A drive in the Caddy Ciel convertible

The Cadillac Ciel convertible concept allows you to gaze at the open sky while wallowing in the levels of luxury usually reserved for minor royalty. Caddy’s comeback continues here...
 
Words: Pat Devereux 
Photography: Anton Watts

This article originally appeared in the November issue of Top Gear magazine

Of all the things guitar god Jimi Hendrix was known to consume during his brief visit to earth, Cadillacs were a known favourite. Offering a mix of over-the-top showmanship and inspired invention, the massive, candy-coloured land yachts were a fitting mode of transport for the psychedelic genius.

Cadillac sold near 200,000 extroverted cars a year in those days. Big, swooping de Villes and Eldorados with enough interior space to fit an entire football team, and engine sizes that could consume a US gallon before they reached the end of your drive. It wasn’t just the Woodstock speaker cabinets that were booming, the US economy was on a roll, too. And Cadillac was the success symbol of the generation.

But not for much longer. Hendrix died in 1970, a few years before Cadillac started to lose its lustre, a victim of the Seventies oil crisis. It was music’s loss, but Jimi’s gain, as he didn’t have to witness the downward spiral of his chosen ride into ever less special and unalluring territory.

The brand rediscovered its mojo at the turn of the century with the disruptively angular CTS, the watered-down version of the Evoq concept car, and has pursued an arrow-straight, curve-free design course ever since. The only round things on the cars are the rims and the steering wheel, but it’s distinctive – albeit aggressive, too – and the cars now have performance and handling on a par with Europe’s best.

So the swoopy, take-your-time Ciel (that’s French for Sky, dropouts) you see before you came as more of a shock than a surprise. One minute, Caddy’s pursuing parallel lines into the future, then up wafts this fabulous chunk of lifestyle and has us all asking: what’s it for?

It’s part of Cadillac’s search for a new mantra to refocus the company around, that’s what. “All our competition plays to a single strength,” says Cadillac Global Design Director, Clay Dean. “BMW has the Ultimate Driving Machine; Audi has Vorsprung durch Technik. Everything they do goes back to reinforcing that goal. So we said, ‘What is Cadillac’s single strength? What made Cadillac desirable in its day?’ We were the king of large luxury and of flamboyant, progressive styling. That’s what we were.”

Dean’s assertion is that today’s Cadillacs have moved too far from this sumptuous DNA, and they need to get it back. ‘‘What we’re doing today is great, because luxury evolves, but what do we need to do to reinforce our strength? Large luxury. That is what we do. That’s what we did best.”

Rather than conjure up images of yesteryear Caddys as the inspiration for this move, Dean
says they looked at the current model line-up as their guide. Which vehicle stood out to them as the leitmotif of the whole range, and subtly underpins the Ciel’s design language? It wasn’t any of the coupes or saloons. Or the estates. It was... the Escalade.

As I imagine an SUV-shaped Russian doll containing the entire 2020 Cadillac range, Dean explains why. “Escalade plays to the strengths of what Cadillac is all about – large luxury with presence. And so that, really, has formed the basis of the Ciel and the subsequent vehicles that will emerge from it. Both as concept cars and what may or may not show up in production. It’s a return to that presence.”

Well, they’ve certainly nailed that part with the Ciel. Unquestionably the star concept car at this year’s Pebble Beach Concours, this exquisite slice of modern Americana had normally genteel billionaires scrabbling past each other on the grassy hillside just to get a look at it.

Then, once they’d seen it, they wanted to buy it.  It wasn’t clear which of the Ciel’s features most appealed to them, but there’s plenty to choose from. As a four-seat, four-door convertible, it sits on its 22in rims in the long-vacant, never-filled hole in the market left by the departed Lincoln Continental. Its styling doesn’t desert completely the current Cadillac angularity, just softens it and introduces an elegance that has all the presence, just without so much steroidal aggression.

