Cadillac, Lincoln Ready to Roll With ‘Luxe Trucks’

If you thought the $50,000 luxury SUV was the pinnacle of vehicular excess, just wait for the luxury pickup truck.

Despite soaring gasoline prices and a weakening national economy, Lincoln and Cadillac both are preparing to launch ultra-luxury versions of the pickup, an American blue-collar icon.

Ford Motor Co.’s Lincoln will lead the way with the Blackwood, due in dealerships late this summer. General Motors Corp.’s Cadillac plays catch-up in the first quarter of 2002 with the Escalade EXT.

Executives at Lincoln say they expect to sell about 10,000 a year of the $52,500 Blackwoods. Cadillac has set production of the Escalade EXT at 15,000 a year. Pricing has not been announced, but the Escalade EXT is expected to start at about $55,000.

These are true specialty vehicles--12-mile-per-gallon, leather-and-wood-trimmed trucks for people who will never haul a bag of manure or tote a refrigerator home from the appliance store.

“It’s too pretty to carry junk in,” said Chris Gilfillen, a Palm Desert real estate agent who has had his order in for a Lincoln Blackwood since Palm Springs Lincoln-Mercury started taking advance orders in December.

But the luxury charms are not apparent to every pickup fan.

“It’s more of a toy,” sniffed Steven Campos, project supervisor for a Santa Ana-based painting and remodeling contractor. Campos, who drives a 1991 Ford Ranger pickup outfitted with a large metal toolbox that takes up a third of the cargo bed, said the Blackwood “doesn’t sound all that usable.”

The Cadillac, with a bigger bed and more cargo space than the Lincoln, makes “a little more sense,” he said. “But at those prices, I’d buy a regular pickup for work and a nice convertible or a [Chevrolet] Suburban for my personal use.”

Although suburbanites long ago turned the working man’s pickup into a family vehicle, some auto experts wonder whether the trucks can make the transition to the luxury market.

Dan Gorrell, vice president of San Diego-based Strategic Vision, an automotive market data firm, worries that the very idea of a luxury pickup “sends a mixed message” that will muddy auto makers’ images with consumers. “You can’t sell the same image to wealthy plumbers and to highly educated high-tech executives.”

“This niche would have been viable about 18 months ago, but both Lincoln and Cadillac are a day late and a dollar short,” said Gordon Wangers, president of AMCI, an automotive consulting firm in Vista, Calif.

With the threat of rising fuel costs and a recessionary economy hanging over them, GM and Ford “are late to the party with the world’s most expensive, impractical pickups--exercises in how bizarre you can make something,” Wangers said.

The new trucks may, indeed, be impractical for most people.

The Blackwood’s molded plastic cargo compartment is carpeted, has brushed stainless steel trim on the inner walls, and is only 4 feet, 8 inches long.

The Escalade will require owners to fold away the rear bulkhead to convert the EXT from a five-passenger vehicle with a 5-foot, 3-inch bed into a two-seat pickup with an 8-foot, 1-inch bed--a bit of manual labor few luxury vehicle buyers are likely to put up with.

But practicality has never been important in the luxury market.

They are distinctive vehicles. They are posh. They have big engines. They are expensive and they will never be gobbled up by the masses.

And all that is important to the buyers whom both brands are hoping to attract.

It also is important to the two auto makers--luxury vehicles and pickups both are high-profit products and strong segments of the passenger vehicle market. So why not combine the two?

Auto industry marketing analysts giggle a bit when they talk about the new “luxe trucks” category, but they pretty much agree that the Blackwood and the Escalade EXT will sell.

“These may be silly vehicles to most of us,” said George Peterson, president of AutoPacific Inc., a consulting firm in Tustin, “but, by golly, they are image cars and they will go to people who want to have the first of a kind. We’re dealing here with a fashion market, driven by a need to be first, and the buyers are people with that need and with the money to indulge it.”

Sales of luxury vehicles in the $45,000-to-$80,000 range have softened this year, but the limited quantities and new design of the two luxe trucks “are likely to make them successes,” said Paul Taylor, chief economist for the National Automobile Dealers Assn. “They are aimed at buyers who want the newest products and who are not dramatically inhibited financially.”

