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Weekly Recap: Lincoln Continental serves up the style, Cadillac CT6 delivers the substance in New York

Lincoln and Cadillac grabbed the spotlight this week at the New York Auto Show in a dramatic fashion that evoked the brands' glory days. America's two luxury carmakers went toe-to-toe with their glittering reveals and plans for ambitious expansion. Both were selling their technology, style and the promise of a better future. Cadillac vs. Lincoln. At the Javits Center, 2015 seemed a lot like 1956. Neither company was interested in drawing comparisons with the other, which is fair, and accurate. They're in vastly different places in terms of sales and the pace of their turnarounds, but they hope to reach the same eventual destination at the pinnacle of the luxury-car world. Lincoln used the element of surprise to great effect with the Continental concept. A production version is still at least a year away, and the company was vague on details. Officially, we don't even know if it is front- or rear-wheel drive, though speculation abounds. Who cares? The seats can be adjusted 30 ways! The Continental also showed off a bold chrome grille that will be the new face of Lincoln. The blue bomber also rolled on blinged-out 21-inch polished aluminum wheels, used a 3.0-liter EcoBoost engine and had huge LED head lights with "laser-assisted" high beams. All of this resulted in almost blinding attention. The concept drew rave reviews, stirred controversy with Bentley designers who argued Lincoln ripped them off, and most importantly, pointed a way forward for the newly determined brand that hopes to compete with Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Cadillac and Lexus. View 32 Photos Meanwhile, Cadillac showed the CT6, a finished product that will top its range and is loaded with the best and latest technologies General Motors has at its disposal. With production starting late this year, Cadillac had more specifics at the ready. Engines? Cadillac has a couple V6s and a turbo four for sure. It's working on a hybrid, and has considered a V-Series variant. It's based on a new rear-wheel-drive, aluminum-intensive chassis called Omega, features an advanced collision-mitigation system with automatic braking and has a cabin that's laden with "leathers, exotic woods and carbon fiber." It will be assembled at GM's Detroit-Hamtramck factory and goes on sale next year. At this point, Cadillac is more than willing to talk about every except for the price. The devil was not in the details for Cadillac, as evidenced by the CT6. But it wasn't for Lincoln either.

Teaching autonomous vehicles to drive like (some) humans

While I love driving, I can't wait for fully autonomous vehicles. I have no doubt they'll reduce car accidents, 94 percent of which are caused by human error, leading to more than 37,000 road deaths in the U.S. last year. And if it means I can fly home at night in winter and get safely shuttled to my house an hour-plus away — and not have to endure a typical white-knuckle drive in the dark with torrential rain and blinding spray from 18-wheelers on Interstate 84 — sign me up. Autonomous technology will also take some of the stress, tedium and fatigue out of long highway drives, as I recently discovered while testing Cadillac Super Cruise. AVs are also supposed to eventually help increase traffic flow and reduce gridlock. But according to a recent Automotive News article, as the first wave of AVs are being tested on public roads, they're having the opposite effect. Part of the problem is they drive too cautiously and are programmed to strictly follow the written rules of the road rather than going with the flow of traffic. "Humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way, and the reality is that autonomous vehicles in the future may have to do the same thing if they don't want to be the source of bottlenecks," Karl Iagnemma, CEO of self-driving technology developer NuTonomy, told Automotive News. "You put a car on the road which may be driving by the letter of the law, but compared to the surrounding road users, it's acting very conservatively." I get it that, like teen drivers, AVs need a ramp up period to learn the unwritten rules of the road and that a skeptical public has to be convinced of the technology's safety. But this is where I become less of a champion on AVs, since where I live in the Pacific Northwest we already have more than our share of overly cautious human drivers. Since moving here 12 years ago, I've found it's an interesting paradox that a region famous for its strong coffee, where you'd think most drivers would be jacked up on caffeine, is also the home to annoyingly measured motorists. As an auto-journo colleague living in Seattle so aptly put it: "People in the Pacific Northwest drive as if they have nowhere to go." If you drive like me and always have somewhere to go — and usually are in a hurry to get there — it's absolutely maddening.

2014 Cadillac ELR whirs into Jay Leno's Garage

While Jerry Seinfeld was gallivanting around LA with Sarah Silverman in a Jaguar XKE, our favorite car-loving comedian, Jay Leno, was checking out the all-new 2014 Cadillac ELR. Set to go on sale later this year, Cadillac brought its ELR to Jay Leno's Garage to show off some of its styling and technology as well as give Leno some seat time in the range-extended EV. Leno owns both a Volt and a CTS-V, and the ELR is a kind combination of the two (sort of).
In this episode, Leno spends some time talking to Frank Saucedo, GM director of advanced design, and ELR chief engineer Chris Thomason before logging a few miles on the sleek coupe. Interestingly, it seems that GM has definitely changed its tune a little since the introduction of the Volt a couple years ago; Saucedo and Leno both refer to the ELR as a hybrid, and Thomason says that it gets the "bulk of its propulsion" from the electric motors. Whatever you want to call it, scroll down to watch the latest episode of JLG with some great information and driving shots of the plug-in Cadillac.