The Celestiq EV is Cadillac’s return to its hand-built, ultra-luxe roots

If you’re the kind to watch quite a bit of TV (other methods of escaping reality are available), you might come across an odd phrase: it’s the Cadillac of the sky, the Cadillac of minivans, the Cadillac of automobiles. Canyoneerooooo. And so on.

But what does that even mean these days? The expensive one for old people? The one that used to be best but that was ever so long ago? As Snoop put it in The Wire after she’s sold ‘the Cadillac of nail guns’, “The man said if we want to shoot nails, this here’s the Cadillac. He means Lexus but he ain’t know it".

Clearly, that’s not something Cadillac is going to take lying down anymore. And, to mangle a metaphor, the Celestiq is the kind of car to make us sit up and take notice. Entirely hand-built in Caddy’s ‘Global Technical Center’ in Michigan and promising the kind of luxury usually reserved for bad hip hop lyrics, the Celestiq is as far from the Florida golf club set as any Cadillac has ever been.

Details are scarce ahead of its proper debut on 22 July, but a four-zone smart glass roof, panoply of 3D-printed parts and king’s riches of interior materials are just a few of the features that’ll set the Celestiq apart, even among Tesla, Lucid and Porsche in the take-no-prisoners luxury EV space.

If its own engine (a twin-turbo, DOHC, 32-valve V8 reserved solely for Cadillacs) was a statement of intent and the Lyriq was a taste of the electric future to come, the Celestiq leaves no room for interpretation on where Cadillac wants to be in the future. That is, right where it was in the past: the ne plus ultra of automobiles. The Cadillac, even.