Hopefully John Voelcker over at Green Car Reports won’t be too mad at us for stealing one of his lines and using it for the title, but its such a colorful way to describe the demise of the Cadillac ELR, sad, but true. Yes, the relatively brief foray of Cadillac into the electric car-verse seems to have crapped out and ingloriously so. Besides having a nice gift for words Voelcker does a great job of breaking down what exactly went wrong with the ELR and you should all certainly read the full article, but to keep it simple, basically it comes down to size and price. The ELR, when it came to the showrooms, had a price tag of $75,000, not necessarily unreasonable but, lets take a closer look.
The ELR was a two door coupe, supposedly sporting four seats, but lets be real, the back seats were not really functional, its a coupe, $75,000 is a luxury sedan. GM had the idea that this was to be their car for competing against the Tesla Model S. Really? Is that what they were trying to do? Basically a little mini-coupe, with two doors, and a range of less than 40 miles, yes you read that right four zero miles. The Tesla Model S get over 200 miles per charge, it has cavernous room, in front, in the back and has a full boot and bonnet. I hate to be a jerk, but lets call a spade a spade, the Cadillac ELR was really just a super fancy two seater golf cart. Yeah, there’s more to it than all that, but someone whose shelling out $75k is probably price insensitive between a Cadillac and a Tesla. So, given half the car with 20% the range. Do we need to say any more.
Farewell ELR, lets hope future GMs and Cadillac can learn from your mistakes.