1993 Cadillac Allante Indianapolis 500 Pace Car Convertible 2-door 4.6l on 2040-cars

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6 luxury car brands to watch in 2024

2023 was a healthy year for the auto industry, and even with incentives returning and dealer lots filling up, there's plenty to like about the market if you build luxury automobiles, and we expect 2024 to be more of the same, which makes luxury-segment rivalries all the more interesting. Top luxury car brand rivalries? Well, that sounds downright uncivilized. But we know better, don't we? And when every quarterly sales update is an opportunity to remind somebody else that they bought the wrong status symbol, well, who can resist? Certainly not the diehard customers who fly their favorite brands' banners high.  Read more: Auto sales: Industry records best year since 2019 Read more: 2023 auto sales and 2024 preview: Ford Bronco vs. Jeep Wrangler This is a tricky segment to define, but essentially, we're looking at luxury car brands with depth to their portfolios and dealerships that exist to attract real-world customers. The Bentleys, Rolls-Royces and McLarens of the world are luxury cars, certainly, but we're more concerned with brands that have a bit more mass appeal — manufacturers who treat supply constraints as fiascos rather than features. If you disagree with our selections, feel free to let us know in the comments.  And since we're mostly concerned with finishing order, the luxury brands and totals featured here may change as new data come in throughout 2024. Due to the wild swings of the past several years, we're treating 2023 as the baseline by which we'll measure sales performance. And rather than rank brands vs. their finishing order in 2022, when supply-chain and inflationary issues still played havoc with sales figures, we're starting 2024 off with a clean slate.  The mainstream luxury segment is always a dogfight, but with their varied approaches to electrification all of the major luxury brands are in the midst of reshaping the premium landscape. Who is doing it right? Well, according to U.S. shoppers, the usual suspects are up to their old tricks.

2017 Cadillac CT6 Plug-In Hybrid Drivers' Notes Review | Seamlessly green

In many ways, the Cadillac CT6 Plug-in Hybrid is the most interesting car the brand sells. Despite having a turbocharged four-cylinder hybrid powertrain, it makes the most torque of any CT6, even the twin-turbocharged V6 model. It also has a claimed electric range of 31 miles and can still manage a combined fuel economy of 26 mpg with just the gas engine. Even its origin is interesting, since its final assembly point is China. To cap things off, it's also the second most expensive CT6 in the range. To find out if the CT6 is worth that money, and has more to offer than fun facts, we spent some time behind the wheel. Editor-in-Chief Greg Migliore: I achieved 34.1 miles per gallon for my roughly 14-mile roundtrip in the CT6 hybrid. This sedan is a rolling example of where luxury is heading in the near term: Existing models souped up with hybrid tech, and the green features will go along way toward keeping big sedans like this relevant. It's a smart play for Cadillac to add a product like this. Otherwise, it's a fairly standard-issue CT6, which is a solid car. The flashy head- and taillights look great. The design is angled, creased and nicely proportioned. The interior is comfortable and roomy. It's a nice car. Cadillac invested a lot in the CT6, and it shows. Rumors have long swirled that the brand will add a larger flagship, though in this climate, that's hard to envision. For now, the CT6 does the job as Cadillac's standard bearer. Associate Editor Joel Stocksdale: Of all the different CT6 variants available, the CT6 PHEV is the one I would pick for myself. Why? Because the hybrid powertrain finally delivers on the quiet, refined driving experience I want from a flagship luxury sedan. I was a bit surprised by this, too, since the gas engine under the hood is the 2.0-liter four-cylinder used elsewhere, which isn't the smoothest thing in the world. But assist from the electric motor helps keep the four-cylinder from having to wind up too much to move the big Caddy, and when the gas engine does rev hard, it's well muffled by whatever insulation is in the car. Besides aural refinement, the power delivery is oil-on-ice slick. The blending of electric and gas power is seamless. There's no waiting on the turbo to spool up, and there's no loss of power at higher rpms with the electric motor. They work in perfect harmony providing excellent low-down grunt and solid upper-end power. The transmission is super smooth, too allowing for happy wafting wherever you go.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.