Key to this is the long, upsweeping line that runs the length of the car, kicking upwards as it nears the rear. But it’s also reinforced when you look at the car from above, or when sitting inside it. The two nickel-plated rails that run the entire length of the car arc gently from stem to stern, making the car feel like it’s enveloping you.

The overall design is still hugely reductive,  with not a crease or a handle spoiling your eye’s smooth progress over its exterior shape and into the cabin. The light does most of the complicated work for you, picking out the subtle changes in form. The doorhandles are integrated into the top rails and pop the doors out parallel to the body before swinging wide on their hinges to expose the completely pillarless, yawning entry to the fabulously spacious interior.

With a wheelbase 30cm longer than a CTS saloon and about the same as Jaguar XJ L, there’s plenty of room to lounge, kick off your shoes and just enjoy the ride in your tasteful, upscale vineyard-inspired olive wood and Cabernet-coloured interior. Rear passengers get video screens, a central armrest with interchangeable pods à la Thunderbirds, which range from a cigar humidor to a mini drinks cabinet.

There are also sprung cashmere scarves which extend to cover the occupants then retract like a flex back into the car body when you’ve finished with them.  Up front, the story is the same, with classic instruments flanked by a small cluster of screens. There’s a larger pop-out screen for the passenger, and a few other interesting detail touches, but the overriding sense is one of calm serenity and simple sophistication. Like you have just stepped aboard a launch and are about to slice a silent path across a glassy smooth lake.

Driving the Ciel just reinforces that feeling even more. Powered by a 425bhp, 3.6-litre,
twin-turbo V6 backed up by a lithium-battery-powered hybrid system, which together drive all four wheels, it makes unhurried, sure-footed and, it has to be said, very large progress down the road on its independently suspended nickel-plated rims and vast ceramic brakes.

Being a concept, it’s only just fast enough to get out of its own way at the moment. But that’s still enough to animate this huge cartoon of a car and turn this dream into a near reality. All that’s missing are three friends and a far-off destination. There is a claret-coloured canvas roof, which was hidden away during our drive, but that will be shown, along with a few other detail updates, in its full glory at the LA Show in November.

The impressive thing is how much like a Caddy it feels inside and out. Loads of concepts look like an artist’s fantasy with a brand’s badging stuck on. Peel the badge off, and many could be anything. Not the Ciel. The bluff front might be softened slightly, but the vertical lights and flat planes are still evident enough to leave you under no illusion that this is – or could be – one of GM’s finest.

Just how likely that is to happen took an upturn recently when rumours suggested that
the General has greenlit its new Omega large car platform architecture. If the economy doesn’t crater again, this will underpin a new Cadillac range-topper and possibly provide a perfect base for the spawn of the Ciel. Or not.

As impressive as the Ciel is, it’s just one of three key concept cars Cadillac will show over the next three years – each one debuting at Pebble – which describe in metal, carbon fibre and rubber, the new core Cadillac thinking. Back to Dean...

“When we sat down and looked at luxury, we distilled it down to three personas,” he says. “First, there was The Journey, the experience of the drive, the anticipation of it and the way you felt while
in that event [this is what the Ciel is supposed to explore]. Then, there’s The Drive, which is
the visceral feel of being in control and how the vehicle responds to the driver. And finally, there’s The Arrival, which is what it’s like to show up, how you feel when you get to your destination.”

Representing The Journey phase of this process, the Ciel isn’t so much about the hands-on driving sensations as much as the emotions everyone in the car feels while driving. “It’s the anticipation that you are going to some beautiful place and you are going to feel everything around you,” Dean says. “The vehicle empowers you to have  all these wonderful experiences and memories with friends and bathes you in luxury.”

It was this thinking, rather than a designer’s pencil, that led the creation process. “We didn’t design it,” he says. “We just wanted to establish the opportunities of where we could go with Cadillac’s form and language, to soften the language of the surface of the car.”

And it’s hard to deny that they have. So for now, and to quote old Jimi himself, excuse
me while I kiss the sky...