The 2019 Cadillac CTS-V Is a Crazy Fast Luxury Sedan

This is a

2019

cadillac

cts-v and it is one of the craziest

sedan

s on the market. This car has 640 horsepower and even though it came out a few years ago, it still has more power than the new BMW M5 and the new BMW M5 Competition. and the mercedes amg e63 today i am going to review the cts-v. I borrowed this cts-v from tustin

cadillac

here in orange county california and obviously tustin has all the latest cadillac models from the escalade to the new xt4 to the new cts-v which is actually the edition The CTS-V's pedestal base features a metallic sand bronze finish to commemorate 15 years of the V Performance brand, and the CTS-V is especially impressive.

This generation of the CTS-V debuted for the 2016 model year and arrived with a bang, this car has a 6.2-liter supercharged V8 with yes, 640 horsepower and 630 pound-feet of torque. It borrows its engine from the Chevy Corvette Z06, not just the regular Corvette but the Z06, it has rear wheel drive and will do 0-60 in something like 3.8 seconds. This is the best cts-v ever, better than the original model I had and better than the second generation model I also had, but unfortunately it is disappearing. Cadillac is downsizing its

sedan

lineup. and they are replacing the smaller cts and ats with a single model and production of the cts is supposed to end very soon so i decided to review this before the famous cts-v name disappears so today i am going to take in a tour of the cts-v and I'll show you all the quirks and features of one of the most powerful sedans you can buy today, then I'll take it out on the road, drive it and then I'll give it an excellent rating and to learn more of my thoughts on the cts-v, click the link below to visit autotrader.com oversteer, where I also compiled a list of my favorite performance sedans currently listed for sale on autotrader for under thirty thousand dollars now I'm going to start the quirks and features with a discussion about the ctsv driving modes in this car, you have four, you have tour which is normal, then you have sport track and then snow and ice and another interesting element with the driving modes.

There is actually a secret fifth driving mode in this car. If you put the car in track mode and then tap the traction control off button twice very quickly, a small hidden diagram will appear. In the gauge cluster that allows you to configure the car's settings when you're in Performance Drive mode, you can choose between Wet Dry Sport 1 and Sport 2 to give you a little more versatility and configurability when you're in Drive mode. clue with that. A little secret menu and a final item worth noting with the driving modes, as I mentioned you can switch between Tour Sport and Track and that tightens the steering, changes the feel of the accelerator pedal, the transmission changes that sort of thing , but the exhaust also changes.

Listen to the exhaust in track mode now, below, near the small switch that allows you to switch between modes on the center console. It also has the lid over the cup holders. It's not normally something I mention, but I like this one because if you push it, it automatically retracts and then you can put drinks in the cup holders. If you pull it out when it's in the retracted position, it automatically extends outward and covers the cupholder so you don't have to manually retract and extend it like some. pawn in a boring car and the cup holder cover is not the only interesting retractable and extendable element here check this out, there is a hidden compartment behind the buttons on the center control console, if you press the bottom of the center control console, pops up and reveals this hidden compartment that is actually a wireless cell phone charger that you can open, put your phone in there and then it will charge while you drive and of course you can close it and no one will know that your phone is there.

Now one thing I like about that top part of the center control panel is that when you open it all the buttons go out and it looks like a cover that appears when you go back and close it again the buttons reappear and of course the reason It's that these aren't real buttons like on many Cadillacs, it's actually an electronic panel and instead of old school buttons that you press, you simply touch different parts of the panel to perform different climate control functions for example. when you touch it, you get a kind of haptic feedback, like a little shock on your fingers, so you know that whatever you just touched has registered all the messages, and the buttons on this electronic panel don't light up until you turn the car over. on and that means when they are off it gives a cleaner look to the interior and dash.

Now I like this little black electronic panel that replaces the traditional buttons, but even I admit that there are some places where Cadillac has also improved a little. So far, for example, at the top right of the center control console there is a small switch on the black panel marked glove box. You press it and the glove box opens. Frankly, it was fine with just a regular latch for the glove box. I don't think we will. I need a small electronic button to open the glove box, that's a bit excessive. The next thing I'm going to do is move on to the center console.

