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Cadillac XT4 crossover to be built in Kansas City

Cadillac's upcoming XT4, a crossover we've previously known as the XT3 in a long series of spy shots of heavily camouflaged mules, will be built at General Motors' assembly plant in Kansas City on the same platform as the Chevrolet Malibu, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the plan. That will give Cadillac another entry in the red-hot luxury crossover segment and, GM hopes, help to reverse a sales slump in the U.S. It'll also breath life into the Kansas City plant that makes the slow-selling Malibu, where GM cut a third shift last year, by sharing the assembly line between the crossover and sedan and defraying costs for each vehicle. The XT4 was known most recently as the XT3, with styling cues based on the Escala concept sedan from 2016. It's slightly smaller than the XT5, Cadillac's top-selling vehicle, and will also augment the full-size Escalade in Cadillac's stable of SUVs when it makes its expected debut later this year. Cadillac last week reported its second-highest-ever sales mark with 356,467 vehicles, an increase of 15.5 percent over 2016. But that mark papers over an 8 percent sales decline in the U.S. to 156,440 vehicles. The luxury brand is on a hot streak in China, where sales jumped 50.8 percent last year to 175,489 units.Related Video: Image Credit: Brian Williams Plants/Manufacturing Cadillac Chevrolet GM Crossover sales cadillac xt5 cadillac xt4 cadillac xt3

Cadillac still planning for big things in China

Despite some hiccups, China remains the auto industry's great hope for new vehicle sales, with significant sales gains and a huge upside. Nowhere is that hope more fervent than at General Motors, which offers eight different marques in the Asian nation. China has been GM's single biggest market the last three years running, and is unlikely to give up that title anytime soon. Yet its premiere brand, Cadillac, has remained essentially stagnant, selling just 30,000 units in China last year. That's in a segment where sales of luxury vehicles has outpaced that of the larger Chinese market. So what gives?
According to Cadillac officials Autoblog spoke with in China this week at the Shanghai Motor Show, it's been a problem of product - they haven't had the right ones. Displacement taxation issues, import tariffs and currency fluctuations have all conspired to make the brand's products less appealing than they might otherwise have been. But GM is stepping on the gas with Cadillac, and executives are eyeballing 100,000 sales by 2016 - more than triple the Wreath and Crest's current volume. And the expectations for the brand only get more ambitious from there - they're shooting for 10 percent of the luxury market by 2020. Bob Socia, President of GM China, promises that there will be a new Caddy launched in the market each year from now through 2016 and most will be built in China. Characterizing the company's efforts to revive the brand's fortunes as a "relaunch" of sorts, Cadillac also figures to gain dealers as GM expands its sales outlet footprint westward.
New products like a made-in-China XTS sedan (with a market-specific 2.0-liter four-cylinder to avoid heavy displacement taxes) will help, and Socia hinted that the ATS sport sedan could be next in line for in-country production. The SRX crossover - currently the brand's best-selling model in China - will also likely get a long look for future local production when the next-generation model is introduced. In the meantime, Cadillac unveiled the Escalade ESV Hybrid (shown above) as its latest model addition to capitalize on the market's white-hot luxury SUV segment.

Junkyard Gem: 1998 Cadillac Catera

A decade or so after Ford tried to swipe some US-market sales from European luxury marques by selling the German-built Ford Scorpio with Merkur badging, General Motors opted to sell the German-built Opel Omega luxury sedan as a Cadillac. The Catera was a reasonably nimble rear-wheel-drive sedan with a 200-horse DOHC V6 engine, and its badge-engineered nature made it a much less costly gamble than, say, the Cadillac Allante, which had its bodies built in Italy and flown to Michigan for assembly. Unfortunately, it had no manual transmission option, and Americans who remembered the miserable US-market Opels of the 1970s were put off by the Catera's Opelness. Its $29,995 list price was quite a bit cheaper than that of the (slightly less powerful) $39,800 BMW 528i and a bit less than the (slightly more powerful) $33,585 Acura 3.2 TL's cost, but the Catera didn't sell in large numbers. This one made it to a respectable mileage figure, and the nice interior shows that it was well-cared-for during its 18 years on the road. The ads for the Catera featured a cartoon duck named Ziggy. Fast, fun, fiendishly flexible! By 2000, Cadillac had ditched the duck and was touting the Catera's value. Related Video: