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Cadillac president de Nysschen says electrification coming 'across the spectrum'

We like to pick on new Cadillac president Johan de Nysschen for his insistence, many years ago, when he was president of Audi of America, that plug-in vehicles are for idiots. Listening to him give the keynote address at the Washington Auto Show today, you wouldn't know he ever said anything negative about an electric vehicle. Instead, he sounds something like a EV-angelist. De Nysschen said that Cadillac will be able to benefit from GM's considerable expertise in plug-in technology, which he said would be "applied across the spectrum of our portfolio." GM's electric committment will help in "making electrification commonplace." With the plug-in ELR already on the road, de Nysschen said that the company's next step in advancing powertrains will be the introduction of stop/start technology – which de Nysschen called an "important system to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions" – into a Cadillac for the first time later this year. Without giving any specific details, de Nysschen said that Cadillac will introduce eight new models (not necessarily plug-ins) by the end of this decade, including five that "will take Cadillac into market segments where the brand is not even present today." These new vehicles will likely be much lighter than today's vehicles, de Nysschen said, because "weight reduction today is critical to automotive design, it helps to improve fuel efficiency and contributes to desireable vehicle dynamics." The key is to reduce weight without compromising safety or comfort and to use the right material – steel, aluminum, carbon fiber – in the right place at the right time. It was a not-so-subtle jab at Ford and its new aluminum F-150. "In the pursuit of weight reduction, some manufacturers have also opted for abandoning steel and have gone for an all-aluminum approach," he said. "At Cadillac, we believe that different materials each present particular advantages in specific applications. There is no single material that represents the optimum balance of the conflicting objectives of every single application." Related video:

Daily Driver: 2016 Cadillac ATS-V Sedan

Daily Driver videos are micro-reviews of vehicles in the Autoblog press fleet, reviewed by the staffers that drive them every day. Today's Daily Driver features the 2016 Cadillac ATS-V sedan, reviewed by David Gluckman. You can watch the video above or read a transcript below. And don't forget to watch more Autoblog videos at /videos. Show full video transcript text [00:00:00] Hey, it's David Gluckman with another Daily Driver. Today I'm driving a 2016 Cadillac ATS-V. This is the sedan model and it has the optional eight-speed automatic transmission. The ATS-V is the small performance car in Cadillac's lineup. It sits below the CTS-V, which is also new for 2016. Ever since the base ATS came out a few years ago, this has always been a wonderful chassis in search of a great engine to compliment it. This car really changes that. [00:00:30] They've dialed up the chassis, the suspension is a little stiffer, the body is even stiffer, and they've put this really nice 3.6-liter twin-turbo V6 engine under the hood. In terms of power and torque, the new V6 outguns it's main bogey, the BMW M3 and M4. The Cadillac engine puts out 464 horsepower and 445 pound feet of torque, which is tons. [00:01:00] The one issue, though, is the way it delivers that power. It's not as smooth as the BMW and there's a bit of turbo lag that you really don't feel in the German engine. Once you get moving, however, this engine really just wakes up. There's no lag once you're at highway speed. You can floor it and there's plenty of power and torque for easy passes and runup to extra-legal speeds. [00:01:30] It's tons of fun there but around town it just kind of lacks a little bit of the smoothness and responsiveness that we're kind of expecting for a car in this class. The engine does sound pretty nice, though. It has this nice little growl when you start it up and when you get on it, it actually sounds more like a supercharged engine than a turbocharged one. It's a little strange, I think that's maybe some active noise cancellation that Cadillac is doing to cancel out the whooshes and whirs that we're used to from a turbocharger. [00:02:00] That's fine with me. Whatever it is, it sounds good. This car gets the same fancy rear limited-slip differential that the Corvette introduced a couple years ago. It does a really good job of keeping everything manageable. You almost can't tell that the car has 464 horsepower. It keeps everything in line.

Cadillac SRX production moving to TN, next-gen Equinox going to Mexico

It's a good week for the town of Spring Hill, TN, as General Motors has announced that its factory in the city of 31,000 will receive a $185 million contract to produce engines. On top of that, the next-generation Cadillac SRX crossover will be built at the factory (NA models are presently built in Ramos, Arizpe Mexico), which was once famous for being the home of GM's now-defunct Saturn brand.
The factory is one of GM's six facilities around the globe that will screw together the company's new line of three- and four-cylinder Ecotec engines. Spring Hill currently builds the 2.0-liter, turbocharged Ecotec, as well as the naturally aspirated 2.4 and 2.5-liter variants.
Spring Hill's vehicle assembly lines were idled in 2009, but were reactivated in 2011. The SRX is just one of the products meant to benefit from last year's $350-million investment, and should have a positive impact, creating or retaining around 1,800 positions at the factory.