As if to prove the point, Lincoln just sold 50 special-edition Blackwoods at almost $60,000 a copy in a single day through the Neiman Marcus spring catalog.

“What recession?” quipped Derek Humphrey, head of North American forecasting for auto marketing consultant J.D. Power & Associates.

Indeed, Gilfillen, the Palm Desert resident with a Blackwood on order, said the chance to be first on the block with such a rare vehicle was a big factor in his decision to buy.

There are practical reasons, too. The 53-year-old Gilfillen said he is a “loyal Lincoln guy” who now drives a Lincoln Navigator--the big sport-utility vehicle from which the Blackwood is derived.

Gilfillen’s lease on the Navigator expires this summer and his wife and 14-year-old daughter “have gotten used to sitting up high and having some metal around them,” he said. “When you get used to that, then [when] sitting in a regular car, you don’t feel you can see as well or are as safe.

“The Blackwood will let us keep that feeling,” Gilfillen said.

For the auto makers, the luxe-truck rationale is simple: Pickups and SUVs have become the industry’s profit leaders--offsetting losses in the passenger car market, in which vehicles are more costly to manufacture and competition is too fierce to allow for much better than break-even performance.

So if Lincoln, for instance, can make an estimated $19,000 profit on every Navigator SUV it sells, “think of what it can do with a pickup derived from the Navigator,” Peterson said.

He suggested that eliminating the sheet metal, glass and third-row seating of the enclosed Navigator and using parts already being manufactured for the Navigator and the Ford pickups that it is derived from could add several thousand more per vehicle to the Blackwood profit picture. The base price of the Blackwood, at $52,500, is $8,000 above the base Navigator.

Cadillac is expected to price the Escalade EXT somewhere around $55,000, or about $7,000 more than the base Escalade SUV from which it flows.

“Even though this is a limited market, the stickers are so big, and these are derivatives of other vehicles, so the profit is there,” said Dave Healey, an auto industry analyst with Burnham Securities.

Besides being profitable, the trucks are expected to help Lincoln and Cadillac attract younger, more active buyers. Both brands have seen the average age of their buyers spiral upward in the last decade. The average age of Caddy buyers, except for those drawn to the Escalade SUV, is about 65, while the average Lincoln buyer, except for those attracted by the Navigator and the new LS sport sedan, is 69, according to AutoPacific.

Early signs indicate that the Blackwood should help lower Lincoln’s age profile.

At 53, for instance, Gilfillen is a dozen years younger than the average Lincoln sedan buyer.

And Donna Wiggins, general sales manager at Star Lincoln-Mercury & Mazda in Glendale, said the two or three advance orders for Blackwoods that her staff has written “are from people whose other cars are things like Porsches. They’re a different kind of customer from the usual.”

Over at Cadillac, Escalade brand manager Susan Docherty said the Escalade EXT also is expected to draw younger buyers--people such as Steve Weinstock, a 46-year-old Newport Beach resident and sales director for a networking products integration company.

Although Weinstock hasn’t plunked down a deposit, he said he is interested in the Escalade EXT because it “would give me the functionality of two vehicles. It is the luxury sedan I need for work, to take clients around in, and it is the SUV with a pickup bed that I need for the home improvement projects I’m always hauling stuff around for.”

At the end of the first quarter of this year, new vehicle buyers were flocking to light trucks. Pickups, minivans and SUVs accounted for nearly half of all passenger vehicle sales for the period. Consumers bought 694,945 full-size pickups during the three-month period, accounting for 13% of all vehicle sales.

“Despite gas prices, the stock market and every other . . . thing, people are still walking away from passenger cars,” said Burnham Security’s Healey. “So sure, there’s a market for a luxury pickup. Just don’t count me in it.”

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Clash of the Titans

Deluxe trucks coming to Lincoln showrooms this summer and to Cadillac dealerships early next year carry hefty price tags, thirsty engines and loads of luxury touches. Here’s a look at how they compare:

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Sources: Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp.