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Cadillac had a dismal second quarter as sales dropped 19.2%.

The CT5 sedan outsold the Lyriq, Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ.

V-Series also had its best quarter and best first-half ever.

Several automakers have written off sedans, but something interesting happened at Cadillac last quarter. Sales of the CT4 and CT5 were up, and the latter ended up beating several crossovers.

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Starting with the entry-level sedan, second quarter CT4 sales climbed 9.4% to 1,564 units. The model is also up 17.7% for the year, but that trend will soon come to a crashing end as production wrapped up last month .

More: Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing F1 Collector Series Debuts With 685 HP And A Six-Speed Manual

That will leave the CT5 as the company’s only sedan in America. However, it’s doing surprisingly well as buyers snapped up 4,311 of them in the second quarter. That means the model outsold the Lyriq (4,208), Optiq (4,236), Vistiq (2,001), and Escalade IQ (1,771). The sedan also wasn’t far behind the ancient XT5, which somehow managed to find 5,764 takers.

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Speaking of gas-powered models, Cadillac is getting hammered by the elimination of the XT4 and XT6. Those two crossovers generated 8,869 sales in the second quarter of 2025, so it’s hardly surprising that the new gas-powered vehicle that will be built in Spring Hill, Tennessee, is rumored to be a new XT6.

On the electric side, GM described Cadillac as “America’s luxury EV leader.” The company also noted the brand achieved its best-ever EV sales in the second quarter. While the Optiq and Vistiq were up, the Lyriq was down 16.1%, and the Escalade IQ was off 2.2%.

The gas-powered Escalade was also down as sales fell 5.9% to 10,999 units. More alarmingly, year-to-date sales have dropped 17.7% to 20,062 vehicles.

Cadillac noted the V-Series had its best quarter and best first half ever. This can likely be explained by several new additions, including the Optiq-V and Lyriq-V . However, the CT4-V and CT4-V Blackwing are now toast.

Overall, Cadillac sales were down 19.2% for the quarter and are off 22.3% year-to-date. The latter figure is the worst among GM brands, although Buick isn’t far behind with a 20.9% drop.

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2026 Q2 Cadillac US Sales

Model Q2 26 Q2 25 % Chg YTD 26 QTD 25 % Chg

CT4 1,564 1,430 9.4 3,111 2,644 17.7

CT5 4,311 4,187 3.0 7,762 8,168 -5.0

Escalade 10,999 11,692 -5.9 20,062 24,375 -17.7

ESCALADE IQ 1,771 1,810 -2.2 3,203 3,766 -14.9

LYRIQ 4,208 5,017 -16.1 7,578 9,317 -18.7

OPTIQ 4,236 3,224 31.4 7,083 4,940 43.4

VISTIQ 2,001 1,744 14.7 3,903 1,745 123.7

XT4 83 4,010 -97.9 210 8,785 -97.6

XT5 5,764 6,374 -9.6 11,107 12,727 -12.7

XT6 888 4,859 -81.7 2,904 9,637 -69.9

Total 35,825 44,347 -19.2 66,923 86,104 -22.3

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Benjamin and Chance react to the news from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman that Apple is accelerating the roadmap for the M7 series of Apple Silicon chips, somewhat at the expense of the as-yet-unreleased M6 line. Also, we break down what’s new in visionOS 27 and do some summer Ask9to5Mac questions.

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Slate Auto says it has no plans to sell its bargain electric truck in Canada.

Tariffs would push bargain US pricing into uncomfortably ordinary territory.

Ford’s upcoming compact electric truck will reach Canada starting in 2027.

If you were hoping Slate’s bargain priced electric truck would rescue Canada’s affordable EV market, we’ve got bad news. The startup has confirmed its piccolo pickup isn’t heading north, leaving Canadian buyers to admire it from across the border.

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Slate burst onto the scene in 2025 promising a genuinely inexpensive electric truck, and it’s delivered on that promise. Backed by Jeff Bezos, the startup recently confirmed pricing starting at $24,950 for its two-seat pickup, while its Squareback and Fastback SUV conversions begin at $29,950 and $31,950 respectively. Deliveries are currently scheduled to begin in late 2026.

Related: Slate Bets Its Electric Truck Is So Cheap That It’ll Turn A Profit

The company has pitched a radically simple formula. Forget giant touchscreens, powered seats, keyless entry and even power windows. Buyers get a basic electric pickup with hand-crank windows, room for two, a projected 205 miles (330 km) of electric range and the ability to add accessories later instead of financing equipment they might never want.

