The 15 Best Cadillac Concept Cars Of All Time

Cadillac was once the top-selling luxury car brand in America, but now it's a shadow of its former self. Its sales have been in decline for years, and the brand struggles to keep up with much of its foreign competition. However, over the years, it has shown off plenty of new ideas through its dozens of concept cars. These range from V12-engined supercars to pod-like autonomous luxury vehicles, but in the vast majority of cases, Cadillac has never put these cars into production, even if they've been very well received by the press and public alike.

Some critics have argued that the brand doesn't have many chances left to reclaim its place in the luxury car market and that continual underinvestment from parent company GM might eventually kill off Cadillac entirely. However, the latest company initiative focuses on electrification, and it seems like, for once, Cadillac is serious about radically overhauling its lineup. As the brand prepares to launch its first electric car, the Lyriq, in 2023, it's a good time to take a look through Cadillac's back catalog of concepts and wonder if any of them could have reversed the fortunes of the Cadillac brand.

Throughout the decades, Cadillac has always been keen to remind buyers of its golden era, sometimes at the expense of designing cars to future-proof the brand. The 2003 Sixteen concept was a particularly self-indulgent piece of nostalgia, and it featured a V16 engine to pay homage to the original 1930 Sixteen flagship car. Like its predecessor, the Sixteen concept was physically huge, and its interior was draped in leather and polished wood. It would have been fast too, in theory at least, as that monstrous V16 engine was capable of making a claimed 1,000 horsepower. However, Cadillac never conducted any real-world performance test, as the Sixteen was always designed primarily as a show car.

The Sixteen did debut with one innovative piece of technology, called Displacement on Demand. The car was able to shut down parts of its engine at the flick of a switch, helping to reduce fuel consumption when it didn't need the extra power. It was able to run on four, eight, or sixteen cylinders, and this tech would make its production debut in various GM products just one year later, according to Autoevolution. The car itself, however, was never intended for production, instead, it was merely to show off the brand's new design language that would make its way to production vehicles in the following years.

The phrase "cutting-edge performance technology" might not be the first thing that most people will associate with Cadillac. But, in 1988, the company sought to change that, showing off the futuristic Voyage, which was chock-full of all manner of new-age tech and boasted a drag coefficient of just 0.28, made possible thanks to an early form of active aero. The Voyage also did away with the boxy lines of previous-generation Cadillacs and paved the way for a new, more streamlined design language to emerge.

Among its other innovations were an early form of navigation software, orthopedically-designed seats with memory profiles, and automatic switching between rear-wheel drive and all-wheel drive for optimal traction. In today's market, these are standard luxury features, but back in the Eighties, this technology was genuinely groundbreaking. Many of these innovations would reach production in the decade that followed, but tougher competition from similarly tech-heavy foreign rivals limited Cadillac's ability to capitalize on this early lead. As well as being futuristic, the Voyage was seriously fast, with an estimated top speed of roughly 200 mph, although this was never officially tested.

Pininfarina has a long and complicated history with Cadillac, but one of the Italian studio's earliest Cadillac-commissioned concepts is the Starlight. Unveiled in 1959, the Starlight is one of a series of four concepts that Pininfarina made for Cadillac over a three-year period, and it featured a unique roof made from a single piece of curved Plexiglass. Instead of a traditional headliner, the concept featured four articulated metal plates that, when not in use, could be folded down as one and stored away behind the parcel shelf.

It seems that GM bosses weren't too keen on this design direction, but Pininfarina nonetheless continued to make designs for the Cadillac brand over the following years, culminating in the Cadillac Jacqueline, a car named after the wife of President John F. Kennedy. What happened to most of these concepts, including the Starlight, remains unknown, although it has been confirmed that the Jacqueline was eventually sold off to a Belgian Ferrari dealer. Perhaps the Starlight will make a reappearance at some point in the future, but for now, it remains a lost concept, with only Pininfarina's original images to remember it by.

