Wishing You A Sweet, Healthy CT5775

If nothing else, Johan De Nysschen has a tried and true playbook: move the company’s headquarters and revamp the nomenclature of their product lineup. How well did it work for Infiniti? Well, can *you* recite their product lineup without looking at their website?

Alphanumeric combinations never work as a remedy for lagging sales or poor brand image. Acura is still catching heat for abandoning Legend, Vigor and Integra. Nobody knows what a QX80, a Q70L or a Q50 is – and even though the whole “Q” structure was supposed to harken back to the flagship Q45, the Q40 is now a lame-duck G37 being sold as Infiniti’s entry-level product. At least until the Q30 arrives, and even then that’s a Mercedes-Benz CLA, which is…

The current Cadillac naming structure, which is a banal cipher of alphabetical combinations, is apparently not good enough, so adding a number after an arbitrary two-letter sequence will fix things. What won’t fix them? Revamping their too high prices, re-engineering the godawful CUE system, fixing the tiny backseat and the heinous gauge cluster on the ATS, which is the one part that literally stares the driver in the face at all times, but looks like it was harvested from a G-Body Buick Skylark.

The Cadillac name change is nothing more than re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. With sales slumping in a growing luxury market, bloated inventories, a failed push to expand in Europe (despite no strategy, no appropriate product and no diesel engines) and no discernible strategy beyond moving to pricey digs in Manhattan, Cadillac is the Sick Man of The Ren Cen. The name change reminds me of the old Jewish folk remedy where gravely ill children were called “Alter”, which means “old” in Yiddish, which would ostensibly make them older, allowing them to bypass typical childhood ailments that could cause death or serious incapacitation. It didn’t work in the shtetl, and it’s not going to work in 21st century America either.

Speaking of which, it’s also the Jewish New Year. According to the Bible, it’s the year 5775 – except in Cadillac’s new HQ, where it’s the year CT5765. Maybe that’s what they’ll call the new Escalade.