Missed Opportunity for the Cadillac ELR in the Central Valley
Thursday, November 14, 2013 at 2:19PM Grant Gerke With the holidays and family time in view, the Cadillac ELR comes to mind as a missed opportunity for GM/Cadillac.
We have family in central California and the only transportation there is via car (maybe some buses in Visalia, Calif.) and my mother-in-law travels close to 90 miles each day for her commute to Visalia and seemed like a possible candidate for a new Extended Range Electric Vehicle (EREV) Cadillac ELR back in the summer.
She currently has a Cadillac Escalade truck and fills up the tank on a weekly basis, the fill-up cost is pretty sizable due to the 26 gallon tank. The ELR could plug in at her store and the roundtrip commute could be close to all-electric.
And the kicker to why this is a great opportunity for Cadillac is the lack of service stations from other high-end dealers in the region, such as VW, BMW and even Mercedes-Benz. It's a big factor for a car consumer in the central valley of California, you don't want to drive down to the BMW service center—90 miles roundtrip—in Bakersfield too many times (or 90 miles to Fresno).
If you want high MPGs in this area, you have to sacrifice car styling and buy a Toyota Prius.
A golden opportunity in the middle of the golden state, but Cadillac announced pricing in the $75,000 range for this new technology car. I still don't get the pricing for the ELR, considering the major R&D was done on the Volt. Are they trying to recoup the cost of R&D here?
The central valley in California, includes Visalia, Porterville, Exeter, Springville, Lindsay, is home to quite a lot fruit and vegetable commercial farming, with Fresno about 45 miles away from Visalia. These towns are not close together.
It seems if GM/Cadillace had its ducks in a row, it could have laid the groundwork with a push of the Volt last year and then introduce the ELR in 2014 at a reasonable price. A high MPG car in area where distances are quite large, wonder if any Priuses are sold here?
GM is probably buying time as they figure out a strategy and maybe these are more regulatory cars for Califorina. Missed opportunity.
For us here in Chicago (West Suburbs), I talked to a local dealer and they do not have a "hard" date on when the 2014 Cadillac ELRs will arrive. As the manager said, "sometimes we are the last to know."
Reader Comments (2)
GM was not looking to sell a great number of ELR's. They've said many times that they were going to produce around 1000 cars and then they were going to move on. That is why they priced this car at $75,000. They are NOT trying to stimulate sales. They wanted to offer a halo car and be done.
So a car company does not want to sell a great number of cars, the best looking electric (albeit EREV) they have ever produced. Don't get it, especially if you do any research and understand your competitive advantage in many non-urban areas. The Cadillac brand has a lot brand awarness (in the u.s) and you could leverage it with the right pricing model.