Power Play

A year ago, Cadillac took the well-established Seville sedan into edgier styling terrain and made a switch to rear-wheel drive when it introduced the Cadillac STS. For 2006, the STS-V continues to offer the luxury every Cadillac buyer looks for, while adding performance no Cadillac buyer has ever imagined.

Engineers have redone everything for the STS-V—chassis, suspension, wheels, and engine, especially the engine. The bore in the STS’s Northstar V8 4.6-liter engine is reduced to make a 4.4-liter engine that’s reinforced from bottom to top. On top, a supercharger blasts the air-fuel mixture into the injectors with enough intercooled force to produce 469 horsepower and 439 foot-pounds of torque. That’s an increase of 149 horsepower and 124 foot-pounds over the quite potent Northstar V8. And that makes the 4,295-pound STS-V the most powerful Cadillac production car ever built.

Nobody needs to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 4.8 seconds, or to reach the electronically governed top speed of 155 mph, but in the upwardly mobile world of prestige vehicles, performance potential is the key. (Ungoverned, the STS-V has reached 170 mph in testing at the Nurburgring racetrack in Germany.)

Phase one of the “Cadillac Renaissance” was a five-year plan to renew styling with new products. Phase two starts now, aimed at performance and technical refinement to enhance Cadillac’s attractiveness to younger buyers. But the STS-V will be for an exclusive group of buyers. Individually hand-built engines are expensive, and the STS-V has a base price of $77,000, with only 2,000 or so cars scheduled for production.

Cadillac has surpassed both Lincoln and Mercedes with U.S. sales last year of 235,002. Now it stands third in its class, behind only Lexus (302,895) and BMW (266,200)—and it aims to keep moving up. For a company that has tended to mistake hype for technology, the STS-V is a welcome new beacon.