( ) At up to around $125,000, the expensive (and hugely powerful) Cadillac CT5-V is the most of just about everything you can get out of the brand right now. Not only that, but this is the *last* internal combustion engine Cadillac will build before transitioning to an all-electric brand. So is this a great send-off? Paul Gerrard takes a deeper dive — driving impressions are coming in August!
All right paul here with tfl car and we’re at vir raceway in danville virginia taking a look at the new cadillac ct5v blackwing and this car is sort of like a technological tour de force i even thought of it as being after hearing their presentations is a bit of a love letter to the internal combustion engine they’re saying this is their last internal combustion
Engine that they’re going to produce and boy oh boy did they pull out all the stops 6.2 liters 668 horsepower at over 200 mile an hour car now come back and look at the full video in mid-august where we can talk about driving impressions that’s when the embargo actually ends and we can talk about everything about what this car not only is supposed to do but what
It does now under the hood of the ct-5 the blackwing this is a lt4 6.2 liter supercharged v8 the numbers are you ready for them they’re pretty astonishing 668 horsepower 659 pound-feet of torque out of this engine and that puts it above anything else that’s out there the only thing you could really compare are cars that don’t compare like a hellcat or something
Like that but if you’re talking m5 any variant even the competition this makes more power amg cars this makes more power audi rss more power than than those so a really impressive vehicle and and of course you know you’d expect this this car to be an automatic or a dual clutch and indeed it has a 10 speed automatic transmission you can run with this car that has
All sorts of upgrades for it to handle this kind of power and torque but the great news is as this is again a bit of a love letter to the internal combustion engine sport sedan they insisted that there was also a manual transmission so you’ve got a tremec 6-speed manual now because this thing makes so much power and torque it actually has a dual plate clutch like
You’d have in a performance car they’ve actually polished the gears so that it has less noise and also better better performance as far as torque capabilities of the gearbox but a six-speed manual with 3d printed shift knob and all sorts of cool little things on there and then through the whole car you know you’ve got chassis braces uh that you can see obviously
This strut top brace but also there’s bracing underneath the car for the subframes in the rear of the car in the back of the car to increase torsional rigidity so what we have here is a true again 200 plus mile an hour performance sedan that just happens to have the cadillac name on it and as far as its track capability it’s done 24-hour track testing consistent
Where they did 250 tanks of gas in the car continuously running it on the racetrack to prove what this car can actually do it has six different uh intercoolers and radiators you know to keep it cool under all of these so you can just go on and on and on about what looks like a fairly standard engine compartment but actually houses one of the most powerful engines
That’s ever been put in a production car so being the true performance sedan that it is there’s a lot of attention that they’ve paid to the front end of the car and the aerodynamics of all of that are really important because again the 200 mile an hour number means you can’t have this this big boxy car that doesn’t do a very good job of of punching through the air
It has to be efficient in other words and so they’ve looked at everything like they did with the the ct-4b blackwing even even the profile of of the grills here and the meshes and the grills have been aerodynamically tuned so instead of it just being pretty from the outside they’ve actually put little vortex generators on the backside of each of these little v’s
That are in here again just to try and feed the air as efficiently as they can through the car and this does have the optional carbon fiber package where there’s carbon fiber even here below the hood also the carbon fiber splitter and more carbon fiber on the sills and of course the spoiler on the back too and then all of these different ducts are all functional
Everything is functional that’s something maybe to comprehend on the car that so many things on a lot of vehicles they’re just styling features but these are all feeding different things we’ve got brake cooling ducts again we’ve got intercooler ducting all of that going on and then they also want to make sure that they get the air out of the car and so they’ve
Got a little bit of a lip on the front splitter here to make sure that they’re diverting the air around there’s actually an air guide here that brings air in and then shoots it out behind and all of this creates low pressure in this wheel well area so you can see the vent here that allows that air again this is a functioning vent that pulls air out of that wheel
