No Cadillac Diesels, Either

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Cadillac’s won’t be offering the diesel engines it had planned to, either.

Instead, GM’s luxury division will focus on . . . electrification. Because that makes all kinds of sense.

Cadillac President Steve Carlisle, speaking last week at the XT4 compact crossover launch, said the brand is “re-evaluating diesel technology.”

He went on to add:

“We have been working on diesel, but the markets may be changing more quickly than we anticipated,” he said. “Going forward, we will focus on electrification.”

No, the market hasn’t been changing – but the politics (and mandates) are another matter. EPA has made it almost impossible to legally sell a “compliant” diesel engine that isn’t too expensive to make it worth selling.

Cadillac had been working on four- and six-cylinder diesel engines for several years as part of its push into Europe, and had planned to offer diesel-powered models in the U.S. as well.

The XT4 was to have been offered with a diesel by 2020 or before, and Cadillac had expected to launch diesel engines in more models.

So much for that.

. . .

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6 COMMENTS

  1. to be fair pairing a diesel in a cadillac isnt great marketing.
    i think the first try went poorly quality wise. With diesel you think big rigs not prestige. not my problem. obviously the volkswagen diesels were excellent

    • Hi Mark,

      Yes, but remember that Mercedes and BMW both sold diesels for years successfully; I think Cadillac’s chief problem is that it’s no longer Cadillac. By which I mean large, plush and brassy. The Escalade is the only one that sort of is – and not surprisingly, it’s the only modern Cadillac that sells well.

  2. What I don’t get is: how do they think they are going to be selling all these electric models, when they can’t sell the ones they have now?

    If you end up with half of your models being electric, but less than 1% of the new car market is electric (that isn’t changing anytime soon) what are these dealers going to be doing?

    Most new car dealers in my area go out of their way to avoid ending up with too many electric cars, since they sell even more poorly here (you can go weeks without seeing ONE electric car). If anything, there are too many electric car models.

    Their in house marketing departments, and their dealers must be telling management that this situation is insane and is going to bankrupt everybody. Why are they ignoring the facts? Management that afraid of the government regulators?

    • Hi Rich,

      It is all about CAFE – and “greenhouse gas” emissions regs. EVs are what are sometimes referred to as compliance cars. They exist not because of market demand but as necessary make-work projects.

      • Well, the real problem is the growing world population is going to eventually consume all natural resources, both food and energy. Survival options at that point will be either mass starvation, genocide, and/or eating humans and burning them for firewood. How soon that will be depends upon many things, but I doubt that EVs or UNCLE will be the solution.

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