We had the chance today to get some passenger seat time with Cadillac PR chieftain Nick Twork in the CTS-V Sport Wagon, and as you might imagine, it was a rollickin' good time. What's truly remarkable about the V-Line, despite the disparate body styles, is how similarly the cars perform when you're strapped into the passenger seat. You'd think the feel of a sedan versus a coupe versus a wagon would be worlds apart, but they aren't. The common underpinnings and careful engineering mean they all share the same balance of stone-crushing power against predictable control.
The V-Sedan and V-Coupe share pretty much everything under the skin, but the wagon required some more tuning. All that junk in the trunk allowing for a total of 58 cubic feet of storage adds up to a bit more mass to deal with. To deal with this, the Magnetic Ride system's been tuned differently and the rear anti-roll bar's a slightly smaller diameter. The result is a car you'd never know was a wagon. It's tight in corners, light over the road but has a firm, planted, Germanic feel to the suspension. For as well as the V-Wagon handles, it's still all about that bone-crunching acceleration. We could do pulls in these cars all day long and never want for more. The exhaust note is sweet, sweet supercharger music. It's unofficially two-tenths of a second slower at 4.1 seconds for a 0-to-60 MPH run, but your bicycle and fichus won't notice.
What will get noticed is the simultaneously right and oh so powerfully wrong aggressive look. Peek at it from a weird angle and it looks like any other nondescript wagon, but stare it in the face and you know it means business. We said when we reviewed the CTS Sport Wagon, that the CTS looks better as a wagon, as if it came first and the sedan was carved out. In V-form it's even more true. This beast-with-a-back's a stunner and it's the first time I've ever seen someone whip out a camera phone to take a picture of a wagon.
So what if the production run will be counted in the low thousands? It took GM hardly any money to build it. So what if fools in their high-riding SUV's will look down on it as a grocery getter? Does anyone really have to know the only people who'll buy this car are auto journalists? This is the thinking man's supercar, the car to buy when you know what you want and don't care what anyone else thinks. And just to be clear: It'll get groceries, it'll get the hell out of some groceries, thank you very much. This is as near to a perfect car as we're likely ever to get in the US. One which makes no compromises for performance, luxury, style and most rarely, utility.
If we're beginning to sound like a broken record when it comes to talking about Cadillac CTS-V variants it's because they're all so good it's easy to run out of superlatives. By taking the already excellent CTS platform and installing a marvelous 6.2-liter supercharged V8 with 556 HP and 551 lb-ft of torque, GM's obviously baiting the enthusiasts. We'll take the bait. By having the balls to build the CTS-V Sport Wagon, Cadillac shows they're swinging for the deep seats. Now we're really itching to get some alone time on the track with this baby.
by jalopnik.com
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