The Cadillac Lyriq Electric SUV Is Not Worth Waiting For
Park City, Utah, is pretty this time of year. Mountain sunlight drenches verdant hills strung with million-dollar ski lodges buttoned up for summer. Chestnut mares doze in pastoral repose. Shopkeeps don insta-smiles for travelers spending $40 on a bandana or squeaky dog toy.
But the 2023 Cadillac Lyriq transporting me through these bucolic environs had me in a funk. I had recently learned that the $62,990 SUV I was driving was a pre-production model—99% finished but technically not a customer-ready example of Cadillac’s first-ever fully electric vehicle. Which meant that any critique I might develop regarding it could be swatted away with an airy “It’ll be fixed by the time we get to production” comment from the folks selling it. This felt like a cop-out. Potential customers for this vehicle deserve to know what exactly they are getting into, not an approximation of something still to come.
The thing is, Cadillac is doing everything it can to get people into the Lyriq—fast. And it’s not working.
In 2020, Cadillac announced it would push ahead Lyriq production by nine months. At the time, it seemed obvious that in order to keep up appearances, parent company General Motors needed to produce an EV more easily swallowed by the general populace than the planned $200,000-plus Hummer and some (still) forthcoming electric pickups. Rival Ford started selling the Mach-e EV SUV in late 2020, and started production on the Lightning pickup truck EV this spring.
Meanwhile, every other luxury brand from Audi and BMW to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche is already knee-deep in EVs. Audi, for instance, lists eight of them for sale on its website, with more on the way. (Hyundai, by the way, is currently decimating Tesla and the rest of the EV pack
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