With sedans struggling for their very survival, and manual transmissions officially less popular than electric cars, the last thing anyone would expect an automaker to do in the 2020s would be taking its manual sports sedan and turning it into a still lower-volume product: a station wagon. And yet, Cadillac's top engineer said on Thursday night that General Motors' luxury brand "continu[es] to study" the feasibility of a CT5-V-based wagon to follow up its cult classic CTS-V longroofs from the early 2010s.

Appearing on the Autoline After Hours podcast this week, Cadillac Chief Engineer Brandon Vivian was asked by a listener if the automaker was able to make a business case for a wagon version of the 2020 Cadillac CT5-V, its new midsize performance saloon. This kind of question is usually answered with a paragraph of purposefully non-committal buzzwords about "enthusiasm" and "branding." But surprisingly, Vivian didn't totally rule it out.

"So I will tell you, I've been looking at that many, many, many times... nothing to announce right now, but certainly, when you see the enthusiasm of our customers, and when I'm out there talking to our customers, to our V-Lab—to our V-Club members—there is an absolute fanaticism around the V wagons, and wagons in general. So because of that, we continue to study a future variant."