Rolls-Royce Black Badge Spectre vs Cadillac Celestiq: who makes the world's best luxury EV?

We can’t agree on the terminology here either. In Britain, something absolutely first class is the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of whatever we’re talking about. But Americans rate the best of the best as ‘the Cadillac of [insert impressive thing here].’

Photography: John Wycherley

So, what’s the world’s best luxury car – the Roller, or the... Caddy? Seriously? Because America has manifested a proper, pukka, unapologetic riposte to the British monopoly on snob value.

Welcome to the most expensive, outlandish, ambitious American sedan ever: the Celestiq. When it launched it cost $340k. That’s been hiked beyond $400k for 2026. General Motors isn’t so much parking its tanks on our croquet lawn as approving an air strike on Goodwood.

The Cadillac has home advantage. We’ve nabbed an unusually dowdy spec Rolls-Royce Black Badge Spectre and ventured to Detroit to meet the Celestiq, because this 18-foot-long, 3,102kg leviathan isn’t coming to Europe. Where would it fit? America first.

It’s special order only in the US to Cadillac’s most enthusiastic clients. Only a handful of dealerships are authorised to accept interest. GM will build no more than two per day. No two will be identical, each car individualised at GM’s space age headquarters with in person consultation from the design team’s top brass.

Detroit, like Cadillac, is fighting back against assumptions and reputation. Down on Woodward Avenue, which used to be the venue for midnight street races dominated by the infamous Challenger Black Ghost, it’s a cosmopolitan, commercialised metropolis. The Fox Theatre’s neon glows bright and crisp. Comerica Park and Ford Field, the vast bases for the Tigers baseball and Detroit Lions NFL team, loom like space stations over the art deco frontages. Oddly gothic churches stand tall in neatly tended grounds.

Go 10 minutes northeast toward 8 Mile and the city is a smashed carcass of old industry, landfill levels of fly tipping and staggering deprivation. Double back into Indian Village and it’s mile after mile of enormous Home Alone-esque mansions, leafy avenues, suburban bliss. Five blocks west in Gratiot Woods, there’s so many boarded up windows and tarpaulin sheeted roofs you’d think a hurricane blew through last week. Will the real Detroit please stand up?

Can’t fault how friendly the locals are. A genial white haired chap raps on the Caddy’s window while I’m at yet another interminable stop sign. “This makes me so proud to be an American,” he beams. “I worked in the motor trade in this city for 50 years. We’ve never had a luxury car that could compete. GM should never have made the Corvette a $250,000 supercar – but this is exactly where Cadillac should be at.”

Detroit only has eyes for the blood orange Celestiq. It exudes presence: not just from its sheer scale but also the unusual details. Its headlights are vertical – only the indicators lurk at the outer limits of the slender silver brow framing its face. The backlit nosecone looks naff next to the Spectre’s exactly milled, illuminated Parthenon grille, but that’s quickly forgotten as your eye begins the journey down the car.

Under the vast bonnet, there’s an (orange velvet lined) cable stowing clutch purse. You could buy a Celestiq with mere 22in rims, but this one’s on the concept car spec 23s. The gargantuan length is accentuated by those clean flanks. No door handles: all four open electrically at the press of a button. Much more reliably than the Spectre’s motorised coach doors.

Even with six feet of Caddy left to reveal itself the tail lamps are hoving into view. There’s no legislative requirement for the lights to be the size of an ice hockey stick. But there was never any ‘reason’ heyday Cadillacs sprouted hot pink fins and rocket shaped lamps. They did it because they could. That’s America at its best. “We choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it is hard.”

The Spectre is a much more upright, restrained object, hewn from monolithic rock faces with the stately timelessness of a royal residence. The Black Badge treatment adds incongruously tarty alloy wheels (and darker badges obviously) but those are the only clues this is the most potent version of Rolls’s twin motor EV, with power upped from 577 to 650bhp and torque now a mighty 793lb ft.

Yet it’s the Cadillac, with a mere 5bhp advantage, just 646lb ft and a 200kg weight penalty, that’s considerably faster. What, you expected us to meet on Woodward and not race them?

The streets don’t echo with a Motown V8 cacophony, but as the lights flash green the Celestiq rudely vaults past the Spectre on its way from 0–60mph in 3.7 seconds. That’s fast for any car, let alone Liberace’s canal boat. Even in ‘Infinity Mode’, necessary for the Rolls to proffer its maximum output, it’s been calibrated not to thwack your hairdo into the sumptuous headrests. This isn’t one of those teleporter EVs. The amusingly swift Rolls pegs the hilariously quick Cadillac and keeps the gap even once it’s rolling, but it’s far too dignified, too grown up for this malarkey.

It’s not that the Spectre isn’t a sports car. Life aboard doesn’t resemble any kind of car. I said the standard car was more akin to a pleasure yacht on a millpond sea or some sort of next gen private jet than a car and the Black Badge is just as otherworldly.

