Cadillac’s global design director, Clay Dean, shows off the 2011 Cadillac CTS Coupe, which is to arrive in showrooms next spring. This is the ‘halo’ car the brand needs, executives say, to attract buyers who have for decades shopped BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Lexus and Infiniti.
The 2011 Cadillac CTS coupe was by far the prettiest car shown during the Los Angeles Auto Show, but the most important cars were the Chevrolet Cruze, Hyundai Sonata, Audi A3 TDI diesel and Ford Fiesta.
The CTS coupe is proof there is life at Cadillac, and there better be.
If General Motors is ever to repay its $50-billion-plus (U.S.) taxpayer assistance from Canada and the United States, GM's luxury brand must become a global luxury brand selling at least 500,000 cars a year. Cadillac might do a third of that this year, said Steve Shannon, Cadillac's marketing director.
His boss, Cadillac general manager Brian Nesbitt - former head of GM design in North America - said the CTS coupe is the "halo" car the brand needs to attract buyers who have for decades shopped BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Lexus and Infiniti.
"It's all imports. We must conquest," Nesbitt said.
"We have to bring in customers who won't consider Cadillac."
We'll see. Cadillac is in Year 10 of its current resurrection.
That's two generations of all-new, well-financed Cadillacs that have rolled into showrooms without really having an impact on BMW et al. Cadillac has one generation of cars - at most four years - to prove an American car company can make serious, globally competitive luxury cars.
As for the Cruze, Sonata, A3 TDI and Fiesta, these four small and fuel-efficient runabouts should represent more than a million in sales a year once they are all available. They are big-volume rides that each auto maker hopes will have a global impact on their respective fortunes. And for the environmentally minded, they represent fuel efficiency and low emissions in a package designed to appeal to buyers on every continent.
Of the four, the Sonata is perhaps the most intriguing. Hyundai is breaking from the pack in mid-size cars by offering the 2011 Sonata only with four-cylinder engines starting early next year. The V-6 option will go with the outgoing Sonata.
Buyers who want extra power will have only a turbocharged Sonata available. Buyers who want more fuel economy will get a hybrid Sonata in about a year.
Whatever the powertrain, the design signals that Hyundai is serious about claiming a place among the biggest, most progressive car companies in the world.
"We've thrown out the 'Beat Toyota' playbook," said Hyundai America CEO John Krafcik, noting that the latest sales figures rank the Hyundai-Kia group the fourth-largest auto maker in the world. "We have our own playbook now."
Andre Hudson, the young design manager at Hyundai in Irvine, Calif., who penned the new Sonata's exterior, said he wanted a design with an "aggressive stance." The key design element: a sharp line from the trunk to beyond the A-pillar that angles downward as it approaches the hood.
This Sonata does not have a so-called generic, "rental-car" look. Not remotely. It's aggressive, with a sloping roofline meant to mimic the style of coupes. Hyundai dealers reportedly are over the moon about the car.
Make no mistake, Hyundai officials believe they can challenge the sales leadership of what some derisively refer to as the "CamAccord" - the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord, which are relatively safe designs that sell like gangbusters.
During a normal year, Honda and Toyota would sell more than 800,000 Camry and Accord cars combined in North America. That means Hyundai wants to move upward of 400,000 Sonatas a year when the market recovers to something resembling normal.
How ambitious is that? Hyundai Canada and Hyundai America might sell just over 600,000 vehicles together in 2009. Talk about bold.
Then we have the Cruze. This is Chevy's global compact car, the one already selling in quite a number of markets. We'll get the 2011 version late next summer or in the early fall.
Chevy types were trying to make a statement by introducing the North American version of the Cruze in California, not a hotbed of GM sales activity.
With this new compact car, the replacement for the utterly bland Cobalt, Chevy is taking direct aim at the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla, the No. 1 and No. 2 best-selling cars in Canada and serious players in the United States, too.
"We think Cruze will change the rules for compact cars," said Margaret Brooks, marketing director for small cars at GM.
The Cruze, she added, has the roominess and amenities of a mid-size car combined with excellent fuel economy. "This is a very, very important launch for Chevrolet," she added.
