Cadillac’s SUVs Are Beating The Equinox EV At GM’s Own Game, And The Numbers Explain Why Buyers Switched
GM’s Q3 2026 sales report, released this week, tells a strange story about its own electric vehicle lineup: the company’s cheapest EV is collapsing while its priciest ones hold steady. The Chevy Equinox EV, which was GM’s best-selling electric vehicle in 2025 and finished third in the entire U.S. EV market behind only the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, sold just 1,905 units in Q3 2026. That’s a 92.4% drop from the more than 25,000 units it moved in the same quarter last year.
Meanwhile, Cadillac’s four-model electric SUV lineup, the Lyriq, Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ, combined for 12,358 units in Q3, nearly half of everything GM sold with a plug across its entire portfolio. The Optiq alone outsold the Equinox EV by more than double, moving 4,550 units despite its own 6.9% year-over-year decline. GM’s mainstream EV flagship is getting beaten at home by its own luxury division, and the timing could not be worse for Chevy’s affordable-EV ambitions.
The Equinox EV’s Fall From GM’s Best-Seller To An Afterthought
A year ago, the Equinox EV was the vehicle GM pointed to when it wanted to prove electric cars could sell at scale. It was the company’s top EV performer in 2025 and outsold every non-Tesla electric vehicle in the country. Now it’s barely clearing 1,900 units in a quarter. Through the first nine months of 2026, the Equinox EV still leads GM’s EV lineup on a year-to-date basis with 18,154 units, but that figure is down 65% from the nearly 53,000 units GM delivered over the same stretch in 2025.
The broader GM EV picture isn’t much brighter. The company sold 25,473 electric vehicles total in Q3 2026, down from a record 66,501 a year earlier, a drop tied largely to the expiration of the federal $7,500 EV tax credit last September. Buyers who were chasing that incentive pulled their purchases forward into Q3 2025, which inflated last year’s numbers and made this year’s comparison look even uglier. But the Equinox EV’s decline outpaces that industry-wide reset by a wide margin, and the pattern across GM’s lineup makes clear why: cheaper EVs got hit hardest, while Cadillac’s premium models held up comparatively well.
Why Cadillac’s Pricier EVs Are Outperforming Chevy’s Budget Play
The tax credit mattered more to budget-conscious buyers than to luxury shoppers, and the Q3 numbers back that up directly. The Optiq’s 6.9% decline looks almost like a win next to the Equinox EV’s 92.4% collapse. The Lyriq fell 50.5% to 3,617 units and the Vistiq dropped 34.1% to 2,587, both real declines, but nowhere near Chevy’s cliff dive. Even the Escalade IQ and IQL, GM’s most expensive electric offerings, only slid 29.2% to 1,604 units.
The pattern suggests Cadillac buyers were never leaning on the $7,500 credit to justify the purchase in the first place. They’re paying for Cadillac’s brand positioning, build quality, and range of electric options rather than chasing the cheapest way into an EV. Chevy’s whole pitch with the Equinox EV was affordability, and once the discount disappeared, so did a huge chunk of its buyers.
The Bolt Can’t Fill The Gap GM Is Leaving Behind
GM’s answer to the Equinox EV’s freefall was supposed to be the revived Chevy Bolt EV, which actually posted 3,866 units in Q3, enough to edge out the Equinox EV for GM’s number-two EV spot. But that comeback is getting cut short before it really starts. GM is now planning to build only around 35,000 Bolts total, down from an earlier target of 150,000, with production ending in Q1 2027. Nearly 1,000 workers at the Kansas City-area plant building the Bolt are already on indefinite layoff.
That leaves a real hole in GM’s lineup. With the Bolt winding down and the Equinox EV in free fall, GM has little left to compete in the sub-$30,000 EV space just as rivals like the Toyota bZ and Kia EV3 are angling for exactly those buyers. Cadillac’s SUVs can carry GM’s EV sales totals on paper, but they can’t replace a mainstream model’s job of getting first-time EV buyers into the brand. GM built a luxury EV strategy that’s working. It just didn’t build a backup plan for the EV its mass-market customers actually wanted.
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