Car Design News: The Cadillac Celestiq never ceases to make my jaw hit the floor. Why was it important to bring this in particular tonight? Because you obviously have a strong portfolio of potential candidates…

Michael Simcoe: We do have a lot of cars we could have brought tonight. The Celestiq has been the crowning glory. You don’t often get a chance to do a hand-built car north of US$300,000. And it’s been a chance to talk differently about the brand.

CDN: Cadillac has always been fairly storied.

MS: We let it go for a few years. But doing something like the Celestiq was a proof point both internally and externally about how serious we are about making Cadillac a great brand again.

CDN: And was it a difficult conversation internally to have? Do you say you want to do something hand-built over US$300,000?

MS: We didn’t put it quite like that [laughs]. I mean, it came from design. It was a puzzle that we made. Magalie Debellis put together an original concept, [so it was a] normal process with a scale model all the way through to a full-size one. 

People saw it was kind of breathtaking in its proportions. The fastback was a very uncharacteristic expression in the rear of the car. Some people like it, some people don’t. Our aim was to shock a few. Not everyone has to like it because not everyone has the price of entry. But it allowed us to do something quite special.

CDN: And it taps into a wider point about design heritage. Cadillac, you feel like it lost its way a little bit, and this was the sort of project needed to bring it back to where it was. 

MS: Cadillac is, I guess, the only real luxury American brand left. It was very important to bring it back in style at an appropriate level.

Cadillac is American and it is clearly an American design vehicle. It’s a little bit in your face, a bit of swagger about it. And that’s the way the brand always was. You talk to people about the belief they have in their mind about how important Cadillac was for America, Celestiq reinterprets and brings back in a very modern way all of those really important memories and the heritage of Cadillac when it was at its best. And when it was the standard of the world.

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