How does the $340
Category
🚗
MotorTranscript
00:00This is the 2025 Cadillac Celestic. It's over $300,000, completely hand-built,
00:23totally custom for each individual owner. They're only going to build 25 of them
00:28this year. Total departure for Cadillac. It's going up against the Rolls-Royces,
00:33the Bentleys of the world. We're gonna get it out on the road, see how this all
00:38comes together, see if a handcrafted Cadillac drives like you expect an ultra
00:43luxury, ultra just gorgeous sedan to drive.
00:58You take a look around and this is what's really fun about this car. All the materials
01:05have, you know, what Cadillac calls authenticity. To us, there's a lot of stuff that just looks
01:11really, really expensive and in many cases is very sparkly. It sounds really reductive
01:18to say this, but the car just sort of glitters. And you look around and you have these big screens.
01:25There's pretty much a full-width display going across the foot of the windshield.
01:30You have all these metal accents and Cadillac likes to lean into this a lot by
01:35saying, if it looks like metal, it is metal. And to anyone that remembers, you know, old
01:42General Motors interiors can appreciate what that really means. There's not a lot of parts
01:47commonality between this and any other Cadillac. There's over 150 3D printed items in this car.
01:54Most of them a sort of cool, powdered metal that then gets rendered into real metal.
02:00That's where you're getting all of these sparkles from. Not only is it just because the part is shiny,
02:05but you look at these speaker grills that are etched and acid dipped and lasered into this ultra-delicate
02:12latticework. And customers can pick two different shades of this, but they can also just
02:17start to mess with the design on its own.
02:23And this is where that custom-tailored, ultra-exclusive experience of just simply buying the car comes in.
02:30You know, Cadillac is eager to talk about how it's highly unlikely that with over 350,000
02:37build combinations or possibilities, and that's just off the rack, you know, you can bring your own
02:44paint colors, you can bring your own materials, you can bring whatever it is. With that level of
02:49possibilities, no two Celestics should be alike, and they likely won't be. You know, that sort of open-ended
02:56openness to pretty much whatever your heart desires when you're designing this car is a huge part of
03:04what makes this a $300,000 plus car.
03:08It's not simply that the car is expensive, these materials are expensive. The level of customer service
03:14that Cadillac is engaging here, the level of design, is unreal. The car deserves its own coffee table
03:23book that just goes into all these things. GM may not have these craftspeople who've been tanning
03:29leather a certain way for ages, the way Rolls-Royce might have. They're selling a completely different
03:36kind of handmade story here. It's very industrial. It's like showing off what GM can do with their engineering
03:43when they're just allowed to run hog wild over budgets and suppliers, whatever. They can just do it to the
03:51maximum, and you find that throughout. And it's all these really, really impressive stories of craftsmanship, yes,
03:58but it's like cool industrial might, and like ingenuity and innovation, and you just can't appreciate it enough
04:06every time you sit in the car.
04:13So while my eyes are getting dazzled by all these sparkly bits inside,
04:18onlookers, anyone outside the car, their jaws are dropping because it just looks like a concept car.
04:23So if the interior is all about this handcrafted, 3D printed, just crazy craftsmanship, the outside is all about form factor.
04:33It's just a designer's dream, and you could just tell they were allowed to let loose, and it looks like a show car for the road.
04:42So as you can see, the outside of the Celestic is very show car.
04:55It's, you know, the scale is massive, these wheels are massive.
04:59These are the smaller of the two wheel choices, and they're 22 inches.
05:03So we're talking like Escalade sized bits slathered on this massive low slung sedan.
05:10And, you know, the material quality, just like the interior is there.
05:14It's just rendered in painted surfaces.
05:17Obviously this is all carbon fiber.
05:19There's this blow molded aluminum, some 3D printed metal, and the jewelry is toned back a lot, you know, versus the, you know, interior.
05:29It's just, the effect is wild.
05:31There's no door handings.
05:32So you just have this completely smooth body side, and, you know, just a little bit of jewelry from the LEDs, that Cadillac signature, vertical lighting.
05:42It is amazing.
05:59So Cadillac entering this space, it's over 300 grand, hand-built, everything is to your spec, everything's sumptuous, everything feels special.