Ford said exactly the same about the 2011 Fiesta, due in showrooms in the summer of next year. Here in L.A., Ford showed the North American version of the Fiesta, a car already shooting the lights out - sales-wise - in Europe.
Ford officials said the new Fiesta will come in four-door sedan and five-door hatchback body styles. Globally, those two body styles will account for 600,000 annual units by 2012, Ford says. Ford also sells a three-door hatchback in Europe and other markets, but not in particularly great numbers.
But there is more at stake with the Fiesta than a mere 600,000 in sales a year. The subcompact, or B-car, platform underneath should spin off a total of one million annual units in total by 2012. "It's a portfolio of B-cars," Derrick Kuzak, Ford group vice-president of global product development, told Automotive News.
Kuzak has not yet offered specifics about the other Bs, but some sort of small crossover utility wagon is surely in the works. The prior-generation European Fiesta had a crossover variant called the Fusion.
The Fiesta will also get an EcoBoost engine variant. That's the engine configuration that combines turbocharging and direct fuel injection to boost performance without straining fuel economy. When the car is launched, it will be powered only by a naturally aspirated, 1.6-litre four-cylinder engine producing 119 horsepower and 109 lb-ft of torque. Diesel versions are sold in Europe.
Ford has confirmed a 1.6-litre EcoBoost engine for the C-Max van in 2010. By 2013, EcoBoost is on tap to be available in 90 per cent of Ford's global vehicle lineup.
As for the Audi A3 TDI, it was named Green Car of the Year at the show - a win for a diesel when the betting money was on the Toyota Prius gasoline-electric hybrid.
Audi, and its Volkswagen Group parent, have long argued that diesel is the most cost-effective way for consumers to increase fuel economy right now.
They also say that diesel is a known powertrain technology that is not complex, unlike hybrids. That is somewhat disingenuous. Cleaner diesels, the ones that can operate in all 50 U.S. states, are, indeed, more complex than the plain-Jane oil burners of a few years ago.
The cleaner diesels, which essentially are coming from German auto makers, are designed to clean up particulates and oxides of nitrogen, but that cleansing technology raises cost and complexity.
The A3 TDI win, however, came on the heels of the same victory last year for the VW Jetta TDI. VW, then, is winning over critics with its diesel engines. In fact, VW offers diesel versions of its Golf and Jetta cars, the Touareg SUV, as well as Audi's Q7 SUV and now its A3 hatchback.
"If the A3 diesel becomes a success, we'll move up to diesel in volume models, like the A4," said Wolfgang Hatz, Volkswagen's head of group powertrain development. Diesels offer 25 to 40 per cent better fuel economy than similar gasoline engines.
VW could also bring in smaller diesels and they would change the performance of smaller models - as they do in Europe with, for instance, the VW Polo, Europe's current car of the year. In addition to the 2.0-litre diesel offered in North America, a 1.6-litre version is available in Europe and an even smaller 1.2-litre diesel is available in the Polo.
Audi's Green Car win also underscored, indirectly, the continuing showdown between diesels and hybrids. VW has alternative-fuel programs like other auto makers, but many among the German auto makers remain to be convinced about hybrids.
Nonetheless, one of vehicles to have its world debut in L.A. was a four-seat concept called the VW Up! Lite. The three-door hybrid boasts a two-cylinder diesel engine and a 10-kilowatt electric motor. VW plans to sell a production version in Europe initially in a test of consumer acceptance. The Up! Lite weighs 695 kilograms or less than two-thirds that of a typical subcompact. The Up! Hatchback goes on sale in Europe at the end of 2011. VW officials said the Up! line also includes a minivan and a sedan destined for European showrooms in 2011.
Intriguing as the Up! might be, it and its ilk remained a sideshow in at the L.A. show. Of the 900 vehicles on the show floor, 50 were hybrids and alternative fuel vehicles, or 5.5 per cent of mix.
Electric cars and gas-electric hybrids and everything in between are interesting, but it is the big-volume cars - the Cruze, Sonata, VW's diesels and the Ford Fiesta, for instance - that by far matter most in the auto industry. They are the present.
And, of course, we did appreciate eye-candy such as the CTS coupe. Not everything about L.A. was utterly practical.