There's nothing particularly interesting here, just a typical storage item, there are a few USB ports, but there's also a household power outlet, so if you want to drive your CTS-V and also plug in your blender, Cadillac lets you do that. Next, some interesting technology in this car relates to the rear view mirror and you're thinking well how can the rear? The rearview mirror is well technical, that is because in this car it is not a mirror, it is a screen. Cadillac has ditched the traditional old school rearview mirror and instead there is a camera at the back of the car that sends its image to the mirror now, the theory here is that when you look at a normal rearview mirror behind you you see a bunch of seats and headrests in the trunk, but when the camera is back there you don't see any of that, you just have an unobstructed view. a clear view of what's behind you and frankly it's a very good idea that I think will find its way into many more cars.

Two interesting elements with the camera, although one is the fact that you can switch from the screen to the normal one. mirror if you want now this is strange because it is obviously much less functional and less usable, but I think this is regulatory. I think the government requires you to have some type of traditional mirror even if you are going to install a better camera system. Another interesting thing with the mirror is the fact that because the camera is mounted so far back in the rear, when you drive around cars that are a normal following distance, it looks like they are directly in your bumper, that's because Because when you're driving When you look at your normal mirror you obviously see the rest of your car and then what's behind you, but with this you only see what's behind you, so the cars that normally seemed to be 20 feet behind you now appear to be only five feet behind you due to where the camera and mirror setup is placed below.

I want to talk about the fact that this is the pedestal edition, as I said, meant to commemorate 15 years of the Cadillac V Performance line. It's all cosmetic things. Sand bronze metallic color, you also get this kind of bronze carbon fiber trim on the interior that, frankly, looks pretty good. You also have these white seat centers that look pretty cool too. Cadillac is apparently only making a few hundred of these pedestal edition cars for the more discerning CTS-V buyers and speaking of the seats, this car has a really cool feature with its seats. Now this car has power seats, obviously the sticker price is like 105,000, so of course you have them and you can move them the traditional way. back, forward, up, down, but there's also a little dial there that looks like it might confuse you about what it does, but Cadillac has thought to start moving the dial and then the seat controls appear on the center touchscreen to show you . exactly what you're controlling as you move the dial, it's a really good idea that eliminates the confusion of what I'm adjusting right now, I can't feel it, oh, it's that my shoulders, well, you know, and the cool thing.

The part is that both the driver and passenger can adjust their seats at the same time and both seats will appear on the screen and both will show exactly what you are adjusting. That's a nice feature. Now there's a curious thing about that infotainment screen. on the seats, if you are moving the seats and it appears on the screen and then you touch the screen to move the seats, no, no, you can't, it actually says, please use the controller to move the seats, you can't interact. with the touch screen while you move the seats, you have to do it on the controls of your seat.

Now next we move on to the infotainment screen and this cts-v has the latest version of the cadillac q infotainment system. many car critics, journalists, drivers, people. I didn't really like the previous versions. The new version is updated and much better. On the one hand, it responds much more to touch. There is no delay between the moment you touch the screen and the moment it does something that you can clearly see. I'm scrolling through things, it's so much better, like a smartphone, and it's especially better in the navigation system, the navigation map, when you pinch to zoom in or out, when you move the map, it responds to your fingers to your touch input much

fast

er than the old system made it much better and because this is a new system there are obviously some quirks and new features to discuss.

An interesting one I want to mention is the school zone alert when you're driving, you enter a school zone, the car dings and then it tells you on the screen that you've entered a school zone, look, that's actually a cool idea because it can You're not paying attention, you're going 40, it's a 25 zone, you don't realize that. you get a high ticket, well, it'll let you know it's not bad. Next, another interesting element in this car. One way this car shows its age is with its camera system. The quality of the reversing camera is really not that good, especially in comparison. with rivals like the e63 and bmw m5, but it has a camera feature that I really like: the front splitter at the front of this car is very low, so you're constantly worried about scraping it in driveways, well , there is a camera aimed directly at the front splitter that will show exactly where you are and if you are going to hit something or if you are too close and you will scrape it on the parking curb, in fact it's even better than that, you can turn on these little guidelines and There are red lines around the front divider to show as the area where you do not want any items to be near the divider.

This is a very good idea for low cars. I'm surprised that cars like Ferraris and Lamborghinis don't have something like this and speaking of cameras, this car not only has front and rear cameras for parking, it also has a windshield mounted camera facing forward. This is not a dash cam although, frankly, I think it should be. The dash cam should be included in all new cars, but it isn't. This camera is for performance data recording system. When you go to a race track, you can insert an SD card into the glove box and then record your laps on the track. to see if you reached that apex where you were slow where you were

fast

and you can use this car's performance data recording system and its camera to do it.