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Unfortunately, Canadian customers won’t get the chance to decide whether that minimalist philosophy makes sense. Speaking to Automotive News Canada , Slate spokesperson Jeff Jablansky confirmed the company’s strategy stops at the US border, saying simply, “We do not have plans to sell vehicles in Canada.”

Jablansky didn’t explain the decision, but economics likely played a major role. Since Slate plans to build its trucks in Indiana, they would face Canada’s retaliatory 25 percent tariffs on American-built vehicles. Add those import duties to exchange rates and the truck’s eye-catching US price suddenly loses much of its magic, potentially climbing into territory that no longer looks like an unbelievable bargain.

Thousands Of Reservations

That’s especially disappointing because affordability has become one of Slate’s biggest selling points. The startup reportedly has around 180,000 reservations, though converting refundable deposits into actual sales remains one of the biggest hurdles facing any new automaker. Whether buyers will really embrace keep-fit windows and almost no standard equipment is another question entirely.

Canadian shoppers looking for an inexpensive electric pickup aren’t completely out of luck, however. Ford has already begun teasing its own compact electric truck, which is expected to start below $30,000 in the US, where it’ll also be built. Unlike the Slate, Ford’s newcomer is planned for Canadian showrooms too, though exactly how tariffs and exchange rates will affect pricing north of the border is unclear. For now, the cheapest new electric truck in America will stay exactly that – an American-only proposition.

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Astronomers have spotted an ancient galaxy shining through the cosmic fog of the early universe, revealing a detailed view that was thought to be impossible.

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope , along with data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers detected "ionizing" ultraviolet photons — energetic light capable of stripping electrons from hydrogen atoms — coming from the galaxy, called MXDFz4.4. It's the earliest such detection on record, arriving only around 250 million years after the end of a major cosmic transition called the Epoch of Reionization , the researchers explained in a study published June 23 in The Astrophysical Journal .

For hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang , the space between galaxies was filled with a fog of neutral hydrogen gas that blocked this kind of light. Over time, radiation from the first stars and galaxies ionized that gas, clearing the fog and letting light travel freely across the universe — a process astronomers are still working to fully understand.

"This was thought to be impossible," Ilias Goovaerts, a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore and first author of the new study, said to Live Science. "What’s really special about this galaxy is that it’s getting through so much of the intergalactic medium [the ionized plasma between galaxies]. It’s the furthest away so it has the most intergalactic medium to get through."

What makes MXDFz4.4 unusual is its combination of size and star-formation rate. The galaxy is roughly 100 times smaller by area than the Milky Way , yet it forms stars around 10 times faster, packing a large number of massive young stars into a compact space. According to Goovaerts, that crowding effect helps the galaxy punch clear channels through its surrounding gas, letting ionizing light escape both the galaxy and, eventually, the murky space between galaxies. The team estimates that somewhere between half and all of the galaxy's ionizing light is escaping.

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The discovery, made in October, came about somewhat by chance. While preparing an unrelated funding proposal just days before a major deadline, Goovaerts examined an existing, deep Hubble image to check whether anyone had looked for this kind of signal there before. Within a couple of hours, he had a promising signal. "It was very, very quick from us having the idea to me going, okay, there’s something here and this is exciting," Goovaerts said. "We were excited from day one, but then it took months for it to mature and to extract all the properties about the galaxy."

An illustration of the galaxy MXDFz4.4 as it appeared roughly 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, when the Era of Reionization was drawing to a close. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)) The finding relied on an unusually rich set of observations: an extremely deep Hubble image taken from 40 hours of observations; JWST imaging across many wavelengths, used to characterize the galaxy's stars and star-formation history; and one of the deepest spectra ever taken of a single patch of sky, gathered over roughly six days of observing time with the VLT's Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument. That spectrum confirmed the galaxy's distance through its Lyman-alpha emission line — which serves as a "hydrogen fingerprint," or a glow given off by excited hydrogen gas, that astronomers can use to measure cosmic distance and time.

No other galaxy from this early period had previously shown detectable ionizing light, making MXDFz4.4 one of a kind so far, study co-author Marc Rafelski , deputy mission head for the Hubble Space Telescope at STScI, noted in the statement. .

Researchers say bursts of vigorous star formation like the one seen in MXDFz4.4 may have played an important role in clearing the early universe's hydrogen fog and that more galaxies like it are likely still waiting to be found.

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