Opinion neededs, Is Cadillac deluding itself by offering a $300K car?

Cadillac’s Silly Marketing plan for a $300K car

I do not know the exact terms, I admit I am an anglophile, I like almost everything British; and the older it is, the better I like it.

Say Bentley Continentals, Guardman’s jacket tailoring, stringback driving gloves, Maxwell riding boots, Purdey shotguns and on and on.

And besides me, there’s legions of Eurosnobs in the US who would rather spend several times more for clothing or machines made in Yurrip because it’s oh-so-much-better, don’tcha see?

So listening to Cadillac announce each week all the areas they will go “bespoke” (my British phrase, not theirs) in this 2023 luxury car fills me with trepidation. Oh, I don’t doubt Cadillac can do it but have they really sampled the audience they will be selling to in the US? Do they really think people who thought of the clumsy industrial van upgraded to the Escalade as a top drawer luxury car will really appreciate options they never heard of or see no need for?

Now I could be wrong. The possibility of rarity alone could create demand. Say only 500 available in a calendar year. When you look at how few Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertibles and Brougham coupes they sold in ’57 and ’58, scarcity was part of the cachet there. Plus they were offering items you couldn’t usually get on other cars—say the set of shot glasses in the glove compartment or stainless steel roof in the coupes.

Cadillac is talking going way way beyond that ’50s effort presuming there is now sufficient discriminating taste at the high income levels that could afford the car. As a visiting artist, or journalist, I have been in the homes of the High and the Mighty, in Bloomfield Hills, Grosse Pointe, Beverly Hills, and Bel Air and I saw little evidence of a cultural background that would lead me to believe there re enough Americans who would appreciate a higher level of fit ,finish and materials than is available now.

Bringing us back to personal experience, I live in the Inland Empire, 40 miles E, of Los Angeles, When I wanted an ascot tie, to wear at Pebble Beach there was none in the entire I.E.Nobody had ever heard of it. Oh, they had seen it in English movies but it is the same way in many categories-- dining, wine, clothes--there isn’t any demand for something finer than we’ve already got. Compared to the west side of Los Angeles the IE (except for Clairmont) is a dead zone culturally, sartorially and taste-wise.

So I got onto Google and looked for a list of what Rolls, Porsches and some other Euro brands offer. I found an Ezra Dyer article in Car & Driver that names some of what us Yankees would call egregious examples, say Porsche offering a carbon-fiber wallet for the owner's manual. A bargain at $1040, right? Not if ups your zero-carbon credentials.

Dyer says in his 2021 Ghost test car, he found two umbrellas that added $1600 to the sticker. He explained that the umbrellas could have been had for less but someone selected custom colors on the umbrellas—tan handles, navy blue stripes, navy blue beads. To a connoisseur money well spent.

Also on the his test Ghost was $850 custom stitching on the instrument panel. It was called the Ghost Package and I had to read it twice but though the name sounds similar to the Special Edition Package on the Honda Accord Sport, he exlpained, no, this package on the Rolls cost as much as an entire Honda Accord.


For that $31,125, you get to specify the placement of the two colors of leather in the interior and receive an illuminated tread plate, rear-seat theater configuration (ie, screens), floor mats deep enough to sink your feet in, and what is quickly becoming a fad in luxury cars (including the lesser Cadillac Lyric)—an illuminated grille.

And of course who can forget the chrome lady atop the radiator-- the Spirit of Ecstasy (dare I wonder if Sir Henry had a moment of ecstasy with the model?) that’s $4800 for said Spirit of Ecstasy to be illuminated. Dyer also indicated he fancied chrome plated visible exhausts, for a trifling $5275.

Now custom paint is becoming very big in the Luxo world. You have to remember up until quite recently, Detroit automakers hated the thought of slowing the line speed by taking some cars from the line and painting them some special color, but now Caddy is intimating they would do that. Look at Rolls—if you want "Premier Silver" paint , that’s a mere, $12,275 additional.

I put grilles that light up when you approach the car in the “cornball category” but Rolls has it, so ehy not Caddy? Rolls also goes full tilt boogie on a fake skyscape. Remember the skies filled with stars (I saw the real thing when I was a cowboy on the Bitterroot range, but that’s another story). Rolls doesn’t worry about real stars , offering instead a fiber-optic starry-sky headliner for only $8000 more on the Cullinan, or standard on the Phantom or the panoramic roof. And the stars even flit bout like real stars! Is there no end to this relentless pleasuring?
The final Rolls option I’ll mention (there are many more) is a center console, which for a mere $18.5 G’s secretes a whisky cabinet with monogrammed glasses, and the upper part conceals a fridge with fitted champagne flutes secured to the door. Now wouldn’t an open container get you busted? Maybe it’s so well hidden, a copper wouldn’t find it. Or you could offer him a snigger.

I forgot sound. To me, a gargantuan car has to have enough amps to entertain the whole block. Dyer quotes the Bespoke Audio System at $10,575, so, hey, ain’t no excuse for not having it.

My point is Americans are not, in my experience, so fine-tuned that they will pay outrageous fees for anything in car that could often have its same function fulfilled at a hundredth of the price. Cadillac is talking to a Costco, Walmart nation, but the English and Continental Europeans have been educated in the finer things of life for many more decades more than us Yanks I have sat on the veranda of chateaus in
the Loire valley sipping champagne just as the aristos did 200 years ago at the same time when buckskinned Americans were fighting their way across the country with flintlocks. We've come much further but not far enough for $300,000 made-in-Detroit luxury cars.

So get real Cadillac. You will look foolish.


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