Cadillac CT5 Sport Wagon under consideration
Cadillac's chief engineer says the business case for a CTS Sport Wagon successor is very much on the table.
Despite only making up a sliver of overall Cadillac sales when the brand offered a station wagon model, there's still reason to hope that GM's luxury marque may yet get back into the long-roof business. That news comes courtesy of Cadillac's chief engineer, Brandon Vivian, who said that a CT5 wagon remains under active consideration while appearing on Thursday's Autoline After Hours.
An audience member of the video podcast show, Scott C., wrote in to ask Vivian if there was a business case to be made for a new CT5 Sport Wagon. Based on his response, a load-lugging variant sounds like it remains a very real possibility.
"So I will tell you, I've been looking at that many, many, many times," Vivian said. "We continue to look for opportunities to make money, and I will continue to do that."
Vivian made a particular point of calling out that the now-discontinued CTS-V Sport Wagon model still serves as a touchstone for some of the brand's most hard-core fans.
"So, nothing to announce right now, but certainly, when you see the enthusiasm of our customers, and when I'm out there talking to our customers, to our V-Lab -- to our V-Club members -- there is an absolute fanaticism around the V wagons, and wagons in general. So because of that, we continue to study a future variant."
If you've been keeping up with Cadillac's ever-changing nomenclature, you know that the CT5 is the successor to the CTS, the midsize luxury passenger-car range that went out of production in 2019. Beloved among auto enthusiasts, the sharp-looking Cadillac CTS Sport Wagon and CTS-V Sport Wagon models were offered between 2010 and 2014, along with a chiseled coupe variant. Unfortunately, GM never brought out a station wagon or two-door version of the larger, third-generation model that came out for the 2014 model year.
While exact production numbers remain tough to come by for the individual body styles, according to fan site Cadillac V-Net, an estimated 7,000 CTS Sport Wagons were produced between 2010 and 2014, of which only around 1,200 were the high-performance CTS-V variant. In total, over 254,000 second-generation models were produced, with the lion's share of that total coming in the form of traditional four-door sedans.
Despite being slow sellers when new, today, CTS-V Sport Wagon models remain particularly sought-after cars on the secondhand market, with unusually high resale values to match. Specialty car auction sites like BringATrailer.com have seen low-mile examples with the more desirable six-speed manual gearbox selling for as high as $64,500 this year -- that's essentially the same as the vehicle's MSRP when it was new in 2014.
Vivian was guesting on Autoline After hours, the weekly online auto-industry program, to discuss Cadillac's just-announced CT4-V and CT5-V Blackwing models. Those ultra-high-performance sedan derivatives have been delayed. While they had been expected to debut later this year, Cadillac officials have confirmed that we won't see them until the first quarter of 2021, with plans for the models to go on sale next summer.