06:12So how does it drive?
06:14The driving experience is great.
06:15It's pretty much binary.
06:17There's two choices, which is tour, which is your kind of baseline, and then sport.
06:23That's it.
06:24Those are the two choices that Cadillac gives you.
06:27And you can go through and individualize the setting to your own liking, but it's nice how simple this is, because, again, the focus is on, in order, design, then luxury.
06:39And then we have this driving experience, which the big question is, does it live up to this price point?
06:44And the only real competitor it has in this space, which is to say the only other all-electric, ultra-luxury car that isn't an SUV, would be the Rolls-Royce Spectre.
06:56Now, that only has two doors.
06:58This has four.
06:59But you can argue this has a pretty coopy roofline.
07:03Both seat four.
07:05They're very, very closely matched.
07:07They're both huge.
07:08They're both well-isolated.
07:10And Rolls-Royce, obviously, has been in this space forever.
07:14They're the benchmark.
07:16They're up there.
07:17If you're buying something that costs as much as your house, you're looking at a Rolls-Royce.
07:22So can Cadillac get up there with the Celestic?
07:26It's a great question.
07:27Having driven both cars now, this is a little more connected.
07:33It's a little more Cadillac.
07:34You feel a little bit more road under the tires.
07:37The body is flatter.
07:38It's not to say that the Spectre flops around or is this, you know, old-timey boat or anything like that.
07:44In the Cadillac, they're taking a lot of that know-how that they've applied across their sedan lineup in recent years,
07:52where you have cars like the CT5 Blackwing or the CT4 Blackwing.
07:56These are track specials.
07:57They're super great to drive.
07:59It recalls they're like an American BMW.
08:01Great.
08:02This car has just enough of that sizzle to remind you that there's a connection to the brand,
08:07without interrupting that Rolls-Royce waftiness and the comfort.
08:12And then if I go and switch to Sport, again pretty much the only other setting,
08:17this tightens things up just enough where if for whatever reason you were in a big hurry, in your big Cadillac,
08:25and you're going to feel very confident running down the road.
08:28Even though this thing is humongous, it feels incredibly wide.
08:32It fills up a lane.
08:33But the steering weights up a little bit.
08:36You get a little more immediacy out of the motor's response.
08:41The car shrinks around you.
08:42It has rear wheel steering.
08:43It has these active anti-roll bars that resist lean.
08:47So I'm not flopping over in my seat right now, even though we're in a three-plus-ton all-electric ultra-luxury land yacht for all intents and purposes.
08:57If you really need to hustle, you get the maximum juice from this V button.
09:02Now this is about the closest thing you're going to get to a Sport mode overall,
09:06because even the regular Sport mode is genteel.
09:09It's about sort of moving swiftly, not, you know, tearing up a racetrack.
09:14But really all this does is click it, and now you get all of the power.
09:21Since these are the same motors that motivate the much smaller Lyric V Sport SUV,
09:29strapped to this much bigger car, you're not getting a lot of this wow factor.
09:34This is not a Lucid Air Sapphire.
09:36But it's pretty competitive with that Spectre.
09:39It'll come down to an owner's preference.
09:41But this car's duality where you're mostly comfortable, even when hustling it in this Sport mode.
09:47And then you switch back to Tour, and you're just wafting down the road.
09:51I mean, just soaking things up.
09:52We're just floating along without getting seasick.
09:56And it's just a really, really satisfying car to cruise around it.
10:02So after driving this car,
10:31So after driving this Celestic,
10:33sitting in the Celestic,
10:35enjoying the Celestic,
10:36beholding the Celestic,
10:38is it a viable $300,000 Cadillac?
10:41Absolutely.
10:42If you were to go through this process, start to finish,
10:44spec one out,
10:45do the whole rigmarole,
10:47picking out your colors and your materials,
10:49and then you take it home and actually drive it and own it,
10:52it looks like a concept car that just happens to be out in the real world.
10:56It's incredibly rare.
10:57It absolutely could go up against a Rolls-Royce.
11:01And not seem ridiculous doing that.
11:04This is totally new territory for Cadillac,
11:06and it is an absolute stunner of a car.
11:09Head on over to MotorTrend.com for the full drive story.