The Cien was a mid-engined supercar featuring a 750 horsepower 7.5L V12. It debuted in 2002 to celebrate Cadillac's 100th birthday, and the car was the first of its kind, with an angular, modern design that went on to influence later production models. However, the car itself never made production, as like so many of Cadillac's other concepts, it was only ever intended to be a show car. It was, however, fully homologated for road use, making it the most powerful road-legal factory Cadillac to date, according to Motor1.

The Cien featured several innovations that are now standard for supercar manufacturers, with a carbon-composite construction, six-speed paddle-shift automatic transmission, and active air vents that opened and closed to aid cooling. The car was built by Prodrive, a UK-based engineering firm that's been responsible for everything from Colin McRae's World Rally Championship-winning Subarus to Ferrari's Le Mans cars, reports Jalopnik. At the time, the Cien seemed too far-fetched for Cadillac to realistically ever put into production, and unsurprisingly, only the one concept was ever produced. The car did, however, feature prominently in the 2005 movie The Island, which starred Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson.

The 1953 Cadillac Le Mans was a styling exercise built to demonstrate the brand's new design language, and it debuted at the 1953 GM Motorama show. It was commissioned by Harley Earl, General Motors' first Vice President of Design, and four examples were made. Its name was taken from the famous 24-hour race, in honor of the fact that Cadillac had competed there in 1950. In the modern era, it's unusual for concept cars to be sold off to private collectors after their time on the show circuit is over, but in the early '50s, it was more common, and it's exactly what Earl did with the Le Mans.

According to Autoweek, all four concepts were sold or given to Earl's well-connected friends, with the intention of building more positive publicity for the Cadillac brand. One went to a shoe magnate called Harry Karl, and another to a Beverly Hills Cadillac dealer who Earl had previously done business with. The third ended up in the hands of celebrity custom car builder George Barris but was later destroyed by a fire. However, Autoweek reports that the fourth car went to Oklahoma to star in a local exhibition, then disappeared the following week. It has never been seen again, despite various attempts over the years to track it down. Autoweek estimates that the car is worth up to $2 million today, although it's unlikely that the car will now be found intact seven decades after it first went missing.

One of the most surprising reveals of the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show, the Urban Luxury Concept, or ULC, was Cadillac's first foray into the world of city cars. It was roughly the size of a Mini Cooper, but it featured Lambo-style scissor doors and a plush interior. Its engine was a 1.0L turbocharged inline-three, which Cadillac claimed was good for 56 mpg in the city and 65 mpg on the highway. At the time, Car and Driver poured cold water on the idea of the Urban Luxury ever reaching production, simply because the market for smaller luxury vehicles in America was near non-existent.

Ironically, Green Car Reports also pointed out that cheap gas prices meant that American buyers were abandoning smaller cars in favor of large SUVs and crossovers. It was suggested at the time that the Urban Luxury might have been a way for Cadillac to relaunch itself into the European market, as Europe has always favored smaller cars. But, the brand's less-than-stellar image across the pond, combined with Cadillac's limited development resources, meant that the Urban Luxury remained a curious one-off.

A uniquely-styled concept that was unveiled in 1959, the Cadillac Cyclone took heavy inspiration from the American fascination with space travel at the time. It made its debut at the inaugural Daytona 500 and was designed by Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell, two of GM's most lauded designers from the era. The car was designed as a rolling testbed for future technologies, and its biggest innovation was the sensors in the black nose cones at the front of the car, that could alert drivers of nearby objects. Proximity sensors are of course a common feature on cars today, but at the time this technology was practically unheard of.

When the sensor detected rain, it could automatically raise the one-piece bubble roof, which was partly coated in vaporized silver to deflect the sun's rays. The car also featured sliding doors for easier access in and out of the car, and an exterior speaker system so that the driver could broadcast their voice to someone outside the car. The Cyclone made a big impression on buyers when it debuted, and several of its features eventually found their way to production Cadillacs.