![]() ![]() RHD Those monstrously huge and inefficient Personal Luxury Coupes were part of an era, which is now long gone.I'm sure Business majors have a name for this piratical strategy. The employees suffer as "efficiencies" are implemented in order to keep the ship afloat. They are the same people who buy a business, then make that same business pay off the loan used to purchase it. RHD Corporate moneymakers have a habit of loading debt onto one division, then spinning it off to suffer and slowly die while trying to pay it off.Michael Karesh operates, an online provider of car reliability and real-world fuel economy information. Judging from sales, plenty of people do like it.Ĭadillac provided the car with insurance and a tank of gas. ![]() You might not like it, but you won’t mistake it for something else. Instead, it appears crisp and upscale, especially in “gray flannel metallic,” vying with the second-generation CTS as the best realization of the marque’s polarizing art-and-science design language. The Cadillac, with its chunky styling and aggressive stance (with the must-have 20-inch wheels), looks nothing like the others and nothing like a Chevrolet, either. The last still looks a bit much like…a Ford. The Acura, Lexus, and Lincoln are nothing special to look at. The rear seat belt reminder doesn’t turn you on? Going over the specs and features, now that the weak base engine is history nothing else stands out, positively or negatively? Why, then, pick the Cadillac over the others? One word: styling. So in this respect the new 3.6-liter engine is very successful. With the $3,820 2.8 turbo, it lost this important advantage. So the Cadillac is actually the least expensive. The Acura is priced a little higher than the Lexus. Adjust for remaining feature differences and the Cadillac’s price advantage grows by about $1,200. Compare invoices, and they’re only about $400 apart because Lexus dealers enjoy much more generous margins. When the RX 350 and SRX are both similarly loaded up, the Lexus costs about $3,000 more-at MSRP. ![]() The Lexus is the one both Cadillac and Lincoln are gunning for. Adjust for feature differences using TrueDelta’s car price comparison tool bumps the Cadillac’s advantage to $2,000 at MSRP, $1,100 at invoice (Cadillac dealers must work with especially miserly margins). Compared to the Lincoln MKX, the Cadillac is priced within $500. The tested SRX, the top trim with all-wheel-drive and optional dual-screen entertainment system, lists for $51,055. Perhaps even all of them, if car safety regulators get their way. I expect to find it in more and more car models going forward. This feature is very useful if you have kids-no need to visually check whether they’ve buckled up. My favorite feature in the Cadillac: a rear seat belt reminder that shows which of the three are in use and lights up a warning if any are undone while the car is still in motion. The EPA numbers: 16 / 23, just a bit worse than the “fuel-saving” 3.0’s 17 / 23 and better than the 2.8 turbo’s 15 / 22. Fuel economy? The trip computer reported about 17 miles-per-gallon in suburban driving, about 21 on the highway. The all-wheel-drive system includes an active rear differential, but the engine, while dramatically torquier (265 pound-feet at 2,400 rpm, up from the 3.0’s 223 at 5,100), still isn’t torquey enough to take advantage of it. It’s not quick-the SRX with all-wheel-drive weighs 4,442 pounds, about 300 more than the CTS sedan powered by a 318-horsepower longitudinal variant of this engine-but it’s not slow, either. It doesn’t have an upscale or sophisticated sound, but it isn’t hard on the ears, either. And?Īnd the 3.6-liter V6, revised for 2012, performs adequately. For 2012, the SRX receives a solution that was obvious from the start: the corporate 3.6-liter V6 replaces last year’s 3.0-liter. The actual result in the case of the Cadillac SRX: a base engine with too little torque and an optional engine for which GM charged $3,820-to provide performance similar to everyone else’s base engines. Need a performance variant? Shrink the engine a little more and add a turbo. One overly simple idea: reduce the size of the engine, and fuel economy will improve. It’s just too hard to communicate anything complicated or nuanced to all involved. Large organizations are prone to overly simplistic thinking.
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