GM to move Cadillac brand to New York City

[Huggybear]

The BMW is a true luxury product with an outstanding driver experience in all aspects of ownership[[driving, service and world-class image). It markets to customers with discerning tastes not the Medicare class of white men who live in Macomb Twp. If you think Cadillac can compete with that based on their current market position, you obviously have never owned a BMW or any other European luxury vehicle.

I own a European luxury car [[actually, I've owned several, with a couple of Cadillacs thrown in), and I don't think the issue is the dealership experience or marketing so much as it is Cadillac's long-term inability to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. This comes out in an incoherent product line [[are the SRX and Escalade sold by the same company?!) that somehow manages to lose sales to its sister brand Buick. That's the lack of confidence: why not stake out your territory and dominate it? Trying to market a 3-series clone is a losing proposition; no matter how good, Car and Driver will never bless your product; others' offerings are homogenized ~2.0T snoozers; and in the end, the volume cars are small, low, and relatively low-powered. None of this is what you would associate with the Cadillac brand, which for most of its history has included mostly V8-powered larger cars. You can succeed with larger cars if you are confident and focused. Cars the size of the 5-series and up are the big profit generators [[that line is a relatively small portion of BMW's worldwide sales but brings home the plurality of the profits), and that is where companies like Jaguar have gone.

I agree that Cadillac has some serious problems, but I don't know that New York is the solution to this: query how many luxury car companies are in glamorous cities. BMW, for its part, is located in the German equivalent of the American Midwest, in a pretty grey corner of Munich. But if you are going to go to a cool place for inspiration, you might as well skip New York because you're not going to see the drivers of many vehicles that are not Lincoln Town Cars, hybrid taxis [[Ford, Nissan, Toyota), or subway cars. Go to London, Paris or Monaco - you can see more luxury cars there [[and their drivers or owners), and the upper middle class there is probably more the aspiration of luxury car buyers worldwide.

But your description of the "Medicare class of white men who live in Macomb Twp." is somewhat curious. Is this to say that poor white guys drive these cars? Or that the cars are designed by them?

HB

[Honky Tonk]

I own a European luxury car [[actually, I've owned several, with a couple of Cadillacs thrown in), and I don't think the issue is the dealership experience or marketing so much as it is Cadillac's long-term inability to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. This comes out in an incoherent product line [[are the SRX and Escalade sold by the same company?!) that somehow manages to lose sales to its sister brand Buick. That's the lack of confidence: why not stake out your territory and dominate it? Trying to market a 3-series clone is a losing proposition; no matter how good, Car and Driver will never bless your product; others' offerings are homogenized ~2.0T snoozers; and in the end, the volume cars are small, low, and relatively low-powered. None of this is what you would associate with the Cadillac brand, which for most of its history has included mostly V8-powered larger cars. You can succeed with larger cars if you are confident and focused. Cars the size of the 5-series and up are the big profit generators [[that line is a relatively small portion of BMW's worldwide sales but brings home the plurality of the profits), and that is where companies like Jaguar have gone.

I agree that Cadillac has some serious problems, but I don't know that New York is the solution to this: query how many luxury car companies are in glamorous cities. BMW, for its part, is located in the German equivalent of the American Midwest, in a pretty grey corner of Munich. But if you are going to go to a cool place for inspiration, you might as well skip New York because you're not going to see the drivers of many vehicles that are not Lincoln Town Cars, hybrid taxis [[Ford, Nissan, Toyota), or subway cars. Go to London, Paris or Monaco - you can see more luxury cars there [[and their drivers or owners), and the upper middle class there is probably more the aspiration of luxury car buyers worldwide.

But your description of the "Medicare class of white men who live in Macomb Twp." is somewhat curious. Is this to say that poor white guys drive these cars? Or that the cars are designed by them?

HB

I think Caddy's hope that somehow they'll be magically saved by moving to NY is a bit far fetched. Beemer, Benz, and Porsche all have added SUVs to their line up and it doesn't seem to have affected their bottom line. Personally, I like the Caddy car line-up, and find them both comfortable and a hoot to drive. A far cry from the Caddys of the 60s and 70s.

[Bham1982]

But if you are going to go to a cool place for inspiration, you might as well skip New York because you're not going to see the drivers of many vehicles that are not Lincoln Town Cars, hybrid taxis [[Ford, Nissan, Toyota), or subway cars. Go to London, Paris or Monaco - you can see more luxury cars there [[and their drivers or owners), and the upper middle class there is probably more the aspiration of luxury car buyers worldwide.

I agree with most of your comment but not this part. IMO you're conflating Manhattan with the NYC area.

It's true that Manhattan itself is not a huge luxury car market, but the NYC metro is probably the largest luxury car market in the world. The Euro luxury imports generally have their North American HQ in the NYC region for this reason. The one exception would be luxury sports cars, where I bet the LA market is #1 in the world.

I doubt Paris and London are comparable to the NYC region for luxury car sales, though fancy cars are probably more visible in core London than in core Paris or NYC. Monaco is tiny and probably can't even compare to Oakland County in luxury car sales.