadillac Escalade-V and more than the most expensive EVs on the market, including the Porsche Taycan and GMC Hummer EV.

“As Cadillac’s future flagship sedan, CELESTIQ signifies a new, resurgent era for the brand,” General Motors president Mark Reuss said in a statement.

“Each one will be hand-built by an amazing team of craftspeople on our historic Technical Center campus, and today’s investment announcement emphasizes our commitment to delivering a world-class Cadillac with nothing but the best in craftsmanship, design, engineering and technology.”

The opulent interior of the Bentley Bentayga S
(Stinson Carter)

That hand-built quality is one a of a few factors that warrants sky-high cost speculation. Another is that the Celestiq will be limited to less than 500 units, Car and Driver reports.

General Motors is also injecting $81 million into the company’s Global Technical Center in Warren, Michigan to equip the facility for production. The Celestiq will be the first car manufactured at the site since its opening in 1956.

Details are scarce, but a couple of Celestiq features teased by GM include a four-quadrant roof made of “suspended-particle-device smart glass” that allows occupants to set individual transparency levels. For the driver and front passenger, there will be a “pillar-to-pillar freeform display with active privacy to help mitigate driver distraction.”

For more substantial details on Cadillac’s future rides, check out everything we know about the first all-electric Caddy, the Lyriq.

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