Cadillac’s surging electric vehicle sales are a bright spot for a brand that has spent decades trying to recapture the prestige it lost to foreign rivals.
“We’re building the best Cadillacs we’ve ever built,” said John Roth, vice president of global for Cadillac.
U.S. sales for Cadillac, a General Motors brand, have been up for 12 consecutive quarters. The Escalade full-size SUV — a traditional combustion vehicle without a plug — is still the biggest seller for the brand by a long shot, and three-quarters of the cars Cadillac sells still burn fuel.
But EVs stand out, especially when compared with competitors. About 25% of Cadillac’s sales through the second quarter were EVs, and that jumped closer to a third of the total over the last 60 or so days — far outpacing the overall industry EV share of about 6% to 8% and even the luxury segment share of roughly 14%.
Cadillac was “the standard for so long of luxury vehicles,” said Jessica Caldwell, head of insights for Edmunds. “But that has been, I’d say for most people, a time they don’t even remember anymore.”
Nearly 80% of Cadillac’s customers are trading in cars from some of the brands that have for so long eclipsed it in the luxury car market — Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. About 10% of Cadillac customers are trading in Teslas.
The second quarter saw a boom in overall EV sales as customers rushed to buy before the expiration of the federal tax credit this fall.
In addition, Cadillac might be scooping customers up from Germans now — something the brand had been trying to do for decades — but EV tech is moving quickly. Cadillac sales are tanking in China, as are those of basically every non-Chinese automaker. The only thing keeping Chinese EVs out of the United States is a wall of tariffs.
“They’re now beyond where we expect the industry to be five years from now,” Tyson Jominy, vice president, data and analytics at J.D. Power, said of Cadillac. “So they’re they’re moving very quickly into that space. But we know things are moving really fast. Culture is moving fast. Technology is moving fast. There’s a lot of things that can change very quickly. And success today does not necessarily mean success tomorrow or five years down the road.”
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