AURORA | The automotive industry loves to benchmark.
It’s probably not foreign to you either. Remember the school years when you’d practice karate in your underwear to prepare for the next time you got picked on? You were benchmarking the bully. How about the job interview you gave in the mirror 28 times before you sat down and realized your potential future boss could stop a freight train with his bad breath? OK, so that’s a loose interpretation.
(The idea of benchmarking isn’t completely foreign though) know what you’re up against, tune and retune until you’re ready to compete.
What’s any of this have to do with the Cadillac ATS? Well, something tells me the ATS spent a lot of time in its Captain America skivvies, fists clenched for the BMW 3-series, working on its roundhouse for this very fight.
That’s not a bad idea at all.
For years now, the BMW 3-series has been the epitome of market domination, propelling sales of the entire brand to the top of the luxury charts and throttling a brand from bloated yuppie buyers in the 1980s to darn near every man, woman and child nowadays.
If it weren’t for the BMW 3-series, we wouldn’t have as many high-quality sedans that we have now — Lexus IS, Audi A4, Mercedes C-class and so on — and we surely wouldn’t be looking at the ATS either. General Motors engineers freely admit that the 3-series was in their sights while the car was under development. I imagine at least half a dozen designers that were molding the clay that would serve as the ATS’s body panels looked to the walls, festooned with the BMW competitor, and shook their fists while sculpting every day. That’s motivation to beat your benchmark.
In that idea, it’s hard to pinpoint the moment when the student surpasses the sensei; only time gives that sort of perspective. There will be a time that another luxury sedan from someone — anyone, maybe Cadillac — will surpass the 3-series, but I don’t believe we’ll know it when it happens. Only 3 or 4 years down the road, when the paths have diverged substantially will we be able to point to a specimen and say, “I think that’s the moment Car A got better than Car B.”
For now, we’re only left to guess at what’s going to happen and look hard at the facts that we have in hand.
First, the ATS exists this year as the first generation of a car that’s almost wholly new to Cadillac. Well, I say new, but I’m completely forgetting Cadillac’s other small offerings of yore, which include, but aren’t limited to, the Cimmaron, BLS (not sold in North America), and Catera (kind of). So we’ll say the ATS is “new to our short attention spans.”
The ATS makes use of GM’s all-new Alpha platform, which is GM’s first rear-wheel drive compact platform since, near as I can tell, Henry Leland was building these things himself.
The car itself is almost nine inches shorter than Cadillac’s former smallest car in the range, the CTS. But that’s an unfair comparison — the ATS is more than just another, smaller, different CTS. I could see how one could get confused, it seems that for the past 5 years Cadillac seemed to be caught in its own wake by making more and more variants of the popular CTS (i.e. CTS-V, CTS Coupe, CTS Wagon, CTS Ice Cream Van) until finally they discovered another letter in the alphabet.
Actually, the ATS is quite a sea change for the automaker. It noticeably combines at least five new technologies into a brand new nameplate for an automaker that used to shun “new” like baseball beat writers. Imagine that.
First, and almost most enjoyable, is the ATS’s new chassis. A 109-inch wheelbase with a perfect 50/50 weight distribution and a low center of gravity is like starting soup with mirepoix made from butter, bacon and more of both — it just has to be good. Cadillac even replaced the front wishbones with a double pivot setup to absorb more road imperfections without compromising driver’s feel. In back, Cadillac used for the first time a five-link rear suspension for an added dimension of road grip by reducing roll motion. Delicious.
All that suspension componentry combines to the best cornering, best handling, most solid Cadillac I’ve driven in, well, forever. It’s clear that the ATS team benchmarked a BMW, because it’s clear that the ATS can handle like one.
The ATS dives into corners thanks to excellent braking, and when power is applied to the rear tires, waggles out when you press your foot into it. The combination is downright exhilarating, and although the CTS-V Coupe was thunder and lightning out of the tailpipes, the ATS feels nimble like lightning in the corners instead. Throw in the optional limited slip-differential in the back and I imagine some people will be petitioning to marry their cars soon.
Assisting in all of that handling is the powertrain, which comes in three variants. The standard 2.5-liter, four-cylinder engine is rated at 202 horsepower while the optional 2.0-liter turbo is rated at 272 horsepower. (The interesting part about the turbo is that it’s still offered with a six-speed manual, which most automakers have given up on.)
The final option, a 3.6-liter V6 that cranks 321 horsepower and 275 lb.-ft. of torque, was our flavor in our test model and turned out to be meaner than a congressional Republican. I firmly believe that the 2.0-liter turbo is enough for the ATS, but if you prefer your whips to be cracking and your necks to be picked via the scruff, then by all means, go big.
Inside the ATS is packed with interesting technology that doesn’t rival the powertrain, but is certainly worthwhile. The optional rumble seats, which warn you when you’re changing lanes or when someone is approaching while pulling out of a parking spot, are interesting.
Cadillac’s CUE system, which doesn’t stand for “Can U Explain that acronym?” is among the highlights. It provides a haptic touchscreen that bounces back when you make a selection (that’s really the best way to describe the feel) and more intuitive menu controls. By and large the system is worthwhile, but considering it’s the first go-round there are still some flaws worth noting.
But the real note to make here