Cadillac not for Oz before '2021 or 2022'

There is no feasible way Cadillac can deliver cars to Australia or any other right-hand drive market before 2021 or 2022.

Speaking at last week's Los Angeles motor show, Cadillac President Johan de Nysschen reiterated his previous view that the company’s global aspirations will need to be redefined as left-hand drive aspirations for the time being.

Cadillac's global marketing chief Uwe Ellinghaus told motoring.com.au at the Dubai motor show earlier this month that the arrival of the General Motors luxury brand in RHD markets including Australia has been put on the backburner until after 2020.

Now, however, the company's global boss admits that despite working on two new sedan architectures and borrowing four more for SUVs from the GM family toolkit, Cadillac will not have the engineering capacity to produce a range of RHD models for up to seven years.

“The issue for us is that we want to do right-hand drive, but we want to do it so that when we enter the right-hand drive world, we do not go to it with a piecemeal basis,” said de Nysschen in LA.

“We need to finesse the timing so we can give the dealers a full showroom of cars. That timing, when we look at it against the life cycles in our portfolio, gets out towards 2021 or 2022.

“That is the first time when the sun and the moon and the stars align to give it to us.”

That doesn’t stop his ambitious goals to finally turn Cadillac into a global brand, but the president said he didn’t want to disappoint people with his uncomfortable reality.

“We are facing huge investments to expand our product footprint but we don’t have limitless CapEx.

“As we look at the longer term, Cadillac must have aspirations to be more of a global brand. We must.”

That’s one of the reasons de Nysschen has taken the development of Cadillac’s next all-new family of sedans in house, insisting the brand can cover its passenger car requirements off with two new architectures.

“The architecture to do it for the global market will be enabled for right-hand drive and will only be rear-wheel drive.

“It’s more likely that we will have unique architectures on the sedan side and utilise the group with crossovers.

“For the dynamics and sophistication we want on a sedan, it dictates a more expensive architecture.

“We can achieve all that we want to do with two sedan architectures, Alpha and Omega.”

Those two architectures will be expected to provide Cadillac’s premium alternatives, with one architecture covering off the Audi A3/Mercedes-Benz CLA segment and the A4/BMW 3 Series/C-Class segment, while the other one would take on the A6/5-Series/E-Class segment and the A8/7 Series/S-Class size of cars.

“And on the crossover side it’s more interesting. We have four crossovers and SUVs.

“Even if you share one architecture with other brands, it does not mean that we don’t have a development cost for the Cadillac side.

“There are features of the design is flexible for Cadillac. For a Cadillac we might decide that the car needs IRS but not for a other brands.

“So some architectures will be Cadillac unique and others will be shared.”

With no Cadillacs on the horizon for Australia until at least 2021, Chevrolet's new Alpha-based Camaro also ruled out for RHD and the imported 2018 Commodore to be based on Opel's next front/all-wheel drive Insignia, the only near-term prospect of a rear-drive GM model for Australia appears to be the mystery sports car Holden has promised after it ceases manufacturing in 2017.