Hands On With Cadillac's Slick 2016 CT6

Hands On With Cadillac's Slick 2016 CT6

Loathe to be seen as a carmaker whose luxury brands' popularity peaked in the 1950s, General Motors has tried everything from making smaller cars with European-style looks and handling to airing "Is that a Buick?" TV commercials aimed at millennials.

Nextcar Bug artIts latest effort, in full splendor on the new Cadillac CT6, involves packing as much technology as it can into its luxury cars. Cadillac already offers high-tech features like 4G LTE hotspots in its entire consumer model range. With the CT6, though—a new offering for the 2016 model year—the company is blurring the lines between concept and production car, inside and out.

Outside, you'll find a car that more closely resembles a Mercedes-Benz S-Class or BMW 7 series than the 1990s-era Caddys tooling around the average nursing home parking lot. During PCMag's recent test drive, a tollbooth operator who said he was a retired auto factory worker ogled the car, exclaiming that its black metallic paint "must be European."

Cadillac CT-6

But as head-turning as the outside is, the inside is even more impressive. This is a car of firsts, from a rearview mirror with built-in streaming video to a twin-turbo V6 featuring auto stop/start and cylinder deactivation. When the first CT6 rolled off the production line last year, Karl Benz must have rolled over in his grave.

No HDR on TV Yet? Try the Mirror

Planning tech integrations for a car like the CT6, a fair number of which will likely end up in black car fleets, is always a challenge for automakers, because they have to distribute features evenly for private owners who drive themselves as well as high-paying customers who sit in the back seat.

CT6 Rear View Mirror

The CT6's rearview mirror aims to please both. With its integrated screen turned off, it's just an ordinary mirror. But activate the LCD display, with a resolution of 1,280-by-240 pixels, and you get a live, high dynamic range (HDR) video feed from the car's two rear-facing cameras.

Cadillac says the extraordinarily wide screen offers the driver a field of view four times greater than what's found in a standard rearview mirror. It's also good for rear seat passengers, who won't feel the need to duck if their chauffeur needs to back out of a parking spot or change lanes.

The mirror takes some getting used to. If you already have an HDR-enabled TV, you won't be impressed by its image quality. Cadillac's engineers used HDR technology primarily to reduce glare and allow for a crisper image in low-light situations. Don't expect colors to pop on this display.

Perhaps what requires the biggest learning curve is the extraordinarily wide field of view. It's so wide that you can see all six lanes of a clogged urban freeway at once, or a car backing out of a parking stall several spots away. It's distracting at first, but once I activated the screen, I never looked back—er, I never reverted to the normal mirror.

The HDR mirror is something you'll want to try out extensively in a test drive at night and during the day. There is some glare in the midday sun, as well as graininess around dusk. If you don't want to use it during those times, it's perhaps one of the easiest of all the CT6's electronic accessories to deactivate. You just flip the black tab on the bottom of the screen—no fiddling with settings in the infotainment system.

It's still early days for HDR technology, and the CT6 is the first road-legal car with this type of mirror. But other manufacturers, including BMW, are also testing the technology, so expect it to be an option on more cars in the near future.

Cue the Touchpad

To help CT6 owners control the Cue infotainment system, Cadillac installed a touchpad in the center console, just forward of the elbow rest. It's certainly not the first car to feature a touchpad: the German luxury brands also have them as standard or as options. What makes this one unique is its haptic feedback option. There's no cursor on the screen, so to alert you when you scroll to a new menu selection, the touchpad will briefly vibrate, similar to how 3D Touch works on the iPhone 6s.

CT6 Touchpad

An iPhone this isn't, though. The pad's response times were atrocious—even when I maxed out the sensitivity settings—to the point where I was experiencing several haptic clicks all at once as I tried to scroll through menu items. I quickly turned off the haptic feedback.

Even with the responsiveness issues, the touchpad is still a useful way to control the Cue system. Not only does it prevent fingerprints from accumulating on the touch screen, but the CT6's dashboard screen is large enough that many drivers will find it uncomfortable and perhaps unsafe to reach the entire display.

The Cue interface itself is well designed and feels more intuitive than Audi's MMI, which PCMag used extensively on the A4s Silvercar loaned us for our Fastest Mobile Networks drives. Instead of the proprietary MMI screen layout, Cue is more like your average Android smartphone: apps like navigation, climate, and more show up on the home screen, and you simply tap them to open.

