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2016 Cadillac ATS-V Sedan Manual
Building a performance reputation, one brick at a time.
Jun 2016 By JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN
Car and Driver Magazine
Instrumented Test
Imagine ordering a ton of bricks. That’s 400 red paving bricks weighing five pounds apiece. You know, the bricks that made Indianapolis famous. They’re yours. Now, do you want your ton of bricks dumped on you all at once? Or would you rather have one brick handed to you at a time?
The manual-transmission 2016 ATS-V sedan is Cadillac’s one-brick-at-a-time performance machine. Sometimes it’s about feeling that kiln-hardened clay in your hand as you set the brick in place and build something magnificent with it. At other times, it’s about bouncing that heft in your hand for a moment just before chucking the brick through a window and running like hell. With 464 horsepower from its 3.6-liter twin-turbocharged V-6, this is one of the world’s great brick-delivery systems. And it excels at running like hell.
Three-Pedal Performance
The stir-it-yourself transmission in this ATS-V sedan is no mystery box. It’s the Tremec TR-6060 six-speed, an evolution of the T-56 that has been used in various Camaros, Vipers, and Mustangs for almost a quarter-century. All the demons were chased out of this gearbox decades ago, and it has been refined to the point that its shifts are intuitive. That is, if your intuition triggers some seriously beefy muscular reflexes.
Cadillac has optimized the TR-6060 by adding both active rev-matching logic and no-lift shifting. The rev-matching feature blips the throttle when it anticipates a downshift to make the shift change smoother, while the no-lift feature facilitates upshifts without making the driver lay off the go juice. Both technologies work well, keeping the engine in the meatiest part of its torque production even if the doofus driver couldn’t stab it with a steak knife.
Full Article: 2016 Cadillac ATS-V Sedan Manual
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