It's a very cool feature, but the performance data logger doesn't just have to record. your lap times, if you go into the settings menu in the performance data logging system, you can also set it to record every time you put the car in valet mode and you can make sure it's also recording audio so you can give this to it car to the valet you put. In valet mode, you can replay it later to make sure the valets don't go

crazy

and get burned on your CTS V thanks to the built-in camera system. Now the next interesting item on this car has something called a safety alert.

The seat and seat will vibrate if you start to drift out of your lane, for example, or if you're backing up and about to hit something, the seat actually vibrates and alerts you that you're doing something you shouldn't. be and that is configurable, you can disable the safety alert seat and instead activate a warning beep, now the strange thing is that you can't do both, you can have the car beep at you if you are about to crash against something or you can make the seat rumble for some reason are mutually exclusive and there will be no seat that vibrates or beeps in this vehicle.

Another interesting element that you can choose in this car. You can configure the ease of use of the systemvoice control. I'm serious. Go into the voice control settings, you can choose whether or not you want friendly accessories and it defines it as messages with more personality or you can have concise and concise angry messages that are just simple. I love it if you are a person who likes to be talked to in a friendly manner by a machine, you can set the voice control prompts to be friendlier than their standard default level and then we move into the back seat of the cts-v where there's not much that's unusual to report, it's reasonably big back here. with pretty good headroom, pretty good legroom, as you would expect from a large midsize sedan, there are a couple of cool features back here, one is that the rear seats in this car are heated and it also has the same dashboard black electronic to adjust the climate controls, you have your own climate zone back here and you can change the temperature, the fan speed and that sort of thing, perhaps the only unusual element on the back seat back here is that it also includes a microphone mounted on the roof, so if you have your bluetooth synced in this car and you are driving, not only the front passengers can talk on the phone, the rear passengers can also talk using the rear microphone in this car and then we get out of the cts-v At the rear, you also have this giant rear spoiler that has a kind of V shape, which is the Cadillac shape.

You can see it in many different places, including at the base of the cadillac logo. but in the back you also have one of my favorite features of the entire car and that would be the chamber washer. Now you have a backup camera in your car. Well, in this car you have a backup camera and also a small washer jet that can clean. Check this out, if you push the wiper forward coming out of the steering column, it will activate this washer jet that will clean your rear view camera, so if your rear view camera is dirty, you don't want to go out and clean it manually.

With a rag, the car will clean it with this little washing machine and then we move to the trunk of the cts-v and there is nothing particularly unusual or interesting in the trunk, it just has a fairly normal sized trunk for a vehicle of this size, If you lift the boot floor you can see that there are a couple of small storage compartments under the floor. Although there is no full size spare tire on this car you do have a small spare tire kit which is quite common on high performance cars like this perhaps the most unusual thing in the trunk is towards the left you have this compartment which contains the battery and has this little latch that you can use to open the compartment quite simply, but if you move the latch in the other direction it will lock the battery compartment.

I guess the theory here is that you don't want your stuff to accidentally fly around and hit this thing, open it up and disconnect the battery while you're driving, so there being a lock on the latch for the battery compartment is unusual and next we move on to the front of the cts-v and i have always loved the front design of this particular generation of cts-v, it looks so angry and so aggressive this bulging front splitter hood coming down the big grille, this thing looks like the

crazy

high performance sedan that now a couple of items worth noting, one is if you look under the bumper under the grill you can see the location of those little cameras that show where the front splitter is and you can see why they have such a good view of the front splitter because they are basically right on top of it.

Another interesting element on the front is the headlights and specifically the running lights which I really like on this car. I see that they start in the normal set of headlights and then go down and are interrupted by the bumper and then continue in a separate set underneath, I think it looks really cool and is worth noticing when you turn on the turn signal. only the bottom part lights up as a turn signal the top part stays with that aggressive looking running light and then it moves under the hood on the cts-v a couple of interesting things under here one is the fact that the Bonnet is Carbon Fiber Now It may seem a little ridiculous to try to save weight on a big

luxury

sedan like this and how much could a carbon fiber bonnet really save?

Maybe two pounds, but still Cadillac went in that direction and saves just a little bit of weight too. On the underside of the hood you can see they have a V printed on them, so when you open the hood you don't have to just show people the engine to show that you have a V. You can also show them this little piece of plastic under the hood that says v on it too, but obviously the engine is the most important thing here, nothing particularly peculiar or strange to report, but you have this 6.2 v8 liters and 640 horsepower, it's amazing to see in a sedan and turns this car into an absolute monster, it's just a huge amount of horsepower for a vehicle like this and those are the quirks and features of the cts-v, now it's time to take it out on the road and see how well it drives driving the cts-v sitting here to stop like the The car, uh, it feels really, really docile, it's actually kind of nice, you know, there's this giant V8 underneath , you know, 640 horsepower, but it feels like a

luxury

car, as you would expect, in the mirror it's still a bit of a strange feeling, I think it's better to have this mirror because you're not competing with the trunk lid and the rear headrest and blah blah blah, but the strange thing is that it's strange to go from looking at real life to looking up at what you're used to.

When you see a mirror, but it's actually a screen, you have to adjust your eyes for a second. The engine sound is simply wonderful in this car. I love, love, love the way the engine sounds and it's a big old V8. You can hear the supercharger. Just like that. feel like it sounds so good that it makes you want to speed up, you really want to do it, okay, I'm going to step really fast, wow, yeah, it's really fast, I mean, there's no doubt that it's really, really, it's fast and it feels like a fast luxury car, that's the nice thing about it, I think when you step on it it doesn't feel like the whole world is ending and everything is like that, it actually feels quite serene and relatively buttoned down, you know? everything comes to you very quickly but you know that it is relatively quiet here, it is relatively stable here like a German luxury sedan, you know that the v came out about 15 years ago and over time they refined it and refined it and now they compare the best and it behaves like if the throttle response was really good when i'm in sport mode it's really quick to do what i want and the car actually handles better than i expected given its size the cts-v looks very big visually it's not really so big, but given its size I wouldn't expect it to change direction so quickly.

It actually does a good job, but this automatic is good and, combined with a really quick throttle, it really feels. like you could give the kind of feedback you want if you were shifting your own gears, which is pretty cool, it really is a fast car, it really is fast and it's especially impressive because obviously, if it comes down to size and technology, it's just Really cool, you're sitting in a nice luxury car with nice luxury car features and all this equipment and yet you're going at this incredible pace and that's something that I've always liked as kind. from an enthusiast of high performance cars that are also practical cars and this is a great example of that, although the design of this car is a little older than the latest competition models like the rs5 sportback or the m5 um, the performance does not feel worse.

In any case, some of the interior stuff doesn't look like the last thing, I mean the turn signals on GM cars. I'm never a fan of the head-up display, it's not that sharp, but it's little things like that. I mean, in terms of actual performance and fun, I think this car is still on par with all of its closest competitors and that's the

2019

Cadillac CTS-V, one of the most impressive performance sedans on the market, one of the more impressive. performance sedans, it's a shame this car is gone after 15 years, but I'm excited to see what cadillac replaces it with and now it's time to give the v a great score, starting with the weekend categories and designing the cts-v.

It has a very nice attractive and aggressive look for a sedan and scores a 7 out of 10. Acceleration is 0-60 in 3.6 seconds and scores an 8 out of 10. It is slower than some of its less powerful rivals because they benefit The handling in all-wheel drive launches is average for the segment and scores a 6 out of 10. The fun factor is good given its huge engine and big power and scores a 7 out of 10. Finally, the fun factor is reasonably high Since you're looking at a Z06-powered sedan, it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 34 out of 50.

Next up are the daily categories and features. The cts-v has a lot going for it, but it lags behind the much newer class. leaders and gets a 7 out of 10. Comfort is average for the class and gets a 7 out of 10. Quality is decent, but some items show their age and need improvement and gets a 7 out of 10. Practicality is average for midsize sedans. this size and gets a 5 out of 10. Finally assess that the cts-v is a decent value on paper, but in practice it's a bit slower than its rivals and a bit more outdated, so you'll see why it's a bit cheaper than its closest competition gets a 6 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 32 out of 50.

Adding to Doug's score is 66 out of 100, placing it here among high-performance luxury sedans, no surprise it's at the bottom like the cts-v. It's the oldest new high-performance luxury sedan, but it's still a great car, fun to drive and very exciting.