Cadillac today revealed the design of its Celestiq show car, which previews the General Motors luxury brand’s future handcrafted and all-electric flagship sedan that design and engineering teams are continuing to develop for production.

“The Celestiq show car is the purest expression of Cadillac,” said Magalie Debellis, Head of Cadillac Advanced Design. “It brings to life the most integrated expressions of design and innovation in the brand’s history, coalescing in a defining statement of a true Cadillac flagship.”

The car is inspired by the luxury brand’s 120-year heritage shaped by early Cadillac sedans such as the custom V-16 powered coaches of the prewar era and the hand-built 1957 Eldorado Brougham.

“Those vehicles represented the pinnacle of luxury in their respective eras, and helped make Cadillac the standard of the world,” said Tony Roma, Chief Engineer for Cadillac Celestiq at GM. “The Celestiq show car—also a sedan, because the configuration offers the very best luxury experience—builds on that pedigree and captures the spirit of arrival they expressed.”

Designers drew further inspiration from classic architecture such as the mid-century masterpieces of architect Eero Saarinen along with other iconic American designs. They combined those influences within an Ultium-based EV architecture for a clean-sheet expression for the Celestiq show car.

The car is said to represent the purest expression of Cadillac design, technology, and performance—challenging the ultra-luxury space with the spirit of futurism and the avant-garde. It features Cadillac’s signature lighting design, which rises to a new level on the Celestiq show car with a choreographed light show intended to invite passengers into the vehicle.

“We’ve combined the beauty of function with the beauty of form,” said Laetitia Lopez, Lead Color and Trim Designer for Cadillac Celestiq at GM. “We had to reconsider all aspects to immerse the customer, all of their senses, and create a connection with the vehicle through the finest genuine materials, exceptional detailing, and advanced technology.”

 

High-tech preview

The show car previews some of the materials, innovative technologies, and hand-crafted attention to detail for Cadillac’s vision for its future. Highlights include five high-definition LED interactive displays including a 55-in main display, an expected industry-first variable-transmission Smart Glass Roof, and Ultra Cruise, GM’s next evolution of available hands-free ADAS (advanced driver assistance system) technology.

The main 55-in LED display introduces a passenger display with “electronic digital blinds” active privacy technology designed to allow passengers to enjoy video content while not distracting the driver. The Smart Glass Roof features SPD (suspended particle device) technology that allows for four zones of variable lighting, enabling passengers to fine-tune their cabin experience for completely personalized comfort and visibility.

The Celestiq will be built on the Ultium platform, the foundation of much of GM’s EV strategy. It encompasses a common electric vehicle architecture and propulsion components like battery cells, modules, packs, drive units, EV motors, and integrated power electronics.

Through the Ultium platform, GM intends a strategic value-chain shift across its network of vehicle assembly plants as the company commonizes and streamlines machinery, tooling, and assembly processes. The new flexibility is intended to enable lower capital investments and greater efficiencies as it remakes additional assembly plants.

 

Hand-built at GM’s Global Technical Center

Cadillac started the trickle of teaser images in June for the Celestiq show car on General Motors Design’s Instagram, continuing more early looks throughout the summer.

“From its unique proportions and a new effortless, sophisticated form language, to the precision and attention to detail, Celestiq is unlike anything on the road today,” said Debellis. “From its inception, the Celestiq show car was crafted to reincarnate the ‘Standard of the World.’”

At the end of June, General Motors announced it would invest more than $81 million into the company’s Global Technical Center in Warren, MI, to purchase and install equipment to hand build the Celestiq. The Cadillac flagship will be the first production vehicle to be built there, the center of the company’s engineering and design efforts since its inauguration in May 1956. Campus renovation work has already begun.

“As Cadillac’s future flagship sedan, Celestiq signifies a new, resurgent era for the brand,” said Mark Reuss, President, at General Motors. “Each one will be hand-built by an amazing team of craftspeople on our historic Technical Center campus, and today’s investment announcement emphasizes our commitment to delivering a world-class Cadillac with nothing but the best in craftsmanship, design, engineering, and technology.”

With Celestiq, GM also hopes to drive innovation across its supplier community with what’s expected to be the highest volume of 3D printed components—over 100—of any GM production vehicle. This will include structural and cosmetic parts in polymer and metal materials. The Celestiq production facility itself will also leverage additive manufacturing for tooling, fixtures, and gauges in assembly.

GM’s Additive Industrialization Center, which opened on the GM Global Technical Center campus in 2020, has pushed Cadillac’s drive for auto industry leadership in functional and aesthetic 3D-printed components. The CT4-V and CT5-V were GM’s first vehicles to benefit from additive manufacturing with parts including the shifter emblem, transmission components, and HVAC ducts.

“This investment is a great example of our commitment to GM’s EV transformation as we apply our manufacturing expertise to a one-of-a-kind, ultra-luxury vehicle for the Cadillac brand,” said Gerald Johnson, Executive Vice President of Global Manufacturing and Sustainability.

 

Ultra Cruise hands-free driving

While most technical details are still scarce, GM did announce at CES 2022 that its next-generation hands-free driver assist system called Ultra Cruise will be available in 2023 on vehicles including the Celestiq. Powered by a scalable compute architecture featuring system-on-chips developed by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., it will mark the first production application to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Ride Platform for ADAS technology.

With high-performance sensor interfaces and memory bandwidth, the Ultra Cruise compute module, in combination with GM’s homegrown Ultra Cruise software stack, will be key to helping the system achieve what the company believes will be an unmatched combination of capability, reliability, predictability, and robust door-to-door hands-free driving in 95% of all driving scenarios.

“Despite its relatively small size, Ultra Cruise’s compute will have the processing capability of several hundred personal computers,” said Ken Morris, GM Vice President of Electric, Autonomous and Fuel Cell Vehicle Programs. “It will take qualities that have distinguished GM’s advanced driver assist systems since 2017 to the next level with door-to-door hands-free driving.”

The Ultra Cruise system will help power GM-developed ADAS software and features including perception, planning, localization, and mapping developed in-house at GM engineering facilities in Israel, the U.S., Ireland, and Canada. GM integrated Ultra Cruise’s software with camera, radar, and LiDAR sensor fusion to ensure a robust system with minimal latency.

The compute module is comprised of two Snapdragon SA8540P SoCs and one SA9000P AI accelerator to deliver low-latency control functions on 16-core CPUs and high-performance AI compute of more than 300 TOPS (tera operations per second). The SoCs are designed with the bandwidth for Ultra Cruise’s sensing, perception, planning, localization, mapping, and driver monitoring, and are designed to meet automotive system safety standards with multiple redundancies. In addition, the compute platform includes an Infineon Aurix TC397 processor for the highest ASIL-D system automotive safety integrity level.

“We are very proud of our collaboration with General Motors on one of the industry’s first uses of our Snapdragon SoCs in an automated driving system,” said Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. Senior Vice President and GM, Automotive. “Ultra Cruise powered by Snapdragon Ride on Cadillac vehicles will be an experiential and technological leap forward for the industry.”

GM opted for an air-cooled vs. liquid-cooled system that avoids heavy and inefficient thermal cooling lines throughout the vehicle, made possible by Snapdragon Ride’s high-performance, high-efficiency design. Ultra Cruise’s compute will also have the capability to evolve over time by leveraging Snapdragon Ride’s SoCs performance and high-speed interfaces for future expansion, as well as over-the-air software updates, enabled through the Ultifi software platform and GM’s Vehicle Intelligence Platform electrical architecture.

Additional details on the Celestiq production model will be announced later this year.