Cadillac Lyriq-V Reviews

It's unusual for the cheapest and smallest member of a car company's line-up to be the most impressive. Indeed, it's like preferring the acting of the Hemsworth whose name no-one can remember, but there's just something surprisingly attractive about Cadillac's Optiq, which will be the entry point for Cadillac's all-EV offering when it arrives later this year. We went to Detroit for a drive.

It may be missing a couple of letters, and a lot of cylinders, but GM is effectively bringing back the HSV brand with the launch of its super fast, seriously sporty Cadillac Lyriq-V, which it describes as “turning all the knobs up to 11”.Sprinkled with blacked-out bits and covered in carbon fibre, the Lyriq-V is Cadillac’s first performance EV, and will be, by far, its fastest accelerating car with its whopping 600-plus horsepower (that’s how they say it, we’d call it 459KW) and 880Nm hurling it to 60mph in 3.3 seconds (let’s add a tenth for the 0 to 100km/h dash, it’s still fast).It’s also faster than the properly shouty Cadillac we can’t get in Australia, the CTV-5 Blackwing, which can hit 60mph in 3.4 seconds using a 6.2-litre supercharged V8. Sigh.The standard Cadillac Lyriq — and keep in mind, we’re talking about a two-tonne plus large SUV here — takes 5.5 seconds to reach 100km/h, despite sharing the dual-motor, all-wheel-drive set up of the racier V variant.CarsGuide spoke to the Program Engineer for this car in Detroit, Christopher Carino, who said this slightly ludicrous Lyriq represented the brand’s first chance to show Australian buyers what the V means to Cadillac.“So it’s got the same motors as the other Lyriq, but they're tuned a little bit differently in order to give that performance upgrade for the V series, and so we get that 3.3-second time, which really is phenomenal for this vehicle,” Carino enthused.“We really have turned all the knobs up to 11 on this car, we wanted to give the customer just everything we could throw at it, from a performance standpoint, and we’re super excited about it being our first electric vehicle for the V series, which has got a long brand history with General Motors, and with Cadillac.“This vehicle lives up to all of that, and more.”Carino said no other car company has a variant that can compete directly with the Lyriq-V (Tesla’s Model 3 Performance can hit 60mph in 2.9 seconds, but it’s a mid-sized sedan, while the Model Y Performance claims 3.5 seconds). What sets the Cadillac apart is its ability “to live in both the luxury and the sport simultaneously.”Carino puts this down to the fact the V offers so much customisation. He said most drivers will use its My Mode to set up the suspension, steering, brake feel, motor sound and so on for the way they want to use the car 90 per cent of the time.“Then you press the V button and you get V Mode, which allows you to exercise all the bells and whistles from a performance side, and then you can go even one step further with a hard press of the V button, which gives you Velocity Max mode, and then that gives you this top-level acceleration on top of everything else you've already set for the vehicle,” he explained.“And the from there, you can use Launch Control, say if there’s someone next to you at the stop light, and you really want to get ahead of them, and that will give you that 3.3 seconds. Boom!”We resisted the urge to ask Carino whether he could have come up with a more American name than “Velocity Max”, and asked him, as someone who’s been driving a Lyriq V every day for months in the US, how often he engaged that mad mode.“So I have a family with three kids, and when I put it in Velocity Max, they're like, ‘Dad! It's too much! Too much. Too much,” he guffawed. “So I enjoy it when I’m by myself.“You guys are going to love it when you get it down there.”The Lyriq-V boasts a 102kWh battery pack, and if you drive it as it’s clearly intended its unlikely you’ll get anywhere near its claimed range of 459km (according to US EPA testing numbers).The standard Cadillac Lyriq is already on sale in Australia, priced from $117,000, and the brand’s local arm won’t say yet just how much the vicious V will be when it arrives early in 2026.“Pricing and specification for ANZ will be announced later this year and customer deliveries will commence from early 2026,” a spokesman from GM ANZ said.

A luxury, three-row, six-seat SUV that packs more punch than a Porsche 911? It must be an EV, and one with quite the battery and aggressive dual motors - meet the very large, very impressive-looking Cadillac Vistiq, coming to Australia in early 2026. We flew to Detroit for a preview drive.

American giant GM, which is in the midst of launching Cadillac as an EV-only brand in Australia, is determined to take on China, and win, when it comes to battery technology, announcing a new way of “layering” its batteries, which can reduce the number of cells by as much as 75 per cent, reducing both weight and cost.

Before I talk about how Super Cruise — the hands-off self-driving system that’s being used by hundreds of thousands of Americans every day in GM and Cadillac vehicles — almost killed me, I’d like to say how impressed I was by its work.

