Cadillac Lyriq Rolls Off Line, Production Will Ramp Up Slowly

The first Cadillac Lyriq for retail customers roll off the line this week at General Motors’ Spring Hill, TN, plant, pulled ahead to meet what the automaker says is hotter-than-expected demand for the battery-electric vehicle.

“We retooled Spring Hill Assembly with the best, most advanced technology in the world and the team worked tirelessly to complete the preparations nine months ahead of the original schedule,” Mark Reuss, GM president, says in a statement released ahead of a ceremony at the plant.

Despite executives saying Monday during a media call that all of the plant’s capacity of 200,000 could be used to build Lyriqs – which Reuss says scored the best of any GM car ever in consumer clinics – data from Wards Intelligence partner LMC Automotive forecasts a slow ramp up.

LMC data shows only about 3,000 Lyriqs will be assembled there this year, and roughly 19,000 in full-year 2023, meaning sales volume in the near term will be on the moderate end of the scale. Competing BEV CUV models from other OEMs in 2021 in the U.S. sold between 1,105 units (Jaguar I-Pace) and 154,159 (Tesla Model Y), Wards Intelligence data shows. The latter vehicle was the top-selling BEV in the U.S. last year.

Cadillac opened reservations for the Debut Edition of the all-electric CUV last September and then closed them 10 minutes later, saying the vehicle had sold out. The number of reservations, for which money had to be put down, has not been divulged.

Official orders for other grades of the CUV open on May 19 but Debut Edition builds continue after May 19, a GM spokeswoman says. It’s unclear how many of the nearly 240,000 hand-raisers for the BEV today will actually place an order. Cadillac Vice President Rory Harvey says during the call that hand-raisers are not required to place a deposit.

The Lyriq, starting around $60,000 before state or federal tax incentives, will be available in rear- or all-wheel-drive variants, although the latter isn’t scheduled to start production until late 2022.

GM invested $2 billion to add production of the Lyriq at Spring Hill, a plant already home to internal-combustion-engine CUVs the Cadillac XT5 and XT6, as well as the GMC Acadia. Plant manager Jeff Lamarche says during the call that production is integrated, with the exception of there being an underbody building specific to BEVs. Reuss says GM will introduce other BEV models to the plant but is mum on details. Cadillac has a goal to have an all-BEV lineup by 2030.

Lamarche says the plant has the ability to flex toward ICE or BEVs depending on customer demand. “We can build ICE, we can build EVs. We can follow the market,” he says.

Wards Intelligence data shows GM assembled 95,415 vehicles at Spring Hill in 2021, down 33.9% from 2020’s 144,393.

While GM officials last year expressed that lack of sufficient supply of chips and batteries could curtail Lyriq production volume in the near term, executives on the call say they don’t see cells as a bottleneck.

A Spring Hill Ultium Cells joint-venture gigafactory with LG won’t open until late 2023, but Ultium’s Lordstown, OH, gigafactory opens this summer, Lamarche says, with initial cells sourced from LG’s Ochang, South Korea, plant. Reuss adds GM has “very long-term relationships” on cell and/or material sourcing so neither should be constricting to Lyriq builds.