Cadillac: Ciel looks to past and future

The Cadillac Ciel's interior features olive wood hewn from a 300-year-old tree near Naples, in Italy. Photo / Supplied

Luxury United States carmaker Cadillac wowed the crowds at last month's Monterey show and shine event with the Ciel Concept, an open-air grand tourer.

The Ciel - pronounced "C-L," the French translation for sky - is a four-seat convertible powered by a twin-turbocharged version of Cadillac's 3.6-litre direct-injection V6 engine, paired with a hybrid system using lithium-ion battery technology.

Cadillac says the car is indicative of how its future designs will look. But in some ways the Ciel's styling recalls past vehicles, from the company's Evoq roadster concept of 12 years ago and rival Lincoln's convertible Continental of the early 1960s.

The Ciel's long, low-slung body, rear-hinged doors and tail-lights that suggest tail fins point to big American cars of 50 or 60 years ago. But in a nod to modern times, the Ciel has a high-performance hybrid drivetrain.

Besides being a larger-than-life concept convertible, the vehicle features a hand-crafted level of attention to detail that hasn't been seen for decades.

At the centre of the interior is olive wood hewn from a 300-year-old tree that fell in a storm near Naples, Italy.

The tree was shipped to a Pennsylvania woodyard where it was milled and kiln-dried before the designers at GM caught up with it.

They sent the planks of olive through a wood planer from the 1940s, sanded and arranged them on a gantry, then photographed the planks so their unique grains could be recreated in a special computer programme.

From there, the finished wood was sent to a design and engineering company where the pieces were cut to GM specifications and glued into their final configurations before being stained and finished.