Cadillac Ditches Detroit For New NYC Headquarters

General Motors luxury brand will uproot itself next year to find a new home in New York City.

The new headquarters will be located in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood with space for roughly 120 employees, of whom 30 will be moved from Detroit and the remaining 90 new hires. Cadillac recently poached former Infiniti boss Johan de Nysschen as its new chief before giving him the authority to re-locate the brand.

The bulk of de Nysschen’s experience is with leading Audi where he also separated the four-ring brand to be headquartered in Ingolstadt instead of Wolfsburg with VW. He also split Infiniti’s corporate headquarters away from Nissan during his time running Infiniti. The South Africa-born executive said without re-locating Cadillac, the company would struggle to change, but that the company will be forced to find new ways of doing things if it is in a new geographic location.

Cadillac is trying to re-gain a position as a globally credible luxury brand, something that de Nysschen is credited with driving Audi to achieve. The brand’s latest products saw early success, but sales are tapering off and the company is falling back on old habits but relying on consumer incentives to drive sales. The compact ATS is down by more than 20 percent through August compared to last year and the CTS is down 6.2 percent. In fact, Cadillac’s SRX crossover and Escalade SUV are the only nameplates that aren’t experiencing cooling sales through the first eight months of the year.

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