2014 Cadillac CTS Vsport Twin-Turbo V-6
Veni, Vidi, Vici: The new CTS Vsport puts Cadillac back in the $60K chariot race.
September 2013
BY AARON ROBINSON
PHOTOGRAPHY BY A.J. MUELLER
From the November 2013 Issue of Car and Driver
TESTED
The lone domestic premium brand with a pulse is growing ever stronger and more confident as it slowly rises from its 30-year snooze. The second-generation Cadillac CTS-V and the new ATS were the first payments on debts from promises long made and *routinely broken. Now we’ve driven the reborn CTS and believe the General is indeed serious about returning Cadillac to the pointy end of the luxury market.
How do we know? Well, the 420-hp twin-turbo CTS Vsport we drove on GM’s own handling track and that streaked to 60 mph in 4.4 seconds simply felt fantastic, with a muscular engine integrated into a neutral chassis that’s been pulled as tight as piano wire. And, driving impressions and test figures aside, the CTS makes strides in cracking one of GM’s hardest nuts, the company’s persistent weight problem.
The CTS’s chief engineer, Dave Leone, tells us that the entire project was developed not with pounds or kilograms as the unit of measurement, but grams. A gram equals 0.0022 pound. Anyone presenting an idea to cut weight had to speak in grams, he says. “That’s how granular we had to be to beat the boys in Bavaria.” The CTS Vsport we tested sans the optional sunroof weighed 1,798,947 grams with a slight rear bias. That’s not exactly a gossamer goose, but it is substantially lighter than this particular model’s stated bogey, the BMW 550i. We tested that one in 2010, and it weighed 2,003,517 grams, or 4417 pounds, or 451 pounds more than our CTS Vsport test car. That’s roughly the gap between New York and Cleveland in an industry currently squeezing its designs for every possible pennyweight.
Spend a few minutes with Leone and you sense that he knows where each gram was filched from the CTS. The first production GM vehicle with aluminum doors also has an aluminum front subframe, bumper beams, shock towers, hood, and front-suspension arms. Feather-light magnesium engine mounts that have the heft of *cardboard origami in your hands save a whopping 680 grams (1.5 pounds) over the previous aluminum ones.
Ditching steel for aluminum, or magnesium, is an obvious but expensive solution. Other CTS nuances are less obvious. The B-pillar, previously assembled from eight separate steel stampings, now begins with a single “tailor-rolled” steel blank, meaning that the steel coil is manufactured with varying gauges so it’s thick where it needs to be and thin where it doesn’t. That saved 1814 grams. Stamping flanges are trimmed in a saw-toothed pattern to remove an unneeded 3000 grams or so of material between the spot-welds.
When you work in grams, ordering a milkshake without a straw would produce a significant savings. But clearly this isn’t the old GM, the company that wouldn’t trade you a rusty nail for a gram or a dram if it didn’t absolutely have to. Our test numbers further affirm that things have changed behind the wreath-and-crest. The panic-stop distance of 149 feet and the 0.97-g skidpad trace are both on par with several Porsches we can name, and they speak to the way in which a well-tuned chassis with suppressed pitch and roll exploits its very expensive Pirelli P Zero run-flat tires. They are sized for modest (and light) 18-inch wheels, the biggest CTS wheel available from the factory.
On GM’s suicidal handling loop, a woolly ride stitched together from replicas of some of racing’s worst widow-makers, the CTS Vsport glissades comfortably with slashing turn-in, gummy grip, and the scales narrowly balanced between understeer and rear-end looseness. Turn off the stability control and the sedan will go sideways with a flick once you’ve waded into the deep boost, but in such an easy and predictable way as to be thrilling fun. If you’re driving more judiciously for lap times, you can definitely feel the electronically controlled limited-slip differential, a Corvette hand-me-down that is standard on the Vsport, forcing the rear rubber to dig tenaciously.
The electrically boosted steering isolates, protecting the driver from all but the worst bumps. But it is tuned to supply a natural swell of effort in the corners, while the optional magnetorheological shocks make magic, keeping the body level and bounce-free. However you analyze the ingredients, the net effect is a Cadillac that finally closes the gap on its German counterparts.
The Vsport’s oversquare 3.6-liter runs medium boost, 15 psi, from two Mitsubishi (MHI) turbochargers. The impellers are closely coupled via short conduits to the central airbox atop the engine, which contains two air-to-liquid intercoolers and a single large throttle body. At 6500 rpm, the redline hangs low (it’s 7200 in the non-turbo 3.6), but you don’t need it any higher, what with the torque peak of 430 pound-feet arriving at 3500 rpm.
The Aisin eight-speed transmission offers four shifting modes, including tour, sport, track, and snow/ice. Tour works fine as a relaxed, eco-minded mode, but sport is a little too sporty, locking the transmission in lower gears for far too long as the engine, which is heard partly through the car’s audio system as a recording, wails at high revs. The sportiest modes should be called “track” and “track , seriously.”
An interior of simple forms and deluxe materials echoes European themes. The new CTS is about four inches longer, and rear passengers feel it in their legs. Push the start button and two giant ball bearings fly at you in the virtual gauge cluster, a thin-film-transistor screen with four driver-selectable gauge layouts. In the best layout, the ball bearings resolve into analog gauges with tightly spaced hash marks. The high-res center screen, part of Cadillac’s often-maddening CUE system, has a fast processor to quickly read out the data and navigation/entertainment selections.
Technology and capability don’t come free, and CTS prices are moving up. The menu is complicated by three engines, the choice of rear-drive or four-wheel drive, and three trim levels (Luxury, Perform*ance, and Premium). Basically, the entry-level 3.0-liter CTS has been replaced by a 2.0-liter turbo. The 3.6-liter V-6 starts at $46,025, an increase of $1790 from last year. And the Vsport launches at $59,995. Right now the most expensive CTS is the Vsport Premium, which has almost every CTS option as standard for $69,995, a sum nearly $4600 higher than the old CTS-V. Even the Vsport Premium will eventually be just an intermediate step up to the monster V, the new version of which hasn’t been revealed yet. That car should blow Cadillac’s price ceiling to even smaller shards.
Well, this is what the Germans charge for comparable performance. Now that Cadillac is finally serious about competing at the top level, it should be able to charge serious prices. Excellent job, Cadillac. Welcome back to the fight. Why don’t you take some time off—say, the next three and a half minutes—and then get back to work?
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqOz5pxeCXs[/video]
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