Most electrified cars today look sleek, polished, and complete and just as impressive as their ICE counterparts. But that hasn’t always been the case, as some of the earliest electric vehicles often looked awkward or even apologetic, as if they were struggling to fit into a strange club. Keen to avoid some of that awkwardness, Cadillac set out to show that it could build an elegant, rich, sleek, and sharply creased car that was as up-to-date as possible and looked like a real player.
Base Trim Engine
1.4L Plug-in Hybrid
Base Trim Transmission
Single Speed Automatic
Base Trim Drivetrain
Front-Wheel Drive
Base Trim Horsepower
84 hp
Base Trim Torque
295 lb-ft
Fuel Economy
31/35 MPG
Segment
Compact Luxury Coupe
It came out with a vehicle that had genuinely advanced hardware and a range-extended electric drivetrain, squarely aimed at buyers who wanted something sleeker than a mainstream hybrid. However, Cadillac really missed the mark with this ELR. Sadly, its original pricing and positioning seemed to be out of step with reality, and the result wasn’t normal luxury car depreciation in the years that followed but an almost total collapse in value.
The Price Fell Apart Almost From Day One
2014 & 2016 Cadillac ELR front 3/4 angle in gray while parkedCadillac
2014 Cadillac ELR
Engine
1.4-liter inline-four with electric drive range extender
Transmission
4ET50 electrically variable automatic transaxle
Drivetrain
Front-wheel drive
Power
207 hp combined 84 hp engine (+ electric motor)
Torque
295 lb-ft
Cadillac launched its ELR in early 2014 with an MSRP of $75,000, but according to the CarBuzz Marketplace, you can buy one of these vehicles today for an average of around $14,500, with the lowest recorded sale languishing at around $6k. If you look at that average figure, it implies a roughly 80% drop from the original sticker and some of the cheapest stragglers are closer to 92%. And for a company like Cadillac, launching a premium halo-style coupe, that makes for very bad reading indeed.
What makes matters worse is that Cadillac did not have to wait long to receive the bad market news. People didn’t buy into the ELR from the get-go, so the company couldn’t take advantage of some stable premium pricing years followed by the usual used car softening. This prompted Cadillac to cut the effective price of its 2016 revised ELR by about $10,000. That amount of correction is not routine trimming – it shows that the message was getting through from the marketplace. The original ELR was simply not making the numbers and the company needed to act.
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Records show that Cadillac only sold a little more than 300 ELRs in the US between January and March 2015 and even for a niche luxury coupe, that’s slow progress. But when the company cut the price of subsequent vehicles after about a year of sales numbers, that eroded the car’s pricing authority significantly. And as history tells us, once that happened, the used market simply finished the job.
Cadillac Sold An Idea That The Market Never Agreed With
2014 & 2016 Cadillac ELR interior view of the cabin from the sideCadillac
As it stood, the ELR was a nice and well-rounded car with good engineering capability. The company thought it would wrap the GM-Voltec architecture in dramatic styling to add premium materials and a touch of Cadillac design theater. The vehicle was certainly more special to look at than the Chevrolet Volt, which shared the architecture, and Cadillac described its creation as a driver’s car with a powerful electric drive system and an athletic chassis, and added an available Sport package for the enthusiast.
However, luxury buyers weren’t really looking for a front-wheel drive, range-extended, plug-in coupe at that kind of price. Those that had around $76,000 to spend would typically be looking for some serious performance, real luxury cues, and perhaps brand prestige, and the ELR didn’t land cleanly in those categories.
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The ELR wasn’t a traditional grand tourer, and it couldn’t get up and go like some premium coupes. It didn’t have any ideological clarity either, because the car still relied heavily on a gas engine alongside its extended range set up, and in a discerning market, people couldn’t understand the proposition. As it turned out, that’s a dangerous problem for an expensive niche product.
