Cadillac, showcasing the best in styling and technical sophistication from General Motors, unwraps two all-new vehicles in a 2004 line that also includes a souped-up sports touring sedan and the largest and most powerful sport-utility wagon in the marketplace.

Recent Cadillac show-car designs with names like Evoq, Imaj and Vizon become the harbingers of a new age for Cadillac promising cutting-edge designs and high-tech gear for superior vehicular performance, stability and safety.

The two-seat Evoq, a hardtop coupe that converts to a daring convertible, is the first of these futuristic Cadillac concepts to spawn a street-legal production model and it's badged with Cadillac's new alphabetical nomenclature as the XLR. Built on the rigid rear-wheel-drive (RWD) platform that also supports Chevrolet's racy Corvette, the new Cadillac sports car wears sharp but clean body forms marked by angular shapes and crisp edges combining in a sleek package that looks like no other vehicle on the road.

The Vizon show-car wagon also comes to life as Cadillac's new SRX sport-utility raised on the unitized Sigma architecture used for the CTS sports touring sedan. SRX packs aboard as many as three rows of seats in a spacious cabin with either rear-wheel-drive (RWD) or all-wheel-drive (AWD) traction and a choice of Cadillac's redesigned 4.6-liter NorthStar V8 engine or a new 3.6-liter V6 version.

The CTS also gets that new 3.6-liter V6, while a souped-up CTSv edition coming later in the model-year will push a high-performance V8 to make the most powerful Cadillac ever. Two familiar names in passenger cars - Seville SLS and DeVille - repeat in the 2004 line. DeVille earns heated and cooled seats plus a heated steering wheel, then spins off an armored edition for those who need security and protection when motoring.

The STS sporty version of Seville fades away for a year while a new version is developed on the RWD Sigma platform, and Seville's SLS luxury sedan remains in Cadillac's line through December of 2003.

Three different sport-utility wagons from Cadillac carry the name of Escalade but appear in different formats. Escalade the SUV rides on GM's full-size truck chassis and carries many mechanical weapons for road combat, along with every convenience in a leather-wrapped passenger compartment that seats seven in luxury. Escalade EXT has the big cabin of a four-door SUV but also the abbreviated bed of a pickup truck plus a link between cab and truck bed in the cabin's back gate.

Escalade ESV, stretched 22 inches longer than Escalade, amounts to a super-size SUV that compares to Chevrolet's Suburban in half-ton 1500 series but with all of Escalade's lavish features plus class-capping muscle. (CONTINUED...)