The Cadillac brand will return to Detroit after a controversial relocation to New York City in 2015. The brand’s new president, Steve Carlisle, announced the relocation in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
The move back to Detroit follows the departure of former Cadillac President Johan de Nysschen. The executive abruptly left General Motors’ luxury division in April. Carlisle, formerly managing director of GM Canada, immediately took over. Carlisle said the decision to take the brand back to Detroit comes from “inefficiencies” between the Cadillac team in NYC and GM in Detroit.
“We have a huge number of launches ahead of us,” Carlisle told the WSJ. “We’ve got to think about how we take inefficiencies out of the communication process between the Cadillac team and the GM partners.”
Cadillac has plans to launch three new vehicles before 2020, and the boss said it’s best for the brand to form closer ties with vehicle design and GM’s engineering division. The product onslaught, coincidentally, comes from de Nysschen’s tenure.
Carlisle was brought on to oversee an expedited process to bring new vehicles to market. The plans include the recently launched XT4 compact crossover, a three-row XT6 crossover, two new sedans likely called the CT4 and CT5, and a next-generation Escalade.
Although going to New York was met with outcry in 2015, de Nysschen and former CMO Uwe Ellinghaus defended the move. Both said Cadillac was better able to attract talent to the company in New York City. The personnel stationed in New York City were mostly marketing and strategy operations, while engineering and design remained in Michigan. About 110 people work at Cadillac’s SoHo-based headquarters.
