Quote:
Originally Posted by Prerunner1982
g) What was the first year for the Cadillac Escalade? Where does that first truck reside? 1999, Arlington Texas
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g) You are correct about the year, 1999, but not the location. As of October of last year the first Cadillac Escalade (VIN #001) was on display at the GM Heritage Center Collection in Sterling Hts, Mi.
GMC was not very happy at all about a Cadillac SUV being added to the product lineup. You might even recall back then the GM CEO (John Smale was it? The Proctor and Gamble guy?) announced that Cadillac was definitely
not going to enter the truck market; It wasn't a month or two later when we came out with the Escalade. The two respective Marketing guys sat on the same program execution team and would think nothing of taking a verbal jab or two at each other during the course of the meeting. My favorite exchange was the time GMC was trying to get "White Diamond Tricoat", a premium paint that was exclusive to Cadillac, to be released on the Denali. The Cadillac guy said something about "this color has been for Cadillac and Cadillac only and we aren't going to share", to which the GMC guy said "yeah; just like having a truck as always been exclusive to GMC".
Incidentally, the whole "bling" thing, with all it's appeal to rappers and sports celebrities and athletes? We never saw that coming. It was totally accidental. It took us a little while to see what was happening and attempt to capitalize on that. We started to get the picture when the Cadillac guy would report sales in the meeting, and conclude with "Jennifer Lopez picked up her Escalade this week", or "BB King got his this week, a black one**".... or "the Shah of Iran got ten this week: two in each color (translated into one for each wife)".....
** I asked if Eric Clapton was going to drive him around in it. I got these blank stares like "...Seymore, WTH are you talkin about?!?..."
By the way, when we did the second generation (GMT800 version) of the Escalade, we didn't realize until after we had assigned the usages for the vehicles that #001 was going to Engineering and #002 was going to Marketing. Cadillac noticed and asked if we could trade, which we did, so that they could have VIN #001.
The Heritage Center had a couple of nice old pickup trucks, too:
