I posted a long post on the Acura board on which I mod. I am a longtime Honda/Acura buyer and my comments are colored by my experience. The V and RL are totally different animals (RWD vs. SH-AWD for starters) but some aspects can be compared.
Cliffs:
I love this car and GM rocks for making it :worship:
Interior not quite up to RL standard but who cares, I've got 556 hp!, and it's still an excellent effort by GM
Like the navi, though I'm still becoming used to the interface so my opinion is incomplete
Manual mode is awesome
Did I say, I love this car? And that GM rocks for making it? :worship:
A few snippets:
Interior
The RL has far better interior materials. This is not a surprise, given that the CTS in base form is an entry-level luxury car that actually competes with the TL. Even so, the double-stitched dash components look and feel luxurious. The plastics seem reasonably good quality and have a great feel to the touch. The carbon fiber inserts in my car with ebony interior look and feel well-made. However, there are places where you can see corners cut. The large piece of center dash plastic creaks when pushed. It rarely squeaks in turns. The Ultraview moonroof sometimes pops when I’m on uneven pavement, usually at low speed. When you look at the components of the Ultraview, the plastic used for the guides looks and feels ultra-cheap. The high-gloss plastic "V" logos on the shifter and the steering wheel look like they were made in high school shop class.
In my RL, the plastics were considerably better in quality. However, even the RL had its flaws. The moonroof creaked when its shade was open. That improved with some silicone lubricant but never completely went away. The interior door handles were flimsy and felt as if they would come off at any time. Mine never did, but there are reports on AZ of this happening. Other than that, the interior materials are uniformly better in quality than in the CTS........
Electronics
Just like the RL, the CTS has big, round dials that are easy to read. The LED tracers for the tach and speedometer on the V are flashy, but helpful, as with the speedometer you have to constantly watch your speed. An even better feature of the dash is the multi-info display. On the CTS-V, you can set this to show your speed. THIS IS A BIG DEAL in this car. I love digital speed displays and in this car, it actually helps you to modulate your speed. This is because a minimal amount of pedal pressure accelerates the car so quickly that you are at risk for a ticket sooner than you’d like, so you have to be super-attentive at all times. The tire pressure display is a little awkward, though. On the RL, you see a picture of the car with pressures at each corner. In the V, you see Front L/R pressure, then you press a button to see Rear L/R. That’s a little more cumbersome and I hope that the software is changed......
Driving experience
Again, I won't get into the speed and handling as the V far outshines the RL, and it's not even a fair comparison. I will comment that one can turn off all nannies, where you can’t on the RL. The manual mode is the fastest shifting manumatic I’ve ever experienced, when you press the button the car shifts; on the RL it was "press button", then wait about three seconds, THEN shift. Aggravating. The CTS has an additional tranny feature. When you slip the shifter into manual mode, and don't manually shift, the car goes into a sport-shift automatic mode in which the shifts are more aggressive and the gears are helf a little longer. This is an AWESOME experience when you are accelerating onto the freeway. I have some video clips of this and will add them to this thread when I have time to upload them to Youtube.....
Conclusion
Where was THIS GM ten years ago? They crammed a lot of features into this car, then priced it BELOW its competition, which is really the M5 and E63. The interior quibbles I mentioned are really minor despite the time I spent describing them and I understand that when you're paying $20k-$30 less than the competition, you don't expect Tiffany baubles. Even so, the car seems to have much better quality than I expected. It's too soon to comment on reliability, but I've had no major issues yet with this car. This is how GM should have been winning customers.....great product....reasonable price.
The full thread is HERE--click.
Cliffs:
I love this car and GM rocks for making it :worship:
Interior not quite up to RL standard but who cares, I've got 556 hp!, and it's still an excellent effort by GM
Like the navi, though I'm still becoming used to the interface so my opinion is incomplete
Manual mode is awesome
Did I say, I love this car? And that GM rocks for making it? :worship:
A few snippets:
Interior
The RL has far better interior materials. This is not a surprise, given that the CTS in base form is an entry-level luxury car that actually competes with the TL. Even so, the double-stitched dash components look and feel luxurious. The plastics seem reasonably good quality and have a great feel to the touch. The carbon fiber inserts in my car with ebony interior look and feel well-made. However, there are places where you can see corners cut. The large piece of center dash plastic creaks when pushed. It rarely squeaks in turns. The Ultraview moonroof sometimes pops when I’m on uneven pavement, usually at low speed. When you look at the components of the Ultraview, the plastic used for the guides looks and feels ultra-cheap. The high-gloss plastic "V" logos on the shifter and the steering wheel look like they were made in high school shop class.
In my RL, the plastics were considerably better in quality. However, even the RL had its flaws. The moonroof creaked when its shade was open. That improved with some silicone lubricant but never completely went away. The interior door handles were flimsy and felt as if they would come off at any time. Mine never did, but there are reports on AZ of this happening. Other than that, the interior materials are uniformly better in quality than in the CTS........
Electronics
Just like the RL, the CTS has big, round dials that are easy to read. The LED tracers for the tach and speedometer on the V are flashy, but helpful, as with the speedometer you have to constantly watch your speed. An even better feature of the dash is the multi-info display. On the CTS-V, you can set this to show your speed. THIS IS A BIG DEAL in this car. I love digital speed displays and in this car, it actually helps you to modulate your speed. This is because a minimal amount of pedal pressure accelerates the car so quickly that you are at risk for a ticket sooner than you’d like, so you have to be super-attentive at all times. The tire pressure display is a little awkward, though. On the RL, you see a picture of the car with pressures at each corner. In the V, you see Front L/R pressure, then you press a button to see Rear L/R. That’s a little more cumbersome and I hope that the software is changed......
Driving experience
Again, I won't get into the speed and handling as the V far outshines the RL, and it's not even a fair comparison. I will comment that one can turn off all nannies, where you can’t on the RL. The manual mode is the fastest shifting manumatic I’ve ever experienced, when you press the button the car shifts; on the RL it was "press button", then wait about three seconds, THEN shift. Aggravating. The CTS has an additional tranny feature. When you slip the shifter into manual mode, and don't manually shift, the car goes into a sport-shift automatic mode in which the shifts are more aggressive and the gears are helf a little longer. This is an AWESOME experience when you are accelerating onto the freeway. I have some video clips of this and will add them to this thread when I have time to upload them to Youtube.....
Conclusion
Where was THIS GM ten years ago? They crammed a lot of features into this car, then priced it BELOW its competition, which is really the M5 and E63. The interior quibbles I mentioned are really minor despite the time I spent describing them and I understand that when you're paying $20k-$30 less than the competition, you don't expect Tiffany baubles. Even so, the car seems to have much better quality than I expected. It's too soon to comment on reliability, but I've had no major issues yet with this car. This is how GM should have been winning customers.....great product....reasonable price.
The full thread is HERE--click.