130,000 Cadillac, how many middle-aged "bathing" men have been stung!

Refer to Ortho Quotient

2024-05-31 08:58Posted on Beijing Zhengshang reference official account

The 120-year-old luxury car brand also has to rely on "volume for price" to survive?

In the traditional automobile industry, Cadillac was once synonymous with luxury and quality, the pride of the American automobile industry, and the special car of many American presidents, diplomats, and ambassadors, and film and television stars such as "Elvis" and Marilyn Monroe are also loyal fans of Cadillac. Its slogans of "no rear drive, no luxury" and "the first rear drive car in life" have made countless consumers who pursue status crazy.

130,000 Cadillac, how many middle-aged "bathing" men have been stung!

However, time has passed, and now the price of Cadillac has dived from 210,000 all the way to 130,000, and it still can't be sold!

The current situation of "foreign brands" in the Chinese market is really a bit embarrassing, no wonder netizens complained: "If you don't work hard, you can only buy BBA in the future"!

"The Cadillac CT4 breaks down the bottom price, and the price of the naked car is only more than 130,000!"

Recently, many Cadillac dealers on social platforms said that the Cadillac CT4 is currently carrying out promotional activities, and the landing price has been less than 160,000 yuan.

CT4, as a B-class sedan sports sedan, is the most affordable model in the brand product line, but its manufacturer's guide price is also in the range of 219,700 ~ 259,700 yuan.

This discount is really in line with the joke that circulates in the market, "Eight folds for tigers and seven folds for leopards, six folds for Volvo no one wants, and five folds for Kaidi snickering."

Spend more than 100,000 yuan to buy a Cadillac CT4, although the business atmosphere is not as good as BBA, but if you go to the foot washing city, you can definitely be a big brother.

Why do you say the city of washing feet, it is because Cadillac also has the title of "King of Baths".

In 2016, AutoNavi Map and the Research Institute of the Ministry of Transport released a "2016 Traffic Analysis Report of Major Cities in China", which is based on a large number of navigation data and conducts an in-depth analysis of the travel habits of car owners.

It was found that the proportion of Cadillac owners going to bathing and massage places was significantly higher than that of other brand owners, and Cadillac was therefore labeled as the "bath king".

Although this label is not very advanced, it has also brought a lot of popularity and sales to Cadillac.

Nowadays, Cadillac has adopted a price reduction clearance strategy, and there has even been a low-price promotion of 130,000 yuan, which undoubtedly breaks the hearts of those old car owners who were once proud of owning a Cadillac.

Behind the crazy discount promotion of Cadillac CT4, there is naturally anxiety about sales.

With the popularity of new energy vehicles and the change of consumer demand, Cadillac's sales in the Chinese market have suffered a serious decline. Taking the single model of Cadillac CT4 as an example, in 2022, its annual sales will be more than 10,000 units; In 2023, it will fall to about 7,000 units.

By 2024, the sales figure has fallen directly into the triple digits, and the average monthly sales have plummeted to about 180 units.

On the other hand, the sales performance of its competitors from January to April 2024 is still good, with the cumulative sales of the Mercedes-Benz A-Class of 3,300 units, the cumulative sales of the Audi A3 of 4,800 units, and even the BMW 1 Series, which announced the discontinuation of production in July 2023, has sold more than 1,000 units every month this year.

The price reduction is helpless, a means, and a forced result.

It's not just the CT4 that is disappointed, but the sales of the entire Cadillac product line in the Chinese market are not optimistic.

Specifically, Cadillac's sales in 2023 will be 183,000 units, and in 2022 it will be 185,000 units, but its sales in 2021 will still be as high as 233,000 units.

In this way, Cadillac's overall sales have fallen by 21% in the past three years.

The corresponding BBA, the three giants of traditional luxury cars, will sell 737,200, 824,900 and 729,000 units in China in 2023, respectively, which is several times the sales volume of Cadillac in the same period.

It is worth noting that although Cadillac has not a few models on sale, 9 models include 3 fuel sedans (CT4, CT5, CT6), 4 fuel SUVs (XT4, XT5, XT6, GT4) and two pure electric SUVs (IQ Ruige, IQ Aoge), but now only CT5 is the model that can support Cadillac's sales.

In 2023, a total of 84,456 CT5 units were sold, accounting for about 46% of sales, which is also the only Cadillac model to achieve positive sales growth.

The direct opponent of CT5 is Mercedes-Benz C-Class, BMW 3 Series, Audi A4 and other luxury brand B-class sedans, and the competition is fierce.

I have to admit that Cadillac's "price for volume" is already an old problem.

As early as February 2008, Cadillac CTS had a preferential gift package of 30,000 to 100,000 yuan; In September of the same year, the price and configuration of the entire Cadillac SLS Saiwei series were adjusted, with a decrease of 10% and 11% respectively.

