General Motors plans to phase internal combustion engines out of its Cadillac lineup by the end of the decade. 

Although the luxury brand doesn’t have a single plug-in model at the moment, that’s set to change with the introduction of the battery-electric Lyriq in 2022. As part of a stepped-up $27 billion EV plan announced Thursday, the Lyriq launch will be happening nine months earlier than originally planned. GM says that it now plans to launch the Cadillac Lyriq in the first quarter of 2022. 

The company hasn't yet said how that affects the model's rollout for China, which had been on track for a few months prior to its U.S. arrival.

According to Doug Parks, GM's executive VP for product development, the company’s extraordinarily quick development process helped also shave a few months off Lyriq development time. The process drops a lot of incremental prototyping and has cut Hummer EV development time from a standard 50 months to just 26 months. 

Cadillac Lyriq concept

GM announced in October that the Lyriq will be made at its Spring Hill, Tennessee plant that originally built Saturn vehicles. Although Cadillac hasn’t yet revealed the Lyriq's starting price, Parks suggested that relative to the $80,000 starting price of the GMC Hummer EV, “the Lyriq is all of a sudden coming down in price quite a bit.”

What are we hearing from that? Although it’s not completely clear yet where the Lyriq will land, expect it to land a lot closer to the Audi Q4 E-Tron, Volvo XC40 Recharge, and Tesla Model Y than to the Jaguar I-Pace or to larger luxury flagships like the Audi E-Tron or BMW iX.