Well and along the side of the car and you’ve got a carbon fiber sill that’s also helping keep that air separated beneath the car and above the car so it’s flowing smoothly along and that all tapers back into the rear diffuser on the bottom of the car here and again you’re just sort of sculpting and trying to create as little drag as possible at the same time as
Little lift as possible and helping a lot with that just like we talked about with the ct4v blackwing we’ve got a big carbon fiber spoiler on the trunk and they even put this little lip on it and that lip allows a little bit of a gurney flap basically on the actual spoiler now looking at the wheels tires brakes and suspension on this vehicle they’re all top
Flight stuff as well and starting with the tire which is the most important part we’ve got a partnership with michelin where they actually have have designed this specific pilot sport 4s for this vehicle they’ve done that over the years that this car has been sort of in the design and testing phase so it’s a bespoke tire just for this vehicle it’s a 275 35
19 in the front and it’s a 305 19 in the rear and then the wheels are forged and then they’re mirror polished and they’ve even gone and laser etched the wheels on the cars as well so they’re very lightweight very strong moving on to the brakes you can see they’re two-piece rotors on here which means there’s an aluminum hat with a cast iron disc a six-piston
Brembo caliper and optionally on this car you can get carbon ceramic brakes get ready for this those carbon ceramic brakes how much weight would you think they might save the actual number 64 pounds if you order the carbon ceramic brakes now the steel brakes on this car are just as good around the track they’ll do all the same durability they do the 24 hour
Full speed durability test and pass it with flying colors but 64 pounds of unsprung mass that makes a big difference in the handling and the capabilities of the car so that’s definitely a nice addition if you can afford it well when looking at the interior of the ct5v blackwing 2022 cadillac you start out with the seats a lot of bolstering and these seats even
Have a carbon fiber seat back to them and then all sorts of adjustability it even has a massage function you also have the preparated leather so you get the air through the seats which is really great in a high performance car especially a leather seat car and then you adjust the bolsters in and out up here that’s kind of normal but also down low as well so lots
Of adjustability with the seat itself again a very performance oriented seating position you can really kind of tilt the seat bottom down which i really like because it helps under braking so you don’t slide forward that’s really cool now starting the car up again we’re that’s lt4 6.2 liter supercharged engine this is the six-speed manual transmission it is a
Lovely shifter you can maybe see in the video but it has this really nice tight gate to it through the six gears and it’s not rubbery at all and it’s very positive and very quick this is actually 3d printed the little little shift pattern that’s on there with all this kind of cool and it’s hand brushed after it’s 3d printed and then the car actually has a flat
Shift function where you can leave your foot on the gas if you’re above 90 throttle and basically do your shifts at full throttle without lifting your foot off the gas it also has a line lock for doing burnouts when you’re drag racing it also has rev matching you hit this button here and you’ll actually see your gear indicator when you’re driving will appear
In here and it’ll be yellow as you can see there and so the yellow is basically telling me that the rev matching is turned on and that node lift shift is also turned on then i hit the button again and you can see it go white now i need to actually match the revs on the downshift and along the lines talking about performance is this v button over here and this guy
Basically when you hit that it takes you into the menu and you can hear the exhaust change on the car right away and now you can actually go and turn through the different modes here from race mode to race 2 to sport mode to dry to wet or inactive in other words taking the system completely out of any of the modes at all and that’s not it right you’ve also got
Modes that are happening right here so on this guy now i go from sport to track to touring to snow and ice and you’re getting different levels of performance from the vehicle here different levels of steering different levels of braking different levels of traction control on or off stability control on or off and one of the big ones is the magneto rheological
Shocks that are adjusting a thousand times a second deciding which program to put you in whether it’s touring which is just driving at a really nice ride giving you that cadillac ride or going into more performance type modes of the car this steering setup and these controls actually were done in both the ct4 and the ct5 blackwings with cosworth engineering
Which is a racing company out of england and the the relationship there is actually through the race team the dpi race team with corvette racing they actually have the race car here uh philippe naser who is the driver of the race car he’s here so all of them kind of supporting the performance pedigree of this vehicle looking at the ct-4 versus ct-5 when we’re
