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Speaking of green...


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If you are not the original owner of your Cadillac, isn't your Cadillac 100% recycled content? We need some bumper stickers I think.

I drive 15,000 miles a year, give or take. The CTS is rated 17city, 27 highway as I recall. My car CAN do that. My CTS averages, on my driving pattern, around 18mpg. Lots of stopping, lots of sitting in traffic, lots of idling. So my CTS will need around 15k/18=833 gallons of fuel this year. When Gas goes up a dollar, I spend another 833 dollars a year. Not a huge problem at my house. In fact, the average house hold spends around 4% of their income on gas.

On the other hand, if my CTS got 10 mpg better mileage I would need 15k/28=535 gals of fuel, or 298 fewer gallons, at a savings of around ($4/gallon), $1,192. For the difference between enjoying my CTS and buying a car that could get 10mpg better on my driving cycle, I'm happy to keep driving my Cadillac thank you very much. Just the purchase difference and new car depreciation would overwrite that savings anyway.

I do look forward to having a hybrid/electric Cadillac that I can charge at home and not use any fuel at all most days.

I also fully support amazing new cars like the CTS-V with 6.2L supercharged V8. I think GM should continue to

offer a variety of products.

Bruce

2023 Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing

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After the last time this happened, in late 1972, people thought that the golden age of automobiles was over. Sure enough, the American carmakers started treating automobiles as a commodity rather than honoring the basic point that image and performance cars are what attract young buyers and cement them as part of the market share. Even Corvette began sharing low specific output powertrains with the Camaro, and Cadillac was flatlined and became just another GM car. The foreign carmakers got a head start of a few years solving the problems, but we saw the Mazda RX-4, the resurgence of Porsche, the reinvention of Mercedes as a performance car, Volvo going turbo four-cylinder, etc. Those who bought into the automobile as a commodity -- most of the British imports, the American cars, and the bigger marques like Nissan and Toyota and the larger European companies with U.S. imports a small part of their business, all suffered and many aren't around anymore, at least in the U.S.

15 years later, the automobile had reinvented itself, with leadership from GM in OBD and DFI that doubled fuel economy without affecting performance while keeping maintainability. Car prices became a major factor and the American public responded with another paradigm switch to pickup trucks as the family car, replacing the station wagon and even the daily commuter. The first major new-age cars were under development -- many at GM -- and we soon had the Quad 4, the Ford Taurus SHO, and some really nasty Chrysler turbo fours, and the Northstar was under development. The Northstar eclipsed the earlier 32-valvle aluminum V8s from Nissan (Infiniti) and Toyota (Lexus) and showed the way to the 21st century.

The seeds of the future are already here in DFI, hybrids, and hybrids with plug-in charging. Toyota led the way with hybrids in 2001; GM supported sales of high-profit SUVs by offering hybrids there, a couple of years too late to maintain market share, instead of starting with a hybrid Aveo or equivalent, but we already have the technology of the next generation on the roads.

CTS-V_LateralGs_6-2018_tiny.jpg
-- Click Here for CaddyInfo page on "How To" Read Your OBD Codes
-- Click Here for my personal page to download my OBD code list as an Excel file, plus other Cadillac data
-- See my CaddyInfo car blogs: 2011 CTS-V, 1997 ETC
Yes, I was Jims_97_ETC before I changed cars.

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