Cadillac

Admittedly, I—like much of the automotive press—have a sweet spot for this car. Cadillac spent the last decade making sure the CTS-V was no stranger to America's journalists, proffering it up with an enthusiasm not often seen by purveyors of cars in its performance class. I drove the second-gen CTS-V on enough occasions, it'd take more fingers than I've got to tick them all off; it was the first 500-plus-horsepower car I ever drove as a journalist, the first one I ever took on a long road trip, and the only one I ever took on the Gumball 3000. I haven't spent quite as much time in the third-generation CTS-V, but I've logged enough miles to know it well, having sent it down highways and byways and even a few unrestricted sections of Germany's famous autobahn. Still, when the folks who run Cadillac's New York-area media fleet asked if I wanted to take a 2019 model—equipped with March-appropriate winter tires, naturally—for a weekend run to Vermont and back, I sent back the professional equivalent of the heart-eyes emoji. There's always room for a little more CTS-V in your life. Even at the end of its life, there's no arguing with its performance. Not when there are still 640 pounding horses beneath that bulging, angular hood—more horsepower than any of its main foes. That's an awfully intimidating number—remember, kids, that's just 11 ponies fewer than the Ferrari Enzo that wowed us last decade—made all the more so by the fact that, in increasingly anachronistic fashion, it funnels those all those horses (and 630 pound-feet of torque) to the rear wheels alone. Yet it's docile as a sedated lamb—so long as your foot never moves past the first 20 percent of the throttle's travel, at least. Push deeper, and the power seems to build exponentially, like quakes on the Richter scale. By the time the gas pedal hits the firewall and the supercharged LT4 is at or near its 6,400 power peak, this leather-lined luxury car feels like it could catch up to an ICBM.

Cadillac

All that power may seem a little excessive for the real world, but once you've calibrated your mind (and foot) to the smallblock's fury, it leaves you feeling rather invincible. No gap in traffic cannot be punched through, no broken-yellow-line pass cannot be made; I ripped past seven cars and the unhurried milk truck holding all of us back on one Vermont straightaway where no one else dared to even attempt a move. Running south from Albany on the New York Thruway in thick traffic that ebbed and flowed between 45 and 90 miles per hour, the CTS-V made slicing through the gnarls of vehicles too easy, the massive Brembos yanking the speed down and the smallblock ripping the car back's velocity back up. In most cars, cutting up traffic like this would be a tense exercise; in this Caddy, it's a blast.

Cadillac

As the road narrows and the curves tighten, however, something unusual happens: the car becomes engaging in a way you don't expect a super-sedan to be. Some of that, no doubt, is that it's easier to notice the benefits after sampling the CTS-V's main foes, a collection of German cars where the front wheels are also saddled with taking power from the engine and the steering rack. But much of it's also due to the yeoman's work the all-but-unsung GM engineers did to build a modern-day car with the best steering they could manage, stiffening the car's structure with new braces, subbing in tie rod ends in favor of bushings, and even tweaking the electric power steering's systems to allow more feedback as the driver dials the car into more aggressive performance modes. Admittedly, the car feels a bit heavy in the tight turns, but the direct steering and taut suspension always keep the mass well in line; there's never a sense that the roughly 4,200 pounds (plus occupants) will overwhelm the parts tasked with controlling it. Besides, a Cadillac should feel a little weighty from behind the wheel; it's the heir to a century of mighty American luxury cars, not a Lotus. Cadillac's Performance Traction Management system has been lauded early and often, serving up multiple flavors of computer assistance once the car's drive model selector flips to Track and making the most of the electronic limited-slip diff, StabiliTrack-branded ESP, and hard-working traction control. I dove into PTM's menu exactly zero times during my drive. Didn't need to; no one really does, not on real-world roads—and certainly not on Adirondack two-lanes at close to midnight with the temperature near freezing. Dialing the car up to Sport mode is enough to satisfy the needs of all but the maddest street driver.

Cadillac