Escalade IQ on the Horizon at Cadillac

Readers who are fully caffeinated will recall Cadillac’s promise to exist this decade as a purveyor of electric-only vehicles. With the Lyriq already out in the wild and Celestiq in the hopper, plus a mysterious Vistiq and Lumistiq waiting in the wings, it doesn’t take an MBA in marketing to figure out Cadillac’s new naming scheme.

Except for one: Escalade. There’s a ton of brand equity in that name, so changing it to Escaladiq would likely cause weeping in the corner offices of RenCen. How about Escalade IQ, then?

This should not be a surprise. After all, we wrote about this development on these very pages all the way back in 2021. It’d seem our guesstimates at the time that Escalade IQ is planned for a regular-length rig whilst Escalade IQL is intended to append an extended-length brute may have been right on the money. Today’s announcement confirms the former, while the latter remains safely ensconced in GM’s special Drawer o’ Patents – located in the third sub-basement of RenCen, next to the flickering Coke machine, of course. 

There’s every chance in the world this Escalade IQ will share parts with the Hummer EV and will certainly be using GM’s Ultium architectures. And GM, if you’re listening, there’s still time to reverse course on yer plan to pull the plug on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto in EVs. Just sayin’. 

Promising the Escalade IQ will be revealed later this year, Cadillac says the machine will join the Lyriq and the upcoming Celestiq as Cadillac continues to build its all-electric portfolio. Specifically, it has been explained that the IQ designation is “Cadillac’s EV nomenclature” as it first debuted on the Lyriq. Using a bit of Vulcan logic, if Cadillac wants to build only EVs and IQ is its EV nomenclature, then all Cadillac vehicles will eventually end in IQ.

It is not unreasonable for some people to turn up their noses at this -iq naming scheme, but at least it is evoking some sort of reaction. The dunderhead decision by Johan De Nysschen to rename everything with the hateful CTx and XTx prefixes will surely go down as one of the more notable marketing blunders, ranking up there with Acura ditching tremendous names like Vigor and Legend for their own xSX alphabet soup as prime case studies for future textbook case studies. We’ll toss the ‘MK’ debacle at Lincoln in there too. Thank goodness the trend is reversing.

Even though the last couple of years have been topsy-turvy in terms of supply, the Escalade has historically sold in roughly equal numbers to the Suburban and Yukon XL, despite its higher price. It outsells everything else in the Cadillac showroom by a ratio of 2:1, approximately.

[Images: GM]

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