Looking at the v blackwings you get a bigger screen in the ct5 and also you got your standard carplay android auto you can see there all sorts of cool performance monitoring i’ll let you see my phone sitting down here on an inductive charger so that’s kind of cool that you have inductive charging but the the cool thing is is it also has wireless carplay so
I’m able to use the inductive charger to charge my phone while i’m using carplay in the car so that’s kind of a next step that you’ll start to see hopefully for more manufacturers that cadillac already has in play and then looking at the settings on the vehicle itself we get in and we’ve got all sorts of cool stuff that we can do with vehicle with apps i mean
You’re used to all this it’s a very snappy quick system and it allows you to do a lot of customization we talk about that with a performance car one of the cooler things is pdr performance data recorder and here you got an sd card that actually goes in a little slot to the left of the steering wheel and and here you’re actually recording the car while you’re
Out on the track you’ve got lap timing so you can actually go in and select the track that you want you can even do custom tracks if you’re auto crossing for example you can just start recording and it does an overlay using the electronics from the car so it has 34 different telemetry points speed g-force you know all of that stuff and it doesn’t overlay on the
Video for you saves it on the card you take the card out when you’re done you go plop it into your pc or your ipad and there you go you’ve got all your racing data recorded from your day on the track and the layout is pretty intuitive you’ve got this entire row that’s kind of this brushed aluminum and all of these are little up and downs that took us a moment to
Figure out right little up and downs for the fan or the temperature the whole way through and so this is mainly climate control that’s all in brushed aluminum and then when we come down here to the bottom this is our seat heating our ventilation we’ve got our lane departure there 360 camera you can turn on or off there and of course our hazard lights so rear view
Mirror right uh well kind of camera rear view mirror and then just by flipping what we’d normally use to tilt the screen up and down for for someone coming up behind us at night and then you’ve got all the settings that you can do here up and down here adjusting the brightness for example uh also you know so you can go through and do magnification on the mirror
So you can have it kind of zoomed in or zoomed out and then you can tilt it now for stereos cadillac has a partnership with akg akg has a 15 speaker system that they have in these cars they have a 12 channel amplifier it’s got multiples of tweeters subwoofers and mid-ranges and mid bases everything you can imagine it’s actually quite a good system it also has
Active noise cancelling and sound enhancement all be built within the electronics so they’re taking with a microphone there’s no fake sound they’re taking with a microphone the sound of the exhaust from a microphone outside of the car and they’re porting that through the speakers so you could call it artificial enhancement but it’s it’s not fake because they’re
Actually using real exhaust sounds all right looking inside the trunk uh it’s a pretty nice trunk it’s not massive but it’s it’s good size and it also has an inflator kit underneath here so you don’t get a spare tire but just to point out you can see how the opening is sort of this elongated oval shape and that’s just showing the chassis braces that are actually
Going down where normally you’d see more of a rectangular opening so all of that kind of leads into yeah you still have a pass through and you still have split fold down seats but they’re also bracing this body because of the performance capability of this 200 mile an hour sedan now the price for all of this performance it starts at just under 84 000 and when
You load this thing up with all the carbon fiber and the carbon ceramic brakes and the interior features you can get it up to about 125 000 so what we’re looking at here tip to tail is probably the strongest representation of the ultra high performance sedan that’s that’s ever been built it’s got it’s got more horsepower more top speed more everything than just
About anything out there magneto real logical shocks a new generation of that it just the list goes on and on and on and so what we want to see is does this car live up to the promise it’s sure on paper looks like an amazing vehicle so make sure you come back in mid-august when the embargo is over and we can actually talk about driving impressions of whether this
Car lived up to this actually pretty incredible amount of hype about what it’s capable of doing
Transcribed from video
This 668 Horsepower CT5-V Blackwing Is The LAST Of Cadillac's V8-Powered Super Sedans! By TFLnowliveBroadcastDetails{isLiveNowfalsestartTimestamp2021-07-29T162158+0000endTimestamp2021-07-29T164006+0000}