The Porsches don't want to play. Over 1000 hard-charging miles in two days across Germany, Austria, and Italy, and not one appears in the Cadillac's sights. Which is a pity, because our wedgy, quad-piped XLR-V is locked and loaded for 911s.
Whoa! Back up a minute! Did I just say we went chasing Porsches...in a Cadillac? In Germany? Um, yah. Because that's exactly what we did. And while the 911s proved elusive, no one -- apart from a lunatic in a black BMW 645i convertible who kept the hammer down in a speed-limited construction zone-passed our XLR-V on the autobahnen. Not the silver-haired guy in the big, black Audi S8 with Wuppertal plates. Nor the guy in the E46 M3 who tried to run with us near Nuremburg. Nor even the guy in the AMG Benz who gave us a cold, hard stare after we blew by him near Mainz. They couldn't keep up.
Cadillac general manager Jim Taylor clearly has a sense of adventure, because when I idly suggested a while back it might be fun to disable the 155-mph speed limiter on an XLR-V and take it to Germany to see what it would do on highways with no speed limits, he didn't suddenly look at his watch and start mumbling something about a meeting he had to catch. Instead, he simply cracked a wry grin: "That sounds like fun. Let me see what I can do."
Lord only knows what it took to shepherd the idea through GM, because every few months I'd see Taylor at some event or other and he'd always say: "I haven't forgotten." But Cadillac's decision to hold preview drives of the all-new CTS sedan at the Nurburgring made a bunch of logistics a whole lot easier, which is how photographer Mark Bramley and I came to be pulling out of the carpark of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Mainz, Germany, bound for Italy and the famed Stelvio Pass in an Infrared metallic XLR-V.
Read Article