vLane Blog

The Cadillac CTS Wagon (and why we don’t need it)

From Banovsky, Featured Contributor
Posted on June 9, 2009

Filed under GM, General Motors, Luxury, Future, Wagon, Humor, Detroit, 2010, Cadillac, opinion, CTS

Make no mistake about it, wagons are the red-headed stepchildren of any car range. Probably conceived in a dank corner of an automaker’s R & D lab, complete with trollish engineers, clip boards, and antiques. Lots of antiques.

As such, only terminally crazy and socially-inept Northeastern Birkenstock-shod buyers drive them. I swear, on my last trip through Maine (one never stops, for fear of being consumed by Cliff Bar-chewing, Apple-using hillbillies), there were dozens of stores selling “Sports Antiquities.” All, natch, with Saab, Volvo XC, or Subaru wagons badly parked out front.

You know what? I love wagons. But I also live in the Northeast. You know what else? I have enough money to feed my girlfriend and cat, but not at the same time. Therefore, I am not in the market for a luxury Cadillac CTS Wagon.

The problem? Nobody will be in the market for a Cadillac CTS Wagon.

Read on…

There are two reasons for this. First, Cadillac is not BMW, Mercedes, Audi, or whoever else they’re trying to ape. Whenever I see a CTS, it’s driven by exactly the person not courted by Cadillac in advertising. They’re — putting it mildly — of a dusty persuasion, where Ensure is an acceptable substitution for most solid foods. For solids, they feel black pepper is just enough spice, without making things too ethnic.

That’s fine. But the Cadillac buyer shows up at the golf course sporting an all-tan outfit punctuated — no, sprinkled — with an assortment of gold chains. This person trims his thin white moustache with military precision, married his high school sweetheart, and wears double-breasted monogrammed blue silk pyjamas to bed.

“Hand me my sleeping mask, Maude!”

Second, if GM didn’t think they could sell the (already developed, I might add) Supreme Mullet-Wagging Machine Pontiac G8 ST to eagerly-awaiting Southerners, how the hell can they justify spending millions developing a Cadillac Wagon? To find buyers, they’ve got to convince European car snobs that the Cadillac is not only more practical than their Doberman-toting Teutonic hearses, but better in every way.

Go after the active crowd, like Lexus tried to do with the IS300 SportCross? It'll sell just like that model…didn’t.

What makes Audi, BMW, Saab, Volvo, and Subaru wagon owners so cool is that they just don’t give a &#!@ about what people think. Cadillac buyers do.

So what now?

Cadillac needs to be courting buyers with practical green technology, and into vehicles with higher profit margins. The new SRX, for instance, isn’t called a very cliché “Sport Wagon.” It’s also built on the same platform as the GMC Terrain, Chevrolet Equinox, and Saturn Vue. Spreading the cost over multiple vehicle lines means there’s less development cost and more — say it together: “Profit!”

But guess what? The platform (unlike the CTS) has already been developed with a hybrid system, the de facto drivetrain choice for exactly the buyers the company wants: Lexus RX drivers.

Oh, and GM’s hybrid system is of the Holy Grail-like plug in persuasion.

Back to the CTS Rip Van Wagon. Owning a Cadillac tells your fellow proletariat Americans that you’ve made it. You’re driving a dubbed-out Detroit dream machine, paid for with sweat. Cadillacs that work; like the Escalade, CTS sedan, and upcoming CTS Coupe, say with their laurel wreath-adorned grilles that America — In God We Trust — may one day shine success on you.

Future models need to do that, and also speak responsibly of their owners. Like rich-with-a-conscience. I’d love to see a Caddy version of the Chevrolet Volt (it’s likely, actually), more diesels, and hybrids stretch throughout the range. I see their biggest competition from Lexus, Infiniti, and Acura — not from European carmakers.

What Cadillac has and the made-up Japanese luxury brands don’t is history — and a history of style, to boot — there was an era, kiddies, when Hollywood socialites positively arrived in the latest Cadillacs.

Now they arrive in a Toyota Prius. How pathetic.

In conclusion, the CTS Wagon is a terrible waste of money, manpower, and has been borne from misguided market research. Kill it now, before the brochures are printed, before people start asking why Cadillac is following — again — when they should be leading.

Even so, I’m positive the vehicle itself will be a wonderful car. I’m sure it’ll be the measure of any European stuff-hauler, and that the press will rave about it.

But I would say that. I’m from the Northeast.

Update: This post inspired another by one of our readers. You can check it out here.

Read More:

• 10 Domestics Worth Waiting For
• Our Favourite Hybrid SUVs
• Old Car Parts as Jewellery

Banovsky is a featured contributor for vLane.