2014 Cadillac Srx Luxury Collection on 2040-cars

Auto blog

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.

2020 Cadillac CT4-V First Drive | The Cadillac of compact Cadillacs

With the launch of the 2020 Cadillac CT4, GM is pushing back into the smallest luxury sedan segment that in recent years has almost exclusively featured entries from Germany. We're pleased to see it return, and importantly, that it definitely came back prepared. The CT4’s key differentiator is its platform. Unlike the bulk of entry-level luxury sedans currently on the market, the Cadillac rides on a rear-wheel-drive platform. All-wheel drive is available throughout the lineup for those who need (or just want) four-season flexibility, but itÂ’s meant to be a convenience feature rather than a performance upgrade — the same is not true of its front-wheel-drive competitors. The CT4 ostensibly replaces the discontinued ATS, but reality is a bit murkier than that. Stop us if youÂ’ve heard this before, but the Cadillac CT4 is not entirely size-appropriate for the class. While the CT4 is aimed at the subcompact luxury sedan segment (and the CT5 at the compact), itÂ’s dimensionally a bit closer to the likes of the Mercedes C-Class than it is the A-Class. This gives Caddy a bit of an advantage, but itÂ’s nothing we havenÂ’t seen from GMÂ’s luxury arm before. Cadillac has chosen instead to target the segment based on price, which is a win for consumers in a way, as you can get a little bit more bang for your buck if theyÂ’re willing to take a chance on the underdog. Cadillac is offering its new small sedan in three states of tune. The base (“Luxury”) model boasts a 2.0-liter engine good for 237 horsepower and 258 pound-feet of torque. The Premium Luxury and CT4-V models get the 2.7-liter — which is still a four-cylinder — that makes 310 hp and 350 lb-ft of torque in its base tune and 325 hp and 380 lb-ft in the CT4-V. All three variants make use of GMÂ’s active fuel management tech which allows them to run on just two cylinders to conserve fuel while cruising. Yes, you read that correctly. The CT4-V boasts just 325 hp, which may seem like a pittance considering the outrageously powerful V models of CadillacÂ’s past, but GMÂ’s luxury arm has decided to re-jigger its performance hierarchy by eliminating “V-Sport” entirely, shifting “V” down to fill that role, and introducing a series of new range-topping performance models dubbed “Blackwing.” In that context, the CT4-V may seem like an also-ran, but consider the company it keeps.

Junkyard Gem: 1973 Cadillac Eldorado

The 1971-1978 Cadillac Eldorado was a gloriously ridiculous personal luxury coupe, packing a monstrous 500-cubic-inch V8 (that's 8.2 liters for you freedom-hating metric types) under its acre-sized hood for the first five years of production. Fuel economy was comfortably into single-digit territory, which meant you had to be a real high roller to be able to feed a new Eldo after OPEC turned off the oil spigot. I found this '73 in a Denver wrecking yard earlier this spring. View 18 Photos This car appears to have been sold new in Denver, and the extensive bodywork and sanded areas indicate that it was someone's project car prior to coming to the end of the line. The front-wheel-drive system used in the Cadillac Eldorados and Oldsmobile Toronados of this era was known as the Unified Powerplant Package, and it used a longitudinally-mounted engine feeding a chain-drive setup that proved to be amazingly sturdy and reliable. So sturdy, in fact, that it was used in gigantic front-wheel-drive GMC motorhomes. Everyone agrees that these cars are cool, but few are willing to rescue a rough example and take on the difficult and expensive job of a full restoration. This one isn't rusty, but that wasn't enough to save it. Related Video: