Could Cadillac Get Away With Building Its Own 911 Dakar?

Remember Cadillac‘s Opulent Velocity concept? It was a sleek coupe with billionaire doors and a look that borrowed as much from Cadillac’s racing heritage as it did from the company’s history of building badass land yachts. It even made a cool noise. And apparently the response was positive enough that Cadillac green-lit another physical concept car, this time without the asphalt-hugging ride height.

What you see above (and down at the end there) is the Cadillac Elevated Velocity concept. Names don’t get much more literal than this one. They’ve pretty much gone and put the thing on stilts.

Just to remind you, here’s where we started a year ago:

Cadillac is pitching the Elevated Velocity as exactly what it looks like: a go-anywhere sports coupe. It’s not a entirely outrageous proposition; Porsche certainly made the formula work just fine with the 911 Dakar. But a 911 is a Porsche, and more to the point, it’s the company’s iconic 2+2 GT done up as an homage to the car that won the Paris-Dakar Rally in 1984. Cadillac has no such heritage to draw on; this is essentially a blank slate.

Cadillac’s pitching it as sort of an all-’rounder, but with a lean toward performance. There’s an e-Velocity mode (a nod to “V” mode in current performance Caddies) that gives it more edge when you’re on pavement. Meanwhile, “Terra” mode adjusts the air suspension for maximum off-road articulation.

And since it’s a Cadillac, it must honor other traditions entirely—comfort and luxury, to name the two biggies. So not only can this 4×4 sports coupe go off-road, but it can both drive itself there and, well, drive itself there. By that, I mean it offers both on- and off-road self-driving capabilities.

“Who is asking for a self-driving, off-road performance coupe,” you might ask? Great question! I’d like to slap them too.

But fortunately both for me and for that hypothetical adventurer, that’s not really the point of concept cars. Think of this not as an idea for a production model, but an amalgamation of different ideas of what a future two-door Cadillac could be.

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