Cadillac Lyriq News

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.

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 confirmed its high-performance V badge will be applied to an electric vehicle for the first time with confirmation today that a Cadillac Lyriq V will be coming to market globally in 2026.

Cadillac has revealed pricing and specifications for its debut model in Australia, the all-new, fully electric Lyriq large SUV.

Cadillac outlines the kinds of vehicles it benchmarked in development as it promises a fun-to-drive EV.

One of Australia's most celebrated automotive designers and executives has asked local car buyers to not do to what "Australians have a habit of doing", and instead reserve judgement on the newest entry to our auto landscape.

“No, we would not do a pick-up at Cadillac,” is Senior Vice President of Global Design Michael Simcoe’s refreshingly blunt answer.“That'd be a waste of an entry. You'd spend that sort of capital and that sort of showroom spot on something much more exciting and more appropriate to Cadillac,” he explained. Instead, a Cadillac hypercar – electric or plug-in hybrid – is a much smarter play for the performance-oriented brand. A smaller SUV to play against the Audi Q4 e-tron and BMW iX1 could be clever, too. Yet there’s no update on either of those possibilities today. Simcoe’s robust response didn’t stop us having a brainstorm of what a Cadillac ute might look like – the top example is a modern rebirth of the Escalade EXT based on the latest Lyriq electric large SUV from Cadillac (top image). The Lyriq lends itself well to becoming a ute. Its bluff, square front end with menacing front mask runs up to a black A-pillar to a chunky sloped C-pillar that blends into the long tray. Of course, if Cadillac were to do a ute it could also take Chevrolet’s existing Silverado frame and add some luxury tinsel on the top (below image). It would be unlikely any pick-up would really suit the Cadillac image, according to Simcoe. Still, the imagination has some swagger.  Simcoe expands on whether he’s brought any information from his time at Holden back to the US regarding Australian utes, “everything's still an emotional purchase”, he said.“ that are all about sport and performance, be it off-road or rock climbing and we have ones that are better suited to being on road as very, very high level luxury vehicles. A truck’s not a tool of the trade necessarily anymore,” he continued. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a luxury brand had entertained the idea of creating a ute for lifestyle customers – Genesis, BMW and others all admitted to the thought. One brand actually did it, and the result didn’t go well. The Mercedes X-Class was a Nissan Navara-based luxury ute that lived a very short life. It was produced from 2018 to 2020, surviving just two years before it was axed due to slow sales. Anecdotally, buyers don’t want 'fancy' utes. If they’re after sheer opulence or imposition on the road, a sedan or large SUV – like Celestiq or Lyriq – delivers that just fine. The Ford Ranger Raptor and Ram 1500 TRX are so expensive not because of interior fit-out or infinite ambient lighting but because of their Fox racing shocks and bombastic engines. That is what sells high-end utes and Cadillac won’t be getting into that game. 

Cadillac Senior Vice President of Global Design Michael Simcoe explained how the Celestiq, Lyriq and Optiq get away without looking like computer mouses or soap bars despite solid driving range ratings. Along with his current role at Cadillac, Simcoe has been with GM for forty years now after starting at Holden in 1983. He can boast credit for the Monaro, VE Commodore and more recently rebirthing Cadillac as an EV-first brand with the Celestiq. “Aerodynamics is a very well understood black science,” he told CarsGuide last week. “We have a lot of people who are very intelligent in that space so we know what we have to do to make a vehicle perform in a fashion.”For comparison's sake, the Tesla Model Y ekes 531km of EPA driving range out of its 75kWh battery pack thanks to a small frontal area and slippery 0.23Cd. The AWD Cadillac Optiq uses an 85kWh battery and gets 480km EPA driving range – we don’t know its Cd figure.The Tesla is better then, right? On paper, sure. But Cadillac is not in the business of making efficiency an absolute. Buyers of Cadillacs are chasing opulence, performance and style. The brand naturally has an internal efficiency goal for EVs, with Simcoe saying the team is able to ‘dial up and down’ various factors to achieve the desired result.“Anyone who tells you that to do an efficient vehicle, you have to do a lozenge with wheels is wrong”, he emphasises. “You can make very efficient vehicles that have style as well.”Yet anyone who has looked at vehicles coming out of China to target Tesla – the GAC Aion hyper GT, IM L6, BYD Sealion 6, Xpeng G6 and more – can see the resemblance to the American brand’s soft-sided vehicles.Interestingly, Simcoe sees this phenomena as copycatting for the sake of style rather than outright aero efficiency, citing hidden tricks such as shielding suspension components from the wind and other techniques. “That's more about commoditisation of design and a power to see something that works in the showroom, with customers, and a whole industry that has the speed to – within a couple of years – move in that direction. “And then two years later there's somewhere else, and then somewhere else. But that's commoditisation of vehicles, it's not necessarily aerodynamics that are doing that,” Simcoe explains. “If you've got the speed to react quickly to a trend and you're seeing something on the other side of town that's working and people are buying and you've got the speed to get there before the market dries up, then you're dealing with commodities rather than a real focus on your brand and the value you have in the design itself.“If we all did that you could forget the brand thing because everybody would be buying the same interior and the same exterior. And there is a bit of that in the market right now, globally.” Cadillac is gearing up to launch its first vehicle in Australia, the large luxury BMW iX and Audi Q8 e-tron-rivalling Lyriq, before the end of the year. More models, including the Optiq, are likely to follow shortly after. 

Cadillac's design bosses believe it will be fairly straightforward talking buyers out of their Audis, BMWs and Benzes with new electric cars.

The top-end luxury electric car market is about to get a lot more crowded.Cadillac is coming to Australia at the end of the year with its Lyriq electric SUV to rival the Mercedes-Benz EQE and BMW iX.The American luxury car brand synonymous with US Presidents, celebrities and royalty has its sights set firmly on the big German brands and will price their vehicle accordingly, said local boss Jess Bala.“We are targeting the European luxury brands and our price will be right in the realm of where their equivalent entries are,” said Bala.That would put the Lyriq’s starting point in the circa-$130,000 range. The Lyriq has some impressive numbers on paper.It uses two electric motors that deliver 373kW and 610Nm to all four wheels. A giant 102kWh battery provides a driving range of up to 530km.The brand couldn’t provide details of what models would be added to the range but said more are coming and it would have a full portfolio.“We listen to customers, we are guided by the segments that are growing and that people are asking for entries for,” said Bala.“Cadillac has made some announcements already, so you’re getting a bit of a hint there but we will definitely make our own announcements locally in the not too far future.”This means vehicles such as the smaller Optiq, seven-seat Vistiq and giant Escalade iQ SUVs could be on the cards for Australia.Sales of electric cars are soaring in Australia, but the growth is being driven mainly by more affordable Chinese brands and Tesla.High-end electric cars from premium bands have been slow sellers, but Bala wasn’t concerned.“No, I think there is still definitely a growth opportunity here as well. It’s still something that is very fluid that is obviously evolving,” said Bala.Cadillac in the US announced it would persist with petrol-powered vehicles for the foreseeable future but Bala ruled out any of those vehicles coming to Australia.The brand didn’t take plug-in hybrids off the table, though.“We will have to watch and see, we don’t have a crystal ball for the next 10 years from now and so I’ll say the plan is now fully EV but we’ll have to continue and watch what the market’s doing,” said a Cadillac spokesperson.