Cadillac has created a hand-made luxury EV with proportions that it admitted “look impossible to achieve”, a price tag that can run well north of $1 million, and an Active Roll Control system it claims can deliver “zero degrees of roll, which is better than any sports car out there”.

Australia and America used to be close allies on the automotive front, but it seems time is increasing the distance between the two countries.

General Motors Australia is running out of options.The American automotive giant has just introduced its third brand into the Australian market, with GMC now available here alongside Chevrolet and Cadillac. The new GMC Yukon Denali joins the Chevrolet Silverado and Corvette as well as the new Cadillac Lyriq in Australian showrooms. But it also represents one of the last new models the conglomerate could offer in Australia in the near-future.Put simply, there aren’t many other models in the broad General Motors portfolio that could make sense here. Cadillac has the most growth potential, with the Optiq, Vistiq and Lyriq V already confirmed for local sale. But despite introducing the GMC brand, it looks to be a one model brand.The challenge for GM Australia and its GM Speciality Vehicles off-shoot, which oversees Chevrolet and now GMC, is that while the Cadillacs and Corvettes are built in right-hand drive from the factory, there are no other such options available. That means anything else would need to be converted to right-hand drive locally, by GMSV’s partner Promoso; which now has 140 employees working on GM products.The obvious challenge with right-hand drive conversion is the cost it adds into the vehicle, which is why the more premium GMC brand was chosen for the Yukon SUV, rather than introducing the Chevrolet Tahoe - as both the Yukon and Tahoe sit on the same underpinnings as the Chevy Silverado. By opting for the more premium brand, it has allowed GM Australia to price and position the Yukon in a semi-premium area of the market.GM Australia Managing Director Jess Bala is still confident the brands have room to grow. ”I mean, we're always assessing what might make the most sense for our market from an opportunity standpoint, from within the GM portfolio,” she told CarsGuide.“So I would say that that work's never done. We're having discussions all the time. From a GMSV standpoint we've just agreed to open two more dealerships, one's already open in Springwood in Queensland.“So I was looking at those growth opportunities to allow us to maximize our own sales volume, but also provide the support that we think our customers should be getting in a country of our size and geography. So I'd say no, we’re still very much believers we're in a growth phase and working with the team back in the US as to what those other opportunities could be and should be.”However, there are not many other GM models available for right-hand drive conversion that could be offered here at a competitive price, besides the likes of the Tahoe and GMC Sierra pickup, which are simply alternative versions of what’s offered here already in the Yukon and Silverado.“ Definitely for conversion, a hundred per cent, you're a hundred per cent correct,” Bala said. “But we're always in conversations as GMs working through product plans and next generations and things like that. When and if there might be an opportunity to study right-hand drive in the plant. That depends . It's got to be a much bigger global study, obviously extensive business cases, things like that.“And then that's only part of it. And then if not, to your point, what could we look at potentially converting here? We're always working with Promoso very closely. They do a phenomenal job of finding efficiencies, cost savings and things like that. And then also learnings as they go.“So, you know, there are things that they've discovered and improved from converting the trucks that are now being flipped into the Yukon conversion as well, and finding efficiencies. Obviously it definitely helps that it's all the one architecture underneath, it's all off the T1 platform, but we're always assessing what else could be and what makes the right sense, especially in a very competitive and saturated market.”She added: “And to your point, from a conversion standpoint, it really doesn't make a lot of sense for us to bring in… a very mainstream model entry that's just gonna be priced higher when we're in so much heavy competition.”That effectively rules out any chance a vehicle such as the Chevrolet Colorado, the smaller sibling of the Silverado, which would make a natural rival to the Ford Ranger and Toyota HiLux, could be offered here as it would be much too expensive to be competitive after local conversion. ”It would,” Bala admitted. “Knowing where the, the two main players in the mid-size truck market are versus where we would end up if we had to convert it. We are better off as a company focusing on the full-size truck.”But she’s confident that long-term GM management will look after its Australian outpost.“ We have a very strong seat at the table and we've got some really great advocates back in the US that have learned a lot about us, have visited us in the last 18 months, two years to learn more about what we're doing and then what we could potentially do in the future,” she said.

General Motors Australia has conceded for the first time that it would consider introducing petrol-powered vehicles, most likely the Escalade SUV, if electric vehicle sales stay flat.

Cadillac has arrived in Australia, with this Lyriq the first in a fleet of new electric vehicles built in right-hand drive in the USA and shipped to our shores. It's big, lux and definitely has premium intentions, but it also goes up against the best of BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi in the battle for our well-heeled dollars.