2003 Cadillac CTS

Toss aside any preconceived notion you have about small Cadillacs. Forget Cimarron. Forget Catera. The only thing Cadillac's smart new CTS has in common with its predecessors is that its name starts with a "C." The CTS's sharply chiseled lines, jaunty rake and snarly exhaust note mark it as a sharp departure from bigger, plusher brethren.

Every CTS has six standard airbags: fronts, front-sides and overhead curtains.

The CTS is just what Cadillac needs to effectively battle Mercedes-Benz's C-Class, BMW's 3 Series and Lexus's IS 300. It's a feisty, not-so-little, rear-drive sports sedan, with the first stick shift in a Caddy since 1951! The 5L40-E automatic option is a velvety five-speed that, believe it or not, GM supplies to BMW and Mercedes-Benz, but until now, Cadillac has not had a model to suit its installation. Cadillac's new management insists it's serious about building a world-class entry-lux competitor. The CTS is a car that'll change people's minds about Cadillac ... and if they buy or lease one and like it, by trade-in time, there'll be a next-level car to trade up to that could keep them in the Caddy family.


It goes without saying that Cadillac (and also Lincoln) has taken it on the chin from the luxury imports. GM's oldest division (now that Oldsmobile is about to disappear), Cadillac has revealed a gaggle of angularly-styled show cars with names like Evoq and Vizon. Although their styling elements appear in present-day Cads, the CTS is the first production model to really walk that walk. Everybody looks at it. Not everyone will like it. But if you're in the market for an agile, roomy and fun-to-drive sports sedan, you'd be missing something if you didn't test it. (After a week with the car, I'm convinced that the styling grows on you. It did on me.)

Upgrading to the optional Luxury Sport package yields 17-inch wheels on speed-rated tires, stiffer suspension tuning and an automatic load-leveling suspension.

Cadillac's engineers insist that the CTS is a "no excuses" effort. To that end, they weren't forced to adapt an Opel platform again. Instead, this is all-new dedicated architecture. At 26 Hz, the CTS is as stiff as any German small sedan; the front short/long-arm independent suspension and rear multilink, the Sachs gas-charged shocks and the highly tuned suspension bushings have been honed at one of the best test locations in the world, the daunting 177-turn, nearly 13-mile long Nurburgring in Germany's Eifel mountains.


Ken Morris was the engineer in charge of dynamic development; he's logged a lot of laps in Germany in test mules and still more in refined CTS prototypes. Diving into classic turns, launching into the air from The Ring's legendary Flugplatz, compressing the suspension, challenging the brakes, Morris has repeatedly taken the CTS to the limit and beyond. When you drive one, you can see how his efforts have paid off.