My biggest issue with some of these reviews is that they fail to review the car for what it is, and more importantly what it is attempting to be against the yardstick the OEM set for it. They tend to review the car based on what they want a car to be.
Not only that, they buy into and regurgitate some of the same misinformation amongst each other. IE the Alpha platform was developed by Cadillac for the ATS and was so good the 6th generation Camaro used it as a platform not vice versa.
Cadillac's performance division has always had two primary goals which were to make bonkers performance cars with just enough civility and luxury to still truly be considered a Cadillac. They aren't extremes of Mopar power for power's sake, or Mercedes luxury for luxury sake, or BMW technology for the sake of technology. They build DRIVERS cars with just enough class to still be acceptable as an executive sedan.
In the case of a track focused car where the engineering ethos was strip the car down to a track weapon and then make everything earn its way back on to the platform, you don't wind up with a huge screen or lots of Uber advanced tech to play with in the cabin, because all of that is in the dynamic components of the car.
Think about it, both BW are incredibly light cars for the amount of luxury items they are carrying, those seat fans aren't light. These cars weigh more than a Nissan murano , so they have that dense solid feel yet, are by all accounts exceedingly agile.
Cadillac wants them to be sleepers. They want it to straddle the fence between performance at any cost and comfort. It's meant to be Jekle and Hyde . The review should address whether the cars meet that standard and to what degree. They could have plastered blackwing on every panel. They didn't because they want blackwing to be more an experience than a trim level. They responded to this lack of external differentiation by giving us track edition cars that for all intents and purposes are just bold new colors and graphics for the collector crowd. My point is BW is a drivers car meant to go work flying under the radar during the week and be acceptable by the clients, be valeted out front on Friday night, rip the track Saturday morning and show up to Church as Sunday best without doing anything but changing the mode switch. That's the intent, does the car pull that off or not? No other maker is currently trying to do that. Yet Caddy is also reaching levels of luxury, performance and technology that put it it in comparison to its rivals in those areas but no one but the Cadillac is attempting to do them all equally well at the same time.
Mercedes focuses on luxury so their performance cars may have great numbers but they go out of their way to isolate the driver from all of that, they want a refined not visceral experience. To say the car has no personality when in fact it has a personality you don't prefer is just lazy writing .
As for the bimmer, they drive great when new, but good grief if you're not one of the very fortunate few who doesn't have technical problems, all I can say is yeah I am unlikely to own another one. The M cars to my experience have been the ultimate in hype about driving machines than drivers, of course this was only when we could get them back from the shop...
...WTF...plus their times are usually slower