Worse still, some people muttered that the ELR was simply a re-badged Chevrolet Volt. That would be a little harsh, as in truth the body, cabin, presentation, and brand intent were all very different, but the mere fact that people were mentioning the ELR in the same conversation as the Volt didn’t help at all.
Once that idea took hold and a much cheaper Volt was in the picture, Cadillac didn’t have much room to maneuver. Too many people concluded that the ELR was just an enormously more expensive interpretation of a drivetrain concept and that surely harmed the ELR’s residual value.
Cadillac’s 2016 Update Made Matters Worse
2016 Cadillac ELR Front 3/4 Driving On StreetCadillac
You could argue that Cadillac’s 2016 ELR revision was a tacit admission that its launch year formula was wrong. After all, this update wasn’t just a token model year refresh but represented a real makeover instead. The 2016 version now had a stronger electric drive system and revised chassis. It had more power and a stiffer rear axle, better bushings, revised steering and suspension calibration, and an extra Sport mode.
All of this recalibration suggested that Cadillac understood the original ELR’s shortcomings. The company was trying to make the car sharper, faster, and easier to defend on value while at the same time lowering its price. This was very far from a standard facelift or repositioning, and perhaps Cadillac knew that the market didn’t understand its offering, both in substance and on price.
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For Cadillac, these efforts were a little like closing the barn door after the horse had bolted. Once a premium car has a reputation for being significantly overpriced, it’s very hard to restore confidence by correcting the formula. Interested buyers seemed to be very aware of the mismatch and didn’t particularly like the Chevrolet connection. They may also have known that sales were simply not strong and may have looked somewhere else.
Even though the 2016 ELR arrived with better performance and a lower price, it still didn’t hit. People simply saw this car as something that Cadillac had already discounted and revised, and perhaps more importantly, they could clearly see that the company didn’t have any real confidence in its product.
Even Scarcity Couldn’t Help The ELR
2016 Cadillac ELR Interior Touch ScreenCadillac
Sometimes, rare or misunderstood premium cars can curry favor in their later years, but that hasn’t happened with the ELR, even though it’s a relatively scarce vehicle on the used market. Those nationwide averages show little enthusiasm and are startlingly low for a low-volume Cadillac coupe that originally went on sale for $76,000. Even the strongest visible result in the current marketplace at $28,000 leaves the car down by roughly two-thirds from its launch price.
The car’s underlying specification doesn’t help to excite collectors either. The 2014 Cadillac ELR weighed 4,054 lbs but only produced a combined output of little more than 200 hp. It had a front-wheel-drive set-up and could record a 0–60 mph time of about 8.1s on its way to a governor-limited top speed of 107 mph. Certainly, you could classify those figures as acceptable in a luxury coupe with no real performance aspirations, but they’re not likely to drive collector demand on their own. And this left the ELR to pitch its case based on design novelty and rarity, which still didn’t lead to strong residuals.
The ELR May Make More Sense Now Than It Did When New
2014 & 2016 Cadillac ELR Front 3/4 SilverCadillac
When Cadillac launched the ELR at that price, it looked like an audacious overreach. But even though collectors may be turning their noses up at the vehicle now, its current values position it as an unusual bargain for the rest of us. After all, this is a vehicle with a distinctive Cadillac design and an uncommon body style, with a meaningful electric-only capability for its era, and a generally upscale cabin as well. Best of all, the buyer is no longer asked to defend a $75,000-plus sticker and can get all these benefits for a fraction of the original price.
When assessing its overall story, it’s important to remember that the Cadillac ELR is not a depreciation disaster because it was poorly put together or somehow worthless. Instead, the market never accepted its story, and Cadillac’s comprehensive repositioning may have muddied the depreciation waters even further.
This means that the market’s correction has become part of the Cadillac ELR’s identity. More than a decade on, it now represents a dramatically mispriced car, which has suffered from an equally dramatic fall in value. And while that makes the ELR a potentially shrewd used buy today, it primarily identifies it as one of the starkest pricing miscalculations of the modern era.
Sources: Cadillac, Classic.com
