Cadillac’s Lyriq EV Might Be a Winner If GM Can Build Enough of Them
After waiting more than a year for delivery, some buyers are scrapping their reservations.
A Cadillac Lyriq concept electric vehicle at the 19th Shanghai International Automobile Industry Exhibition, also known as Auto Shanghai 2021.
Photographer: Zhe Ji/Getty Images
Lance Soucie is just the kind of customer Cadillac hopes its electric Lyriq SUV can attract. At 37, he’s youthful among new-car buyers and affluent enough to pay $77,000 in cash for the vehicle, and he lives in Tampa, outside the flyover states where domestic auto brands typically sell well. He put a deposit down with two different dealers a year ago hoping to get one, but he might give up waiting for his car to be built.
Soucie and other Lyriq buyers have been waiting more than a year as General Motors Co. slogs through a ramp-up in production of its new electric vehicles. Some 1,000 customers put $100 deposits down in September 2021, and the vehicle sold out in 10 minutes. GM let more people order cars in early 2022. But a slow start at the Ultium plant in Lordstown, Ohio, where the automaker and partner LG Energy Solutions make battery cells, and software issues with the car meant last year’s fourth-quarter production resulted in just 122 deliveries of the Lyriq and fewer than 1,000 in this year’s first quarter.