According to the news, Cadillac is moving its headquarters from Detroit to New York.
According to official releases from GM and from Cadillac, the purpose is to establish Cadillac as a business unit totally separate from GM.
http://www3.carbuzz.com/news/2014/9/23/Cadillac-to-Become-a-Separate-Entity-from-the-Rest-of-GM-7722767/
Sad for GM. Truely sad. You know you’re developed a track record of screwing up badly when your own kids disassociate themselves from you.
Haha wow. Everyone knows its still a GM car.
Kind of like “Ram trucks” trying to disassociate themselves from Dodge. Waste of time.
I agree. I think it’s only a “paper separation” in an attempt to make themselver appear more exclusive to the upper class buyers it seeks to woo. This could mean that the :“new” Cadillac may have more indepenence from the rest of GM, and that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Like Saturn was a separate business unit?..didn’t end well.
Maybe they’ll then sell it to the Chinese.
I agree that there’s more marketing in this decision than anything else. But it is not a positive sign for the parent company when a division is “spun off” on paper in order to disassociate it in the mind of the public.
Cadillac really has done a great job turning their image around these past years. IMHO they did so by focusing on the product rather than on “shell games”. Kudos to the division. They seem to have rediscovered what it was that made Caddy a world class car in the first place.
So no more Cimmarons or Cateras?
Hopefully, never again.
You may have noted that over the last few years many GM dealers have gone through a building face lift which is kind of designed to make them look similar and with those high costs being paid by the dealers instead of GM.
The Cadillac dealer here threw in the towel rather than face the expense and which was likely going to involve putting up a new building due to his particular situation. Several others have gone away also and at this point I think there’s 3 dealers within a 70 mile radius to the east and southeast. There’s nothing for several hundred miles to the west and I would imagine that a number of Cadillac owners will take exception to spending a day on the road for any dealer services.
Traditional franchise agreements for all major car manufacturers require facelifting to meet the manufacturer’s changing perceptions of their desired image, always at the expense of the franchisee and often for costs that considerably exceed a million dollars. These and other mandated expenses are a primary reason dealers are so afraid of the new Tesla business model and the reason so many dealers’ associations are trying to get state laws passed requiring car manufacturers to sell through traditional franchises, preventing the Tesla model, against which they’re afraid they can’t compete.
Personally, I say “let the market decide”. If the new model succeeds, the “old way” will have to change. If not, the “old way”, complete with all its corruption, will continue.
Hmmm. Sounds like just creating another division like Olds again with more autonomy like they used to have. The worrysome part is: The new CEO “having made Audi what it is today”. Is that really what we want?
I was at the GM dealer for my recall today and man had they updated things. Service counter, waiting room, popcorn, even a kids room and big screen TV. And lots of blues shirts and blazers walking around. I don’t know how they pay for them all. Having spent hundreds of thousands on the the building to make it Chevy like, I’ll bet they’ll have to have a separate new Caddy building. Just reading too that Caddy was planning to come out with the lane recognition system in 2017. Guess that won’t be shared for a while. I’ve never really been a Caddy fan though.
Cadillac sells more cars outside the US now than domestically. Sophisticated foreign buyers don’t want the brand associated with the urban basket case that is Detroit.
Cadillac is just doing what Lincoln did a few years back, getting the heck out of Michigan. Lincoln moved to California. The car industry in southern Michigan is far too inbred and insular. When California had 50% imports in their market, GM’s CEO said people would rather have a used Buick than a new Japanese car.
This is true, only in a state where EVERYBODY got employee discounts on US cars because they all had a relative that worked for the Big 3. They never SAW imports, so they discounted their progress. No one they knew HAD and import so they never learned how good they really were. This is a huge part of the arrogance that led to GM’s bankruptcy, Chrysler being bought out, twice, and Ford being pulled from the brink by the brilliant Mulally.
Moving to New York will allow the management staff of Cadillac to get out in the world and see what is actually happening in the real world.
I would strongly suspect that they’re getting a ton of taxpayer money to move. Recently there has been a lot of TV ads here in OK encouraging businesses to move to NY and gain some tax benefits.
To each their own, but that RoboCaddy styling over the last dozen or so years just leaves me cold. I’d rather have a used Corolla or Mustang… 
An article I read said that Cadillac has hit a wall in expanding their market share, and they believe it is related to their association with GM. Audi and Porsche don’t let on their VW ownership, as that might reduce their mystique. Cadillac wants to duplicate that. As the article referenced above indicates, the new head of Cadillac used to run Audi, and it seems likely he wants to use his success strategy for Audi at Cadillac. GM will still provide engines and other systems used to construct the cars, at least for the time being.
“To each their own, but that RoboCaddy styling over the last dozen or so years just leaves me cold. I’d rather have a used Corolla or Mustang… :-(”
I agree
I think the recent Cadillacs look extremely jagged and unrefined, as if somebody forgot to polish off the rough edges
“Audi and Porsche don’t let on their VW ownership, as that might reduce their mystique. Cadillac wants to duplicate that.”
Anybody with a pulse and a brain knows that Audi and Porsche are owned by VW.
Just as Lincoln is owned by Ford. Moving to California doesn’t change that
I think it’s a good marketing move. I work from time to time at a large, multi-brand dealership and I know the man who buys used vehicles online (he’s my cousin’s husband). He buys every Cadillac CTS, ATS and XTS that is available. I don’t really like their styling either but they sell like hotcakes just like the Ford Fusion and Focus. He can’t buy enough of these models to meet demand.
I also think that it is a good marketing move.
In fact, the latest Cadillac commercial that I saw on TV last night was clearly filmed in NYC, with much of the footage shot in SoHo–where Caddy is apparently going to locate their new headquarters. Identifying the marque with a very upscale part of Manhattan that is frequented by younger, style-conscious folks with HUGE incomes is a very smart move, IMHO.
I can recall when SoHo was a run-down part of Manhattan, composed of ancient loft buildings, slum housing, and light manufacturing. Now, it is home to one of the most expensive hotels in NYC, many expensive restaurants, and every high-end shop that you might imagine.
The streets of SoHo are lined with parked…Porsches, Land Rovers, Jags, BMWs, and other expensive cars. If you are trying to court people with a lot of disposable income, I think that it is very smart for Cadillac to associate itself with that neighborhood.
“Anybody with a pulse and a brain knows that Audi and Porsche are owned by VW.”
I disagree. I think that many people are not aware of this; especially Porsche. Audi has only been part of VW since the mid-1960s, and spent over half of its existence using other names. Porsche became part of the VW group in 2011. They play down the relationship because the two companies don’t want to take on a VW image. That would be bad marketing.
I agree with jtsanders that the typical man on the street isn’t aware of the fact that Audi & Porsche are owned by VW. Heck–when I have “revealed” to some people that many Acura models are essentially upscale versions of certain Honda models, they have reacted with skepticism.
When delving deeper with these folks, it became obvious that they didn’t even know that Acura is owned by Honda. Similarly, many people are not aware of Toyota’s ownership of Lexus, and Nissan’s ownership of Infiniti.
I think that for many people (you know–the “all I know is that I put gas in it and it goes” crowd), most of these corporate connections are a mystery.
I can only infer from that weird comment that the overwhelming majority of the human race has no pulse and no brain…