Despite slimmer sidewalls and tweaked suspension which reins in a noticeable chunk of the standard car’s pitch and dive, it can’t be caught out. This is serenity on a different plane to any car in history. No Bentley or Maybach isolates you so completely from not just the road itself, but the outside world. You’re hermetically sealed against the drone of a truck, the buzz of a scooter, the chirrup of a siren. Wind. Rain. Changes in season. It all just bounces off the Spectre inconsequentially.

You’re cradled loftily high in an exquisitely stuffed armchair, peering through a much narrower glasshouse than the Cadillac – this is a coupe, not a liftback saloon. But the sense of being so safely cocooned away from the stresses, noise and interference of the outside is spooky.

And this peerless silence is uncannily matched by the way the Spectre interprets your commands. The steering has such an oily, weighted deftness you can’t believe it’s doing anything as vulgar as pointing some tyres where to go. When one of the enormous wheels encounters a drain cover or a tramtrack, the steering wheel isn’t informed. Everything is dealt with by the downstairs help, so the one per center in the expensive seat is blissfully unaware of imperfections and inconveniences. Even regen braking is perfectly set not to corrupt the trademark Rolls pedal feel which makes a jarring stop impossible.

But let’s be fair. This is what Rolls-Royce exists to do. It only builds Davos on wheels. A Spectre costs $100,000 extra (for now). Cadillac is a mainstream carmaker stamping out hundreds of thousands of sedans and SUVs a year. So the Celestiq has blue collar roots.

Peel the body off a Spectre and you’ll find the same foundations Rolls-Royce deploys under the peerless Ghost and Phantom. Meanwhile, the Celestiq uses the same ‘Ultium’ battery core as the stupidest car in the world: the Hummer EV. Only a single deck of batteries mind, and the 111kWh cells generate a genuine (Rolls matching) 300 mile range.

But despite the bespoke aluminium front/rear subframes, all new magnetorheological adaptive suspension which leans into corners, the 275 patents filed to create this car and its impressive adoption of 3D printed titanium (the steering wheel carcass is one giant piece with buttons machined to a two micron tolerance)... there are problems.

One is that there’s not enough space. It’s fine up front, but the two rear chairs offer no lounge-around room and because the battery only has small divots for the footwells you can’t fit your feet under the front seats. The Spectre’s hardly built for chauffeuring rear seat passengers, but it’s not a four door. Where did the Caddy’s space go?

Then there’s the boot, which has no bulkhead between the generous cargo area and the passenger lounge. That’s not great for refinement, and when you slow down in a hurry your designer luggage shoots forward, uses the rear seat control panel as a stunt ramp and launches itself through the windscreen. Cadillac says it’s working on a solution. No one noticed that at the prototype stage?

Where the Spectre’s soft close doors whumph shut, the Caddy’s clank just a touch. There’s more play in the switchgear. And while the Spectre keeps its orchestral interruptions to a polite minimum, the Cadillac merrily beeps and bongs away like a smoke alarm, warning you about near death situations like a closing door or selecting reverse.

You also hear more of your neighbour’s engine. By ‘car’ standards, it’s an extremely refined place to be, but by ‘ultimate EV’ standards the Rolls is in a different league. And it’s the same story with the ride, which isn’t pillowy. Occasionally the whole structure seems to twang with scuttle shake. Photographer John rides shotgun for an hour and remarks “it doesn’t just look like a concept car – it feels like one”.

The flipside is that the big Caddy is freakishly good to drive for its size and weight. The Rolls will be hustled begrudgingly. The Celestiq will give chase to an M3, then bully it. With rear steer chopping a city block out of the wheelbase, a lower silhouette, huge pace and precise steering, it’s far more incisive to drive than it needs to be, and once you’ve accelerated to Interstate speeds the Celestiq cruises fabulously. You can let GM’s ‘Supercruise’ autopilot take the wheel for some stretches, but I don’t feel encouraged to. I want to savour everything about this flawed but fascinating moonshot.

I love being in the Celestiq. I love its low scuttle 1950s-kitsch dashboard and the cavalcade of classic Caddies engraved into the cupholder lid. I like the random armrest folding mechanisms (even though they rattle) and the fillets of genuine cool metal lavished about the place. I enjoy its single paddle regen which works like the brake mushroom on an old Citroen DS.

I love how even with a 55in sweep of screen, it doesn’t feel Germancially tech dominated. I adore its sound system and its buffet of comfort options. Want a warmed neck, cooled back, inferno bum cheeks, griddled armrests and a sports massage all at once? You got it!

The Celestiq is a fabulous creation. A worthy new celebrity of the American car industry – much more of a landmark EV than the Cybertruck. And by a distance it’s America’s greatest luxury product.

But Cadillac used to call itself ‘the standard of the world’ and this isn’t the Super Bowl, where you can be a ‘world champion’ by only playing US opposition. If you won’t settle for less than the finest automobile on Earth, the Cadillac of luxury cars is still the Rolls-Royce.