Base Coupe 3.6l Cd 8 Speakers Mp3 Decoder Radio Data System Xm Satellite Radio on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Cadillac won't replace XTS after 2019

Cadillac wouldn't be Cadillac without a large sedan, but the definition of just which model fits that bill changed last week. Before the New York Auto Show, that role fell to the XTS. After the New York Auto Show, though, the focus shifted to the CT6. So what's to become of the XTS now that the CT6 has emerged? According to the latest intel, it'll live out the rest of its lifecycle until around 2019, but then drive off to its own funeral like so many limousines and hearses that were built off its platform. This was learned based on comments made by Cadillac chief Johan de Nysschen at the closed-door unveiling of the CT6 in Manhattan: "Ultimately, a car like XTS when it reaches the end of its lifecycle, will not be replaced." That'll be bad news for the livery business that – in the post-Town Car era – has come to rely on the XTS as the basis for its stretch jobs. "We will not have a car that will lend itself to these kind of modifications and we will probably withdraw from those markets," de Nysschen told GM Inside News. That's not all the new Cadillac boss had to say, though: he also indicated that the replacements for the ATS and CTS will be positioned differently from the current models: "As we move into the future refining our sedan portfolio, there will be no direct successor to the CTS. There will be no direct successor to the ATS. There is no point to renaming those cars because in the future those cars will disappear." Based on Johan's comments and those we've heard until now, we'd expect the replacement for the ATS to move down a size to take on the likes of the Audi A3 and Mercedes CLA, and the CTS' successor to move down half a size class as well to give the new CT6 a bit more breathing room, and possibly an even larger flagship sedan to be positioned above them all. Related Video:

Cadillac CT6 production ceases January 2020 as part of D-Ham layoffs

General Motors filed paperwork under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act with Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity this week, detailing events to come at the automaker's Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant. Starting February 28, 814 salaried and hourly workers at D-Ham, as its called, will be laid off. The 753 workers represented by the UAW will begin receiving offers in January to relocate to facilities in Michigan and Ohio, or buyout offers. As the 4-million-square-foot plant winds down through April 3 to a skeleton crew, the Cadillac CT6 ceases production in January 2020, and the last Chevrolet Impala comes off the line on February 28. The loss of the CT6 represents the end of Cadillac's latest brief, and highly regarded, adventure into flagship sedans. It might also mean the end of the 4.2-liter Blackwing twin-turbo V8 engine, at least for the moment. Both casualties are calamities. The death of the Impala closes the door on a nameplate in production for 52 years since 1957, having started off as a top-tier trim for the 1958 Bel Air known as the Bel Air Impala, once advertised with the line, "Lets you know you're the boss." As part of the new four-year labor agreement with the UAW, GM is keeping D-Ham open to build a new line of battery-electric vehicles, ultimately investing $3 billion and tripling employment to 2,225 workers when fully operational. The agreement described the coming EV as a "van" that would commence production in late 2021, but various reports say what's actually coming is a range of premium EVs in pickup and SUV bodystyles under the program codename BT1. The easy predictions put an electric GMC Sierra and Cadillac Escalade among the EV fold, but not until 2023, according to auto industry forecaster LMC Automotive. Before that, LMC claims an electric van will debut in late 2021, along with a battery-powered rebirth of the Hummer brand in pickup and SUV forms, also in late 2021. 

MIT puts V2V technology on its 2015 Top Ten list

Of all the technologies swimming around the automotive world, it is vehicle-to-vehicle communication that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fished out as one of its Ten Breakthrough Technologies of 2015. It joined emerging tech like brain organoids, supercharged photosynthesis, and Project Loon on the list, and got the nod over autonomous driving because, as the MIT Technology Review wrote, V2V communication "is likely to have a far bigger and more immediate effect on road safety." How so? Because actual cars transmitting data like their location, speed, steering angle, and state of braking to one another at least ten times per second provides a greater degree of awareness than sensor readings and algorithms. The US Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have been working for years on standards and a regulatory schedule for introducing V2V to the marketplace, and Cadillac plans to incorporate V2V into at least one of its vehicles by 2017. Since we've begun the year with a number of stories of cars being hacked into, that got us wondering about the security of V2V communications. In a recent piece by our own Pete Bigelow on what motorists should know about getting their cars hacked into, he wrote that although cyber break-ins are extremely difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to do remotely, V2V is "one more conceivable avenue a hacker could use to impact multiple cars at a given time." So we spoke to Wilmington, Massachusetts-based Security Innovation about it. The automotive consultancy company has been working with the DOT since 2003 on V2V technology and the issues around it - namely security and privacy - and its chief scientist, William Whyte, is the technical editor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1609.2 standard outlining its security protocols. Those protocols are expected to be finalized by the DOT toward the end of this year and then come into effect in 2016, and the company's Aerolink product is the security solution Cadillac will use. Whyte said, "If you hack into a car, V2V is the hardest place to start," and Pete Samson, the general manager of Security Innovation's automotive team, said "There are ten or 12 alternate attack surfaces" around the car that would make much easier targets.