Top brass at Cadillac have made it abundantly clear they plan to exit this decade solely as the purveyor of electric vehicles. To that end, a swath of new model names have been floated, including the Lyriq which is set for the 2023 model year.
Now, thanks to internet sleuthing, we may have learned a few more of the names Cadillac has up its all-electric sleeve. They all end in ‘iq’ … except for one.
If you guessed ‘Escalade’ as the outlier, give yourself a gold star. There’s a less than zero chance, after all, the marketing team is going to squander the equity built in that name. Thanks to some snooping of patent documents by the writers at CarBuzz, it appears we will eventually be treated to the spellcheck-vexing Vistiq and Lumistiq.
Oh, and the Escalade IQL.
Your author is all for the return of real and creative names at Cadillac, which is slowly binning the hateful CT- and XT- alphanumerics thrust upon it by Johan De Nysschen after he similarly bulldozed his way through Infiniti and put the letter ‘Q’ on everything. At least all these new Cadillac names evoke some sort of response beyond customers asking what’s the difference between an XT5 and an XT6 and an XT8472.
There’s also something to be said for marketing consistency within a brand (likely part of Johann’s argument for his naming scheme), so having all its vehicles end in ‘iq’ isn’t the worst idea in the world, even if it may cause some tenured – read: old – Cadillac sales staff to wonder what happened to names like Fleetwood and Sixty Special. In that vein, perhaps the culling of its dealer body isn’t such a bad thing.
Appending ‘IQL’ to the Escalade is an interesting trick, one which keeps the forward-looking branding while retaining the good juju of that particular model. Also, your author is willing to bet the IQL is the long-wheelbase version of the Escalade, with the regular variant set to be dubbed the Escalade IQ. I guess changing it to Escaladiq was a bridge too far.
Of course, these are just patents which doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll actually be applied to the rump of a Cadillac. Car companies register trademarks all the time and then don’t use them – sometimes to secure a name while it’s under consideration, sometimes to throw journalists off the trail and have us looking in the wrong direction for clues. That’s entirely possible here.
But I don’t think so. Not this time. Cadillac has used plenty of ‘iq’ suffixes on its show cars, associating itself with that style of naming for several years now. And hey – Cadillac Vistiq doesn’t actually sound all that bad. It’s certainly better than what’s currently on sale, Johann.
[Image: GM]
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