In 2011, the Cadillac SLS 3.6 was directly discounted by 150,000 yuan, and the CTS 3.6 luxury sports model was discounted by 120,000 yuan; In 2015, Cadillac's CT6, XTS and ATS-L models joined the "army of price cuts", and the main models were discounted by about 20%.

To this day, "price for market" remains one of Cadillac's main strategies.

Not only that, the Cadillac brand has been out of the circle in a very magical way in the past two years.

For example, when the Xiaomi car was launched, Cadillac looked at it with red eyes, and it made a wave of surprises, and went straight to Xiaomi:

The official released a series of coconut tree style posters with obvious porcelain implications, with rows of large characters that read: "I'm sorry, I suddenly can't fix it after 120 years of marketing"; "I'm sorry Thor, I helped you build a good SUV within 500,000"; "Unlike Porsche, not like Tesla, we just want to be ourselves", "We never thought that parasols and awnings could be sold for another money"......

Poke people but not the backbone, Cadillac's operation has made a group of consumers shout "good low" and "get out of the Chinese market"......

It's a pity that despite this, Cadillac has not achieved a change of life, and its reputation has declined rapidly.

For the sake of sales, what is the shamelessness of the face? The official answer is also straight enough: skin, I didn't expect this to be my turn, see you at the new car Beijing Auto Show.

In addition, Cadillac's current strategy in the market is also very vague, although it is one of the first luxury brands to transform, as early as 2019 announced that it will be fully electrified in 2030, and in 2021 said that it will gradually discontinue the production of gasoline models from 2025 to 2026.

Entering 2024, the domestic new energy market is like a hot tea, and it has long been certified by the industry as the trend of the times, but Cadillac suddenly "changed its tune" and said that it will continue to sell fuel vehicles after 2030.

The strategic deployment is vacillating, and losing may be an inevitable process.

Although "low-cost exchanging" has been criticized a lot, it is not uncommon in the luxury car industry now, and even BBA is not immune.

Audi A4 is the least martial arts, it has been reduced to 250,000 early, the starting price of BMW i3 has also dropped to more than 200,000, and Mercedes-Benz C260L still maintains a high price of 280,000, but it has also dropped by 70,000 or 80,000. Even Porsche, the "big brother" of luxury cars, was tragically "forced into the palace" by dealers and staged a wonderful drama.

BBA has made a comeback in 2023 by reducing prices, buying time for BBA's electrification transformation. However, this strategy can stimulate sales results in the short term, but it cannot be used as a long-term strategy. This is also evidenced by the financial results of the first quarter, and most of the BBA's performance indicators show a downward trend. Among them, Mercedes-Benz's sales in the Chinese market fell by 10.4% year-on-year, and BMW's sales also fell by 3.8%.

The American Association of Manufacturers (AAM) also released a report a few days ago warning that if the introduction of cost-effective Chinese electric vehicles is introduced, the impact on the American auto industry may be "extinction", and called on Biden to prevent the introduction of Chinese electric vehicles as soon as possible.

It can be seen that the excellent product power of China's new energy vehicles, and the lower and lower prices, have become a nightmare for foreign luxury cars.

In 2023, the annual sales of new energy vehicles in the world will reach 14.653 million units, a year-on-year increase of 35.4%, of which the sales volume in China alone will be as high as 9.495 million units, accounting for 64.8% of the global sales, ranking first in the world for 9 consecutive years, and the penetration rate will climb to 31.6%, while the annual sales of new energy vehicles in Europe and the United States are less than half of China's! By April this year, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in the Chinese market even exceeded 50%.

China's new energy vehicle companies are rapidly expanding their market scale around the world, seizing the minds of users, and are unstoppable, and the market share of traditional fuel vehicles is being squeezed rapidly under such a rapid growth rate.

Entering 2024, it is a major turning point in the automotive industry and a year for luxury brands to survive. As market sales are sluggish year by year, luxury cars have had to put down their bodies and save the market by slashing prices.

The rout of Cadillac is a footnote to this era and the fate of imported luxury cars in the Chinese market. But what it reflects is a revolution that the entire automotive industry is experiencing.

After gaining a firm foothold, domestic new energy vehicles began to rapidly march into the high-end market, and many high-end models were priced at more than 500,000 yuan, or even more than 1 million yuan, directly entering the base camp of luxury cars. Whether it is the "refrigerator color TV smart screen" that only traditional top luxury cars have, or the "far ahead" that must be mentioned at every press conference, it has made domestic new energy vehicles sit on the throne of scientific and technological upstarts and become the existence of leading the times.

Chinese companies are speeding up the "rolling" of international brands off the altar, leaving Cadillac with little time!

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