Sell Cadillacs in Europe? The idea sounds heretical in a part of the world where home-grown luxury cars are as exalted as the continent’s wines and cheeses.
But that is what General Motors Corp.’s luxury car division hopes to do.
The company introduced a redesigned 1998 Seville this month at the Frankfurt auto show. Cadillac says it’s the only time a U.S. carmaker has unveiled a new model outside North America.
GM announced two years ago that Cadillac would be one of its global flagship brands.
Now, says Cadillac General Manager John F. Smith, to be taken seriously, Cadillac must compete head-to-head on the home turf of European luxury standard-bearers Mercedes-Benz and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG and, in Japan, Toyota Motor Corp.’s Lexus and Nissan Motor Corp.’s Infiniti.
The Sevilles will be made at Cadillac’s Hamtramck plant near Detroit and exported to 40 countries.
To help crack overseas markets where cars drive on the left side of the road, including Britain, Japan and Hong Kong, Cadillac will build thousands of Sevilles with steering wheels on the right side, the first time it has done so since 1913.
Eventually, company officials hope overseas markets will account for 20 percent of all Seville sales.
European industry experts caution that the Seville faces some formidable speed-bumps. “The snob appeal of Europe’s luxury cars is very real here,” says Stephen Haggerty of Schroder Securities in London. “It is really tough to convince European car buyers that there is anything else.”
What’s more, Cadillac is entering a luxury-car war zone by trying to move into Europe. Mercedes leads the pack with 288,000 vehicles sold this year, followed by Audi at 274,000 and BMW at 263,000.
Lexus, which has been a hit in the U.S., has barely made a dent in Europe. This year, it has sold just 2,000 cars.
Certainly, no one at BMW or Mercedes seems to be worrying much about Cadillac’s new entry. After all, Europeans take pride in placing performance over comfort. They like tight steering, for which Cadillacs aren’t known. They prefer rear-wheel-drive; most American cars, including the new Seville, have front-wheel-drive.
With their narrower roads, smaller parking spaces and expensive gasoline, Europeans don’t like big cars.
What they do like is speed: On European freeways, it isn’t uncommon for traffic to move at 80 to more than 100 miles per hour.
“Most Europeans are not interested in cars like a Cadillac,” says Lutz Kunert, a German analyst based in New York who follows BMW for Georg Hauck & Sohn Bankiers.
“Only niche cars, like the Chrysler LeBaron, can sell within Europe.”
Cadillac executives were well aware that the slab-sided, boatlike Cadillac with its pillowy suspension and cluttered interior would have a lot of strikes against it in Europe and Asia. To develop the new Seville, they conducted clinics involving 4,000 customers in Asia, Europe and the U.S.
Designers simplified the Seville’s interior, shortened the exterior, improved the suspension, put on better tires and made the car quieter.
“If this car is going to be successful, it’s going to be what the customers have told us they want,” says Jack Velich, Cadillac’s chief engineer.
For all of that, the new Seville looks American. Its sculpted lines give it a hefty, boxy look that sticks out next to the more rounded Euro-shapes on even Lexus models.
Cadillac’s designers and marketers say they made a deliberate decision to embrace rather than hide the car’s roots. They hope to cash in on Cadillac’s cachet as an American icon, famous for its outlandish tailfins, hot-pink paint jobs and gargantuan size–some cars were 18 feet long.
“Through studies, we found that the Cadillac name is well respected throughout the world. People identify it with Elvis and the glamor of the ’50s and ’60s,” says Martin Walsh, Cadillac’s marketing services manager.
Other consumer products, such as Coke, Levis and Nike, have profited handsomely from their image as uniquely American. Cadillac should be no different, says Fred Teach, Cadillac’s brand manager for Europe.
“From a customer’s perspective, America is where your dreams are going to come true,” Teach says. “It’s successful and entrepreneurial and very much something we will build on.”
Cadillac executives say they may be in better marketing shape abroad than in the U.S., where lingering images of Cadillac’s marketing troubles in the 1980s and its aging customer base have made it a hard sell among Baby Boomers.
But many changes have been made. To conform with the European taste for a more spartan interior, Seville was designed to de-emphasize “fluff,” says Velich, the Cadillac chief engineer. The car has cup-holders, for example, but they are out of view.
The car also comes with a wide wheel track and tires more suitable for higher freeway speeds. Sound engineers worked for years to make sure the car was the quietest on the road. Cadillac also made sure the Seville could keep up on the Autobahn.
In addition, the version of the new Seville sold overseas will be four inches shorter.
For Japan, which Cadillac hopes will be a major market, engineers made the gas pedal flatter to the floor after learning that Japanese drivers like to sit farther from the wheel than Americans.
They also raised the back seats to improve the view because they expect many of the cars sold in Japan to be used by people with chauffeurs.
