MONTEREY, Calif. — Mark Reuss has a unique vantage point from his perch at General Motors (GM). Reuss, GM’s president since 2019 and a 34-year GM employee, has his hands in all GM brands, including Cadillac, Chevrolet, and Buick. He’s in charge of everything from global research and development to manufacturing and electric vehicle initiatives, such as battery strategy and development.
He’s also an avid motorsports and track driver who has seen GM push deeper on the racetrack with programs through Chevrolet and Cadillac. Reuss joined Yahoo Finance for a conversation at Monterey Car Week, where Cadillac unveiled its latest creation: the Opulent Velocity concept car
Here is an edited excerpt from the interview.
GM President Mark Reuss from an event showing off the new Cadillac Opulent Velocity concept (credit: Pras Subramanian)Pras Subramanian: Monterey Car Week is an important event for Cadillac, with plenty of high-end customers and clients milling about looking to see the company’s vision. Is the Opulent Velocity a vision of Cadillac’s future?
Mark Reuss: You know, if you think back to the Celestiq [Cadillac’s $300,000 EV sedan], when we showed it for the first time, it was a concept car and people were like, ‘Wow, you should make that. That’s really a statement. It’s something that would really set Cadillac apart.’ And, of course, we were going to make it, and we tried it out.
But if you think about that, we’re looking over the horizon at the future of Cadillac and what that design language was going to be. And if you look at our product portfolio, we’ve taken that language from the front to the rear to the really progressive design of Celestiq into all of our products. And it’s time to take a step back again and use this car to look over the horizon and look at technology, performance, and elegance and what Cadillac is going to become. So you’ll see some of these things, maybe quite a bit of them, come into the portfolio as we go forward.
Cadillac’s electrification strategy has seen a pivot, where 2030 was supposed to be the target for full electrification. Now Cadillac is sort of saying, ‘We’re going to have options for people for all kinds of powertrains.’ Is that the strategy?
Absolutely. We’ve always said, we have a really good inherent advantage on our manufacturing capacity and footprint where we can actually do both, and we can let the market really tell us what they want and when they want it.
And so that’s what we’re doing. And, you know, Lyriq is off to a great start; it’s sort of the No. 2 luxury EV in the world. And we’re doing close to 3,000 [in sales] a month, which is fantastic, and we’re doing that because it’s a fantastic car.
