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By Brett Berk
Photo courtesy of Cadillac
Cadillac, one of the most venerable nameplates in automotive history, with a culture of almost 120 years, has just presented a maximum concept in a position for the production of its first electric vehicle (EV). The Lyriq, a sumptuous four-seater SUV, will be the first new car subsidized through General Motors’ Ultium scalable battery system. This massively packed electric platform will allow GM to produce dozens of new electric cars with logo shapes and sizes over the next few years, with different amounts of strength and range, from cars to full-size pickup trucks.
When the Lyriq is on sale in 2022, probably starting in the mid-five and with a planned diversity of more than three hundred miles, this will be the first step in Cadillac’s role as GM’s pioneering logo. electric vehicles. It will also include a box full of battery SUVs, familiar luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Tesla, as well as start-ups you may never have heard of, such as Bollinger, Fisker and Rivian. The Cadillac game in this domain will come with a cutting-edge generation and, in particular, an internal and external design with a vision for the future.
The Lyriq expects to compete in a packed box of battery SUV.
“The coolest Cadillacs of the afterlife have been turning points,” says Andrew Smith, CEO of logo design. “They’re looking for the long term. Therefore, Lyriq’s general mandate was to design the Cadillac in the long run.”
The result is a seductive shape that balances the classic with the outraged. The front is blunt, with a new and active soft signature, arranged not only in corners like classic head knights, but also combines and intertwines in the ‘calandre’. These Gentiles, who will have the signature of Cadillac, will be used to “greet” the occupants as they manipulate them, offering what Smith calls “a sense of opportunity and experience.”
Cadillac designed the look of the car to give the impression of having “a liquid steel feel.”
The aspects of the frame have an attractive concave and convex surface, an effort to achieve what Smith calls “a liquid steel feel”. The overall shape is fluid, though straight, reflecting Smith’s preference for the Lyriq to have a “strong classic position.” The remedy of the rear is perhaps the maximum innovative, with a tailgate that protrudes like a mollusk and the iconic vertical taillights of Cadillac represented in two parts, the highest of which penetrates deep into the appearance of the frame, at most in jest.
This last detail would possibly have been influenced by the location where he created the Lyriq, the outdoor General Motors Technical Center in Detroit, a masterpiece of the mid-century fashion campus designed through Eero Saarinen, with the help of Harry Bertoia, Florence Knoll. and others. “You’ll see in some of the images, we film them around the Saarinen campus,” Smith says. “In this environment, I love this car. All the feel of a mid-century fashionable campus, a long-term positive. When you see this car driving, you think the long term is here.”
The interior of the Lyriq continues this paradigm of mixing the traditional with the expressive. A giant single-screen OLED display curves on the board, tilted toward the driver. A new front demo logo is truly augmented and projects it onto navigation and other data on the windshield in the driver’s view box. And Cadillac’s new generation Super Cruise driving is integrated, allowing you to actually drive hands-free (while the driver’s eyes remain on the road) on 200,000 miles of Mapped U.S. roads.
A look at the back of Cadillac’s new all-electric SUV.
Although classic fabrics such as wood, steel and leather are still used indoors, they are presented intriguingly. The veneer is backlit. The steel is brushed and disturbed. Much of the leather interior is a dreamy green bottle. Some leather ornaments are cut and turned to one side, to spread what Smith calls “their bark,” and then interspersed with steel. Surprise and excitement abound, as is the case with shiny suede inserts inside the glove compartment and cabin garage compartments.
Overall, the Lyriq’s design goes beyond Audi and Mercedes-Benz’s new electric SUV designs, which attempt to pass their electrification under the radar, reseaving themselves to any other crossover. But it’s less radical than Tesla’s or Jaguar’s efforts to create absolutely new shapes for their battery-powered vehicles, released from the required conventions – engine at the front, fuel tank at the rear, transmission between – internal combustion engines. According to Smith, this is intentional. “The very concept that an electric vehicle has to be seen as a clinical project? Maybe if he’s the only one in his wallet, he might be relevant,” Smith says. “But if it’s the first in a long series, it’s going to have to be proportional and beautiful.”
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