The Cue system on the CT6 I tested also included Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. Unfortunately, the touchpad isn't compatible with CarPlay, but the steering wheel audio controls are. To wake up Siri, you simply long press the voice command button. (A short press activates Cue's own digital assistant, which understood me remarkably well, especially when entering navigation commands).

Your CT6 Is Watching You

There are seven exterior cameras on the CT6. Although that number pales in comparison to the 34-speaker Bose sound system, they make the CT6 feel a bit like a filming platform for a Hollywood car chase.

In addition to powering the rearview mirror, night vision, and auto parking systems, the cameras can also be configured to record footage on an SD card in the trunk. There are two recording modes: one will cycle through four of the seven cameras while the car is stationary. That's primarily useful for people who are paranoid about people keying their CT6 or otherwise vandalizing it (remember, this is a head-turning car).

CT6 Rear Camera

The other mode records video while you're driving, Russian-dash-cam-style, and at least on paper it sounds exciting. Unfortunately, it's limited to displaying the front and rear camera views, and at painfully low frame rates, so don't expect it to provide jaw-dropping footage of your coastal road trip.

The recording options can be configured via the Cue system. You can also play back footage on the in-dash center screen while the car is stationary, in addition to removing the SD card from the trunk to import the video to your computer.

Cadillac CT-6

While the CT6 owners probably won't use their cars for donuts, drag races, or other stunts, owners of GM sports cars would certainly appreciate more nuanced controls for the surround video recording system, if it's ever extended to those models. Cadillac does offer a performance data recorder system on V-Series cars, which allows drivers to record, view, and analyze their driving experiences with real-time video, cabin audio, and performance data.

Fun in the Back Seat

While most of its innovative tech is in the front, the CT6 also pampers its rear-seat passengers with features they'd expect from a Benz or Beemer. You'll find two 10-inch monitors and wireless headphones for audio. There's a built-in Blu-ray player accessible from the back seat, and the system will also play back content streamed from devices connected to the car's Wi-Fi network. The device has to be Miracast-enabled, which means Android 4.2 or later. Apple iOS doesn't support Miracast, though Cadillac suggests that Apple users download a third-party app with Miracast support to connect.

CT6 Rear Seat Infotainment

To skip that hassle, you can also plug a Chromecast£30.00 at PC World, Apple TV$129.99 at Groupon, or other streaming stick into the included HDMI port, and wirelessly stream content that way. Leave the device plugged in while you're at your meeting to curry favor with your chauffeur, who can display the inputs from the rear seats on the front screen while the CT6's transmission is in park (like an episode of Frozen Planet, below).

The wireless remote included with the rear-seat entertainment system works similarly to the one that comes with your TV at home. It controls each screen individually, with a slider at the bottom allowing you to toggle between them. When you're not watching video, press the remote's power button, and the screens automatically slide out of view into compartments built into the backs of the driver and passenger seats.

Cadillac CT-6

Other back-seat niceties on our test car included heated and ventilated seats that also reclined. The automatic rear sunshade and two manual side shades are great for keeping out the heat and prying eyes. If you want a view, you can always gaze out of the giant sunroof, which extends well into the rear compartment.

An Impressive Price

The mirror, cameras, and entertainment system barely scratch the surface of all the other technology you'd expect to find in the CT6. Along with night vision, adaptive cruise control, and automatic parallel parking, they make the CT6 fun to drive. Strip all the tech away and you get an ordinary luxury car. Sure, you can easily understand whispers while going 70mph on the highway, and its ride is less, uh, boaty than Cadillacs of old. Ultimately, though, you'll buy this car for what's in the cabin rather than under the hood.

Cadillac CT-6 In-Dash Screen

Speaking of buying, the CT6's price is also very impressive relative to its competition. PCMag's test car, with a 3.0L twin turbo V6, came to $87,465 before delivery charges. The cheapest Mercedes S-Class, the S550, starts at $95,650, and a fully optioned S600 can push $200,000.

You'll still have to come to terms with the fact that despite all that technology, you're driving around (or being driven around) in a Cadillac. That said, GM's efforts to rid itself of Cadillac's stodgy reputation may be working: other than the test car, the only CT6 I've ever seen was parked at a tony tennis club in the San Francisco Bay Area, frequented by software engineers, UC Berkeley professors, and more than a few Bernie Sanders supporters.