Mary Kay's Pink Cadillac "Career Cars" Have Gotten a Very Modern Update

The Mary Kay cosmetics company has been doling out branded company cars to its top-performing salespeople for decades. Traditionally, the top tier of these vehicles have been Cadillacs painted a pale pink color named after the company and adorned with subtle Mary Kay badging on their front doors. While that tradition lives on, the pink Cadillac is changing—and we think for the better: It's now electric.

Mary Kay has announced that its newest Cadillac "Career Car," as it calls them, is a pink Optiq electric SUV. Now, we don't think the Mary Kay Cadillac is better solely because it's electric—it might actually make the salespeoples' lives harder, if they cover vast territories—but the Optiq is an excellent luxury SUV that happens to be electric. Hey, given that recent Mary Kay cars have included the unloved, largely forgotten XT6 three-row SUV and XT5 two-row SUV, the Optiq's pretty slick.

For those curious, not all Mary Kay Career Cars are Cadillacs. Most of the active fleet (about 3,600 cars) is made up of lesser GM products, namely the Chevrolet Trax and Equinox; only 1,000 of that total are Cadillacs reserved for the top cut of Independent Sales Directors. Everyone else in a Career Car is a lower level, still high-performing director or an Independent Beauty Consultant.

Anyway, back to the Optiq, which has the benefit of good optics—after all, it's a classy small electric SUV. The design of today's Optiq is stylish inside and out, with interesting interior materials, sharp digital displays, and a surprisingly roomy layout given its relatively modest price tag among similarly luxurious SUVs, EV or not. Of course, Mary Kay has a corporate angle here about sustainability and environmental friendliness that it's hoping to project through the use of an electric Cadillac for the pinnacle of its Career Car program, and now you know that.

With a range of 302 miles (per the EPA), the Optiq should have more than enough juice for most short- and medium-haul sales calls, but for criss-crossing states, Mary Kay Independent Sales Directors will need to exercise its merely OK 150-kW DC fast-charging speeds. At least the onboard AC charger for Level 2 charge-ups is strong, at over 19 kW. The rest of the time, they can look forward to a smooth, well controlled ride; athletic handling; and excellent tuning of its EV-specific systems, including one of the best one-pedal drive modes (where lifting a foot off the accelerator slows the vehicle using the electric motors) in the business.