Cadillac says it hasn’t adjusted its Australian sales forecasts, despite a clear decline in local EV demand over the past 12 months.
The General Motors-owned luxury carmaker has formally re-entered the Australian market for the first time since 1969, as an EV-only brand.
Having already launched online sales of the Lyriq mid-sized electric SUV, the solitary model in its Australian line-up for now, Cadillac will next week open its first local ‘Experience Centre’, located in Rosebery, Sydney.
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Speaking with CarExpert at the launch of the Rosebery Experience Centre, General Motors Australia managing director Jess Bala said the recent slowdown in local EV sales growth wasn’t likely to affect Cadillac’s projected internal sales volumes.
“Honestly, we’ve held our forecast because we believe that the market we’re going into and the space we’re going to play in – we’re not coming in as a mainstream brand, we’re coming in as a high-end car brand – none of that has changed for us,” said Ms Bala.
“Our EV-only strategy was a part of the very first messaging in Australia.”
Although Cadillac won’t divulge its sales ambitions for Australia, the luxury brand declared it has received more than 7500 expressions of interest from prospective buyers since it announced last November that it was returning to the local market.
GM executive vice president for global markets, Rory Harvey, said that figure gave officials plenty of encouragement amid Cadillac’s relaunch in Australia.
“We don’t have the luxury of having a rear-view mirror, or being able to say that if we get this many hand-raisers, this will be the rough conversion rate,” he explained.
“It’s relatively difficult to predict exactly how many sales we will get from those 7500 people. The outstanding job our team has been doing is keeping the information flowing, keeping prospective customers up to speed in terms of progress. As time progresses we’ll get a sense of what the conversion rate is.”
Ms Bala explained that Cadillac has formally hired a sales team in Australia, which will work hand-in-hand with customer experience centres – one in Sydney, with others coming in Melbourne and Brisbane – to engage with prospective buyers.
“We’ve been interacting with people the whole way through the process, whether it was someone that signed up back in November last year when we revealed, or you came to one of our events, or you’ve engaged since we went live officially with sales,” she said.
“There’s been constant touch points with those people, and now that we have a sales team that we’ve hired, they’re now talking directly. It’s gone beyond looking at emails to actually picking up the phone and making phone calls, learning about customers, how they want to interact and which ones want to take the next step.
“Now that we have cars on the ground, we can bring something physical for customers to see.”
Cadilliac’s enthusiasm comes despite evidence that Australia’s EV fascination has slowed in recent months. EV sales continue to grow in Australia, but not at the same pace as hybrids and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), recent data revealed.
“EV adoption is not going to be linear, it’s just not the way the world works,” said Mr Harvey.
“There are reports of EV adoption slowing down, but it’s always a case of peeling the onion back and looking at the next level of detail.
“In the US, if you strip out fleets, the retail adoption is still very high. And then if you look at luxury within retail, luxury is the area that is expanding rapidly in terms of EVs. We feel we have an area here that is still very much the sweet spot.”
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