2016 Cadillac CTS AWD 2.0T Premium Collection -- Race Organizer Review

[Titan ;x]

An Upper Midwest flashback in the super-advanced descendent of the car of my childhood

Every summer, I spend a week or two at a log cabin on Lake Michigan owned by my wife's family, on Wisconsin's Door County Peninsula. This area is about as pure a region as you'll find for love of Detroit vehicles, and you'll see levels of Buicks and Chryslers and Fords on the streets of Door County in numbers not seen on the coasts since the late 1970s. When I fly out to Wisconsin from my home in Denver, I must drive American during my visits; last year, I had a Ford Focus ST for this trip. That was a fine automobile, no complaints, but it wasn't the sort of machine that gave me a connection to the Detroit iron driven by my Midwestern forebears.

I spent the first half-dozen years of my life in Minneapolis, and the first car I remember riding in was my mom's green 1949 Cadillac coupe. It was 20 years old and fairly rusty, but my parents called it Dillinger and, even as a 3-year-old, I knew it had style.

My dad, meanwhile, drove a utilitarian 1967 Ford Custom 500 two-door post (the cheapest full-size Ford that year), with 289-cubic-inch V8 and three-on-the-floor manual transmission. These cars were very appropriate to a proper patriotic family in the Upper Midwest, but then the miserable Minnesota weather chased my family to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1972, making the move in a brand-new 1973 Chevrolet Sportvan Beauville passenger van. After that, my parents tried to stay loyal to Detroit cars, but a clanker of a 1979 Ford Granada and an even more wretched 1988 Chevrolet Celebrity pushed them into the eager embrace of Toyota and Mazda.
 

My wife grew up in Milwaukee, a place very similar (culturally speaking) to Minneapolis. Her parents drove Buick Skylarks and Ford Country Squires, and her grandparents drove gigantic slab-sided Cadillacs. To this day, the keychain that holds the keys to the Door County log cabin comes from the Chicago-area dealership that sold Grandpa one of his Cadillacs. So, I needed a proper Cadillac for this trip.

The Cadillac Division built some of the most technologically advanced and most prestigious cars in the world during a period lasting from about the end of World War II until the downward spiral that set in around the time of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. Now Cadillac's engineering chops are back in full effect, and this car drives just as well as something built by those Germans.
 

I didn't clip any apexes at 11/10ths nor did I explore the bleeding edge of the performance envelope in this car, mostly because the roads in Door County do not encourage such driving (and because most of the time my 76-year-old mother-in-law was in the car with me). However, I pushed it hard enough to recognize that the CTS AWD 2.0T is light-footed and extremely grippy, even to the point of sacrificing cushiness for the sake of handling -- something impossible to imagine the Cadillac Division of even 15 years ago being willing to do. With a very nervous small-displacement engine stuffed with serious boost in front and power to all four wheels, this car pulls hard with little turbocharger lag, the eight-speed automatic transmission downshifts without trying your patience and the whole package managed to get close to 25 miles per gallon with me doing mostly non-highway driving.

My mother-in-law, upon hearing I would be driving a new Cadillac, expected the sort of standing-on-a-waterbed ride and acres-of-tufted-leather experience that one might get with an '84 Eldorado Biarritz. She drives a 10-year-old Accord and had a Supra before that, so she hadn't retained her Wisconsonian devotion to Detroit machinery … but the sportiness and firm ride of the CTS 2.0T disappointed her greatly. She felt it rode too harshly, made too much engine noise and shifted too frequently. However, when driving in town I noted many approving looks from locals, so the lesson here appears to be that those who remember both Cadillac's good years and bad years can find things to love and hate about this car
 

\Me, I was impressed. I'd drive one of these things every day, although (because I'm old and an automotive journalist) I would much prefer a manual transmission. The Bose audio system may be the loudest factory-installed system I have experienced in any car, and I mean that in a positive, do-justice-to-bass-heavy-music sense; the interior is made entirely of nice stuff; and the highway range on a full tank should be a long-road-trip-encouraging 500-plus miles. And it's only a matter of time before the aftermarket sells a kit that lets you bolt on a bigger turbocharger and more, uh, flexible engine controls, for a hundred or two increased horsepower.