THE MOONSHOT NOBODY SAW COMING

IS THE $340,000 CADILLAC CELESTIQ WORTH ROLLSROYCE MONEY?

- ALEXANDER STOKLOSA

Cadillac adopted its “Standard of the World” slogan just after the turn of the 20th century, and it used it in advertisements for decades. This was while General Motors was at the height of its power and its leading brand's cars indeed set the standards for luxury, style, and technology.

By the 1970s, however, Cadillac's unquestioned leadership had faded, and the slogan was retired from public use. Today, few remember when it was true, much less when the coachbuilt 16-cylinder cars of the 1930s rolled off Detroit assembly lines or when Cadillac hand-assembled the 1957 Eldorado Brougham (then the world's most expensive car).

Maybe that isn't so bad, if only to make Cadillac's all-new, all-electric, hand-built, ultra-rare, carbon-fiber-bodied, totally custom $340,000 stunner even more shocking to the naïfs. In the 2025 Celestiq, once again a Cadillac is being sold for Rolls-Royce money.

Is it worth it? To arrive at an answer, you need to understand where Cadillac has been. It spent decades pushed into global irrelevance by European and Japanese (and even Korean) luxury marques with fresher thinking and new angles on defining luxury through sportiness, customer service, futurism—or all three.

GM's refusal to properly differentiate Cadillac from lesser Chevys, Buicks, and Oldsmobiles starting in the '70s kept the brand wandering the wilderness until only relatively recently. There have been flashes of greatness, from the ambitious Pininfarina-bodied Allanté convertible to the original CTS sport sedan and from the stylish Escalade, which came to define American luxury SUVs, to the CT4and CT5-V series cars of today.

Yet these random wins ironically fractured Cadillac's personality even further. Is Cadillac the Escalade company? The builder of high-performance neo-BMW performance sedans? Or is it the batteries-included vanguard of GM's push to electrify its portfolio?