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Cadillac Elmiraj Concept slinks in Leno's Garage

Jay Leno's Garage has moved to Pebble Beach for the week. This time around, the affable comedian is taking a look at the Cadillac Elmiraj Concept that debuted during the Monterey car week, and is talking to General Motors vice president of global design, Ed Welburn.
There's plenty of reminiscing about what concept cars were like when these two were kids, before a fairly deep dive into the striking Elmiraj Concept itself. Welburn shares a few anecdotes about the design process behind the two-door concept, including how his designers changed his mind on the grille design.
After bringing up the Cimarron, Leno makes a solid point that the Elmiraj would be a solid production car that could even spawn a four-door variant. We couldn't agree more. Take a look below for the full video from Jay Leno's Garage.

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.

Cadillac CTS-V spotted with big exhaust, new grille?

If you thought Cadillac was content to leave its twin-turbocharged Vsport as the range-topping CTS, think again. Behold, our first good glimpse at the next-generation Cadillac CTS-V sedan, sporting more aggressive styling (somewhere under there), meaty quad-exhaust pipes, and what very well could be a new face for the V-badged Caddies.
Creating an all-new grille design seems like an awful lot of work just for a prototype, so it's very possible that the vertical-bar treatment you see here could make its way into production. Our spy photographers have pointed out that they've seen this same sort of grille treatment on prototypes for the smaller ATS-V sedan, and we've heard V-series models may soon have greater differentiation from the standard vehicles that sired them - that seems especially necessary if Cadillac insists on expanding this whole Vsport range.
Regardless of how its front end looks, the CTS-V ought to be a real monster. Industry sources say we can expect to see a supercharged version of General Motors' 6.2-liter V8 under the Caddy's hood, and considering the current car already makes 556 horsepower and 551 pound-feet of torque, we wouldn't be surprised to see a decent increase in both of those numbers. After all, one of the CTS-V's main competitors, the Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG, is currently putting out 550 hp and 590 lb-ft of torque. Could this mean a 600-hp Cadillac is on the horizon?