1957 Cadillac Fleetwood on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Petrolicious eats up Rita Hayworth's 1953 Cadillac Ghia

The automotive industry has seem some wonderful transoceanic collaborations between America and Italy, from the Ford-powered De Tomasos of the 1960s to the alliance between Fiat and Chrysler today. Of course it's also seen unfortunate experiments in between like the Chrysler TC by Maserati and the Pininfarina-bodied Cadillac Allante. But before any of those, there was a beautiful tradition of rebodying American steel at the hands of Italian carrozzerie. And this could easily be among the most gorgeous of them all. It's a Cadillac Series 62 from 1953 with bodywork by Ghia. It's one of only two made, and has a star-studded history. The car was purchased by Aly Khan, prince of the Nizari Ismaili muslims and Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations, for his wife... who just so happened to be the inimitable Rita Hayworth. They split up, but she held on to the car. Today it's part of the permanent collection at the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA, so the videographical artisans at Petrolicious went by to check it out. You'll want to as well in the five-minute short above.

Cadillac Rear Camera Mirror | 2017 Autoblog Technology of the Year Finalist

We give Cadillac a lot of credit for being the first to make good on the promise to replace mirrors with cameras and displays. That was good enough to earn the Cadillac Rear Camera Mirror a place on our 2017 Technology of the Year awards shortlist for new features. The idea behind this system is relatively simple; what perhaps took more doing was getting the regulations in place to allow a video feed to replace the government-mandated mirror. The hardware and that rules compliance starts with what looks like a normal rearview mirror – because it defaults to being a mirror until you switch on the display or in the event the system somehow fails. Flip the little toggle at the bottom of the mirror – the one normally used to switch from day to night mode – and the reflection is replaced by a very crisp feed from a camera at the back of the vehicle. This live stream gives you a wide-angle view of what's behind, without obstruction from back-seat passengers, headrests, or any bodywork. The camera is even shielded from weather and has a coating to shed water. What you see doesn't exactly look like a normal reflection, but the quality is good enough and you see more than you would normally with something aimed through today's small rear windows. But because it isn't actually a reflection, you have to make some adjustments. When your eyes are focused down the road, glancing at a mirror gives you a view the same distance away but in the rear. With the rear camera mirror, a glance back requires your eyes to first refocus on the display, which takes a moment. And unlike a normal mirror, which you look through at an angle, this display is angled toward the driver but projecting an image that looks straight back – no matter how you move it, the image doesn't change like a mirror's would. And because it's an image and not a reflection, you can't choose what's in focus and lose your sense of depth perception. It's not clear whether objects in mirror are closer or farther than they appear. And there are other limitations. For instance, while the display balances bright lights and dark surroundings well at night, it is tricked by LED headlights, which flicker at a rate faster than the camera shoots. The result is a distracting strobe effect like you get when you point a smartphone camera at any LED light source. For those with migraine sensitivity, this kind of fast flashing can cause real problems.

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.