Cadillac will keep its eye on ICE demand

Cadillac plans to go all-electric, but it will monitor electric vehicle margins and customer demand for internal combustion vehicles along the way, executives told dealers at the make meeting Saturday.

"Dealers' biggest fear was, 'I'm in Texas. What happens with ICE?' " said Inder Dosanjh, chairman of the Cadillac National Dealer Council. "They said, 'We're going to keep looking at ICE.'

"So a lot of dealers walked out of the meeting very calmly ... with relief."

General Motors' luxury brand plans to launch an all-electric portfolio in North America by 2030, five years ahead of GM's companywide target. Cadillac intends to stick with that plan, but it also will ensure that GM and its dealers are profitable, said Dosanjh, who is CEO of Dosanjh Family Auto Group, which includes four Cadillac stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cadillac showed dealers a photo of one of its upcoming EVs, a compact crossover similar in size to the XT4, at the meeting. Dosanjh said the new EV was well received, and executives assured dealers that the brand will sell the EV and the XT4 simultaneously for now.

"We are at a time of transition. This is our time to pivot," Rory Harvey, vice president of global Cadillac, told Automotive News ahead of the meeting. "We have one of the freshest lineups today in terms of our ICE portfolio, and we're complementing that with the rollout of EVs."

Cadillac's EV launch starts with the Lyriq midsize crossover. Harvey told dealers that the first production Lyriq will come off the assembly line in Spring Hill, Tenn., on March 21.

Harvey said that about 70 percent of Lyriq hand-raisers represent conquests from non-GM mainstream and luxury brands.