• Pros

• Quiet. This is one of the most impressively quiet sedans we’ve driven. If your pet peeve is road noise, we have the car for you.
• Comfortable. Some recent model Cadillacs, like the ATS, can’t seem to figure out if they want to be luxury cars or hard-riding sporty cars. The CT6 lets you know you’re in a luxury car. The seats are awesome. The ride is smooth and pliant, especially with the optional magnetic ride control. The interior is tasteful and well done. It’s not over the top or brassy. The materials look to be good quality, and the fit and finish is excellent.
• Handling. Although it’s clearly a comfortable car — as God intended Cadillacs to be — the handling is pretty respectable. It doesn’t feel like you’re driving a large car (except when you’re parking). On twisty roads, it makes you feel confident, with no wallowing or body sway. It feels pretty light on its feet for a 4,000 pound sled.
• Back seat room. Cross your legs, businessmen! If you have to tote around adults, they’ll be grateful to you for leasing a CT6. There’s an unusual amount of leg room in the comfortable (and heated) back seats. It’s larger, back there, than in most mid-size sedans. Our Platinum test version had video screens for each back seat passenger, for when they got bored by our conversation.
• Improved CUE system. We’ve disliked the CUE system in the past, but to be fair, it’s better now. It seems to respond a lot faster, with little of the infuriating waiting we used to experience. The screen is big, at 10-diagonal-inches, and the menus are pretty clear. There’s also Apple Car Play and Android Auto.
• Thin A-pillars. Cadillac seems to have put some money into extra strength steel for the A-pillars. They’re thinner than you’d expect in a car like this, and that improves front-side visibility.
• Heads up display. The Platinum edition CT6 projects key information, like speed and navigation directions, so that it appears to be floating at the front end of the hood. Good controls for location and brightness make this heads-up display particularly useful.

• Cons

• Oh, for a volume knob! Cadillac is still insisting on using a touch sensitive volume bar under the touch screen. It might be time for Cadillac owners to storm their offices in NY and refuse to let Caddy execs go out for more caviar until they relent and give us a damn volume knob. Fortunately, there are controls in the steering wheel, but it’s not always in the right orientation when you need it.
• Transmission. We don’t know if it was just our test car, or CT6-es in general, but we experienced hard shifts between first and second gear, both on the way up, and sometimes on the way down. We also felt other shifts more than we believe we should have. The truth is, we’ve driven Lexuses and BMWs (and even other GM cars) whose automatic transmissions were practically unnoticeable. And when you buy a $60,000 to $70,000 luxury car (or in the case of our top of the line Platinum AWD test version, $90,000), the last thing you want to feel is harsh shifts.
• Mileage. While the CT6 is rated at 18/26 and 21 mpg overall, our (admittedly mostly city driving) test resulted in a mediocre 16.5 MPG overall. The on-board computer noted that our “highest recorded mileage” was 29.2 on the highway. But that may have been going downhill. You have a choice of engines in the CT6. We drove the most powerful twin turbo V6, which delivers 400+ horsepower, which suggests you’d do fine with one of the other, less-ridiculously powerful engines.
• Safety Equipment. While the CT6 boasts a lot of great safety equipment in the mid-level models (blind-spot monitors, low-speed automatic emergency braking), the full-speed emergency braking is only available on the high-end model. That’ll change over the next few years when consumers start demanding all-speed emergency braking in their Kia Rios. But for now, you’ll have to pay dearly for it.

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