- Luxury brand's new performance EV packs 459kW and 880Nm.
- The Lyriq-V will sprint to 100km/h in around 3.4 seconds.
- It shares the same 102kWh battery pack as the standard Lyriq.
It may be missing a couple of letters, and a lot of cylinders, but GM is effectively bringing back the HSV brand with the launch of its super fast, seriously sporty Cadillac Lyriq-V, which it describes as “turning all the knobs up to 11”.
Sprinkled with blacked-out bits and covered in carbon fibre, the Lyriq-V is Cadillac’s first performance EV, and will be, by far, its fastest accelerating car with its whopping 600-plus horsepower (that’s how they say it, we’d call it 459KW) and 880Nm hurling it to 60mph in 3.3 seconds (let’s add a tenth for the 0 to 100km/h dash, it’s still fast).
It’s also faster than the properly shouty Cadillac we can’t get here, the CTV-5 Blackwing, which can hit 60mph in 3.4 seconds using a 6.2-litre supercharged V8. Sigh.
The standard Cadillac Lyriq — and keep in mind, we’re talking about a two-tonne plus large SUV here — takes 5.5 seconds to reach 100km/h, despite sharing the dual-motor, all-wheel-drive set up of the racier V variant.
CarsGuide spoke to the Program Engineer for this car in Detroit, Christopher Carino, who said this slightly ludicrous Lyriq represented the brand’s first chance to show Australian buyers what the V means to Cadillac.
“So it’s got the same motors as the other Lyriq, but they're tuned a little bit differently in order to give that performance upgrade for the V series, and so we get that 3.3-second time, which really is phenomenal for this vehicle,” Carino enthused.
“We really have turned all the knobs up to 11 on this car, we wanted to give the customer just everything we could throw at it, from a performance standpoint, and we’re super excited about it being our first electric vehicle for the V series, which has got a long brand history with General Motors, and with Cadillac.
“This vehicle lives up to all of that, and more.”
Carino said no other car company has a variant that can compete directly with the Lyriq-V (Tesla’s Model 3 Performance can hit 60mph in 2.9 seconds, but it’s a mid-sized sedan, while the Model Y Performance claims 3.5 seconds). What sets the Cadillac apart is its ability “to live in both the luxury and the sport simultaneously.”
Carino puts this down to the fact the V offers so much customisation. He said most drivers will use its My Mode to set up the suspension, steering, brake feel, motor sound and so on for the way they want to use the car 90 per cent of the time.
“Then you press the V button and you get V Mode, which allows you to exercise all the bells and whistles from a performance side, and then you can go even one step further with a hard press of the V button, which gives you Velocity Max mode, and then that gives you this top-level acceleration on top of everything else you've already set for the vehicle,” he explained.
“And the from there, you can use Launch Control, say if there’s someone next to you at the stop light, and you really want to get ahead of them, and that will give you that 3.3 seconds. Boom!”
We resisted the urge to ask Carino whether he could have come up with a more American name than “Velocity Max”, and asked him, as someone who’s been driving a Lyriq V every day for months in the US, how often he engaged that mad mode.
“So I have a family with three kids, and when I put it in Velocity Max, they're like, ‘Dad! It's too much! Too much. Too much,” he guffawed. “So I enjoy it when I’m by myself.
“You guys are going to love it when you get it down there.”
The Lyriq-V boasts a 102kWh battery pack, and if you drive it as it’s clearly intended its unlikely you’ll get anywhere near its claimed range of 459km (according to US EPA testing numbers).
The standard Cadillac Lyriq is already on sale in New Zealand, priced from $123,000, and the brand’s local arm won’t say yet just how much the vicious V will be when it arrives early in 2026.
“Pricing and specification for ANZ will be announced later this year and customer deliveries will commence from early 2026,” a spokesman from GM ANZ said.
- Stephen Corby, contributing journalist.