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NEW YORK — Cadillac's electric Escalade was barely a day old, but Will Churchill already had more than 30 emails from clients and friends wanting to buy one.

Since General Motors' luxury brand unveiled the 2025 Escalade IQ last week at an event here, it has generated some of the biggest response the Texas dealer said he has received for a new model.

"Escalade's become its own brand, and I think this continues that narrative," said Churchill, who has Cadillac stores in Fort Worth and Arlington. "It delivers on what you expect from an Escalade."

Staying true to that brand as an electric vehicle will be key for Cadillac's top-selling franchise. The Escalade IQ is, on one hand, a clean-sheet EV designed from the ground up on GM's Ultium battery platform, rather than a gasoline vehicle architecture retrofitted with batteries and an electric motor.

But unlike Cadillac's first two EVs — the Lyriq midsize crossover and upcomin…

With a lineup of only SUVs and crossovers, Land Rover must move into electrification with surgical precision.

Vehicles such as the Defender are engineered for off-road use, and many are used for overlanding. The $100,000 Range Rover already has a gross vehicle weight of nearly 7,400 pounds, and the upcoming battery-electric model won't weigh any less. Somehow, it must perform as well as the combustion-powered Rover and deliver a decent driving range between charges.

JLR, parent company of Jaguar and Land Rover, is investing $19 billion in new products and facility upgrades through 2028 to transform most of its vehicles to full electric power.

"By 2030, all nameplates will offer pure-electric options that are expected to account for 60 percent of our retail sales," the company said.

Range Rover: An electric version, using the MLA platform, arrives late in 2024. The Range Rover will have two motors, one for each axle. The estimated range is 300 mi…

Volvo Cars and its Geelycontrolled affiliate Polestar are on a battery-powered juggernaut. JLR, meanwhile, is charting its own path toward electrification.

Polestar launched in 2017 as a Volvo-affiliated all-electric performance brand. But that distinction is blurring as Volvo vows to go all-electric by the next decade.

"Volvo will not sell a single car that is not full-electric after 2030, regardless of market," the brand's chief commercial officer, Björn Annwall, told Automotive News in June. "There's no ifs, no buts."

Volvo said all new models will be electron-powered only. The Swedish automaker has told dealers that it expects to launch seven new and redesigned electrified models, including five battery- electric vehicles.

The fossil-fueled lineup will, however, hang around but don't expect new engines or model redesigns.

According to Annwall, the combustion engine models "will get a bit of love."

"We're not inv…

The best part about attending this month's Management Briefing Seminars in Traverse City, Mich., was picking up the industry buzz.

Every year, smart people take the stage a few hours' drive north of Detroit to give presentations during the dayslong MBS, which has been hosted for years by the Center for Automotive Research.

But if you're a regular attendee, you know it's really the buzz in the hallways and coffee breaks and evening receptions that provide a barometer of what auto industry executives think, what they know, what they want and sometimes even what they quietly fear about the business' near-term future.

This year — no surprise — the biggest buzz around the gathering was the worldwide shift to electric vehicles. EV sales outlooks, EV battery technologies, EV charging networks and the technical challenges entwined in all of it.

The chatter fell into three camps.

Camp No. 1 was a segment of people w…

Before the end of the year, JLR says it will give an early look at the first of three new all-electric Jaguars that will begin appearing in 2025.

Although JLR officials updated the progress on their plan to reinvent Jaguar as a low-volume, super-premium luxury brand cast more in the mold of Bentley and Aston Martin than BMW and Audi, there are still more questions than answers as the 2023 model year winds down.

Will there be just one new Jaguar in 2025 until JLR builds out the lineup? JLR has said one new EV model will be launched each year after 2025. If all of the current lineup dies in 2025, Jaguar showrooms are likely to be largely empty and lonely places with just one model.

What will the U.S. Jaguar dealer network look like? This year, JLR has been encouraging Jaguar dealers to terminate their franchise agreements in exchange for a greater allocation of hot-selling Land Rovers.

JLR officials have not been forthcoming with many of those and…

Volvo Cars is cruising through a product transformation as it steers toward an all-electric future by the start of the next decade.

The Swedish automaker has told dealers that it expects to launch seven new and redesigned electrified models, including five battery-electric vehicles.

The first two are due next year and will bookend Volvo's crossover lineup.

Volvo's newest flagship, the EX90 large crossover, arrives on a new all-electric platform in the second half of next year. Software development issues related to the platform have delayed start of production by five or six months.

But first, Volvo will deliver its smallest, most affordable and fastest accelerating vehicle in the first half of 2024.

The EX30 compact crossover starts at $36,145 including shipping, and its performance variant can zip from 0 to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds. Also in the pipeline are all-electric versions of the XC60 midsize crossover and S90 large sedan.

Whi…

Chance Mayfield argues that automotive dealerships are still missing a lucrative opportunity — reaching the ever-growing number of Spanish-speaking customers.

He is the founder of Carfluent, a startup designed to help address this. The Dallas-based company formally debuted its artificial intelligence software in June, with a pitch the technology would publish additional search, inventory and vehicle detail pages on dealership websites with highly accurate Spanish translations. It is designed to be a plug-in that is compatible with dealerships and their dealership management systems, allowing them to be "instantly bilingual" with their Spanish-speaking customers, Mayfield said.

Carfluent is a young company with eight employees that formally launched in 2022. It is bootstrapped, or self-funded, so far. The company started generating revenue last year and has roughly 10 customers, including independent and franchised dealerships, Mayfield said.<…

The possibility of a recession seems less likely this year, GM Financial CEO Dan Berce said, adding he is "quite optimistic" industrywide sales volumes will stay strong to finish out 2023.

One potential headwind for the remainder of the year would be a downward trend in used-vehicle prices, Berce said, which have fallen steadily after rising this spring but slowed a bit in late July.

Berce told Automotive News that GM Financial is "set up pretty well" for the second half of the year.

"Everybody was predicting a recession sometime in '23. I think that's been pushed back to a soft landing," Berce said. "That bodes well for consumer performance in the second half of the year."

General Motors' captive lender has seen prices of 3-year-old GM vehicles coming off lease fall almost every week since late April, Berce said. GM Financial noted a steady decline in used-vehicle prices from June to late July.

"That bein…