Cadillac Ditches Detroit For New NYC Headquarters
General Motors luxury brand will uproot itself next year to find a new home in New York City.
The new headquarters will be located in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood with space for roughly 120 employees, of whom 30 will be moved from Detroit and the remaining 90 new hires. Cadillac recently poached former Infiniti boss Johan de Nysschen as its new chief before giving him the authority to re-locate the brand.
The bulk of de Nysschen’s experience is with leading Audi where he also separated the four-ring brand to be headquartered in Ingolstadt instead of Wolfsburg with VW. He also split Infiniti’s corporate headquarters away from Nissan during his time running Infiniti. The South Africa-born executive said without re-locating Cadillac, the company would struggle to change, but that the company will be forced to find new ways of doing things if it is in a new geographic location.
Cadillac is trying to re-gain a position as a globally credible luxury brand, something that de Nysschen is credited with driving Audi to achieve. The brand’s latest products saw early success, but sales are tapering off and the company is falling back on old habits but relying on consumer incentives to drive sales. The compact ATS is down by more than 20 percent through August compared to last year and the CTS is down 6.2 percent. In fact, Cadillac’s SRX crossover and Escalade SUV are the only nameplates that aren’t experiencing cooling sales through the first eight months of the year.
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Luke is an energetic automotive journalist who spends his time covering industry news and crawling the internet for the latest breaking story. When he isn't in the office, Luke can be found obsessively browsing used car listings, drinking scotch at his favorite bar and dreaming of what to drive next, though the list grows a lot faster than his bank account. He's always on <A title="@lukevandezande on Twitter" href="http://twitter.com/lukevandezande">Twitter</A> looking for a good car conversation. Find Luke on <A title="@lukevandezande on Twitter" href="http://twitter.com/lukevandezande">Twitter</A> and <A title="Luke on Google+" href="http://plus.google.com/112531385961538774338?rel=author">Google+</A>.
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Worst possible location. even Juarez would've been better.
At least Cadillac needs new blood and direction to change them around. I welcome them the change and to become autonomous from GM. However, being viewed as an equal to the Germans and Lexus to the general public could take 10 to 20 years or 2-3 generations of the current models. Also it could be sooner depending on how fast Cadillac wants to turn things around by offering several halo products in the future.