Review of the new Cadillac STS

You'd love to be wrong about the Cadillac STS. I'm certain you'd be delighted to hear it was a credible rival to cars like the BMW 5 Series and the Audi A6. Instead, you're expecting a story about big power, interior quality that can only be described as lamentable and the sporting nature of Colin Montgomerie with one foot in an Indonesian bunker. If that's the case, the latest STS may well raise one or two eyebrows.

The old Seville STS was never really a contender. Ranged against it were some of the tautest, sleekest cars £35,000 could buy, and faced with this barrage of excellence, this front-wheel drive transatlantic oddball smacked of Elvis Presley in his latter days - overweight, clumsy and trading on former glories. Is the launch of the latest STS like The King's '68 Comeback Special? After years absent from live performance, Elvis decided to put on a show in Las Vegas, go back to his musical roots, perform some rock'n'roll standards with a stripped-down band, recapture the raw energy that characterized his '50s heyday.

Most expected it to be a shambles and an embarrassment. This Fifties throwback with his dyed hair and hazy grasp of reality was trying to elbow the likes of the Stones and the Beatles aside, but he gathered together a coterie of brilliant musicians, including ace guitarist James Burton, slung on a leather jacket and a six-string, and got up onstage and blew everyone away.

"The Cadillac STS is undoubtedly the most talented Cadillac to make landfall but comes with a few significant caveats"

The STS doesn't quite manage this feat but it at least gets the look and sound check right. Its chassis has been tuned for European roads and hundreds of laps of Germany's Nurburgring race track have seen a far more focused ride and handling compromise than the bulky carriers Cadillac had previously been content to float our way. We tried both the 255bhp V6 version and the 320bhp V8 and came away with mixed feelings. While both engines, if anything, feel even stronger than their quoted power outputs, there's a nagging suspicion that the 'Europeanisation' of the STS isn't as comprehensive as would have been desirable or indeed necessary. American road tests are chiefly concerned with two key measures - how a car performs in lateral-g tests and how quickly it can demolish the quarter mile sprint. This has resulted in generations of cars with huge power outputs, enormous grip from jetliner-sized tyres and precious little in the way of feel and subtlety.

Fire up the V8 of the STS and you get the classic torque shimmy of all properly powerful American cars, the engine straining at the leash. It sounds seriously potent too, idling a little reluctantly as if it's straining to get going. The big test comes in the first few metres and the STS doesn't pass. It's often said that we Europeans fetishise steering feel, but as the key interface between man and machine, the feedback that comes through the wheel is vital in establishing trust with the car when the going gets tricky and establishing exactly what those four palm print sized patches of rubber are doing to the blacktop. The STS feels at the same time pointy but remote. Up the pace and it still feels rather numb and uninvolving.

The gearbox, so smooth and mannered at ambling speeds, also becomes surprisingly rough, dropping a couple of cogs at will and sending the needle on the rev counter up into a harsh, noisy sector that offers anything but the melodic timbre you'd expect at the top of a BMW 550i or a Jaguar XJ V8's vocal Range. What's more should you choose to knock the lever across the 'box and change gears yourself, the up and down shifts are the wrong way round. How many times do we have to tell manufacturers, you push the lever forward to downshift, (as in when you are decelerating for a corner and the entire car's weight is shifting forward) and you pull the lever back to upshift as you accelerate? Virtually every racing car adheres to this system, so I'm guessing it works, but Cadillac thinks it beyond us mere mortals. Perhaps there's an opportunist lawsuit lurking in the background from some bovine Texan to explain it.

The story continues with the interior which is big on gadgets and low on build integrity. The dashboard of the V8 we drove chirruped and twittered like the queue at a Girls Aloud concert. It would have been unacceptable in an £8,000 Korean econobox, but in a car that goes head to head with the Lexus GS, it wasn't even funny. What's more, it was frustrating as the Cadillac STS is so nearly a very good car. The basic architecture of the cabin is well executed, with very good ergonomics and none of the chintziness of American cars of yore. One suspects that a few months of production will tighten the quality control, but better quality plastics - especially around the lower dash - and more consistency to the effort required to manipulate the controls would go a long way to exorcising the suspicion that Americans can't do quality car interiors.

There's a lot about the STS to admire. Ignore the uncommunicative steering and the car rides and handles very well. One thing it has in common with the Jaguar XJ is the way in which it disguises its bulk so well. Drive it hard and it feels like a car the size of a Mondeo despite the fact that the V8 tips the scales at 1810kg which is a full 110kg more than a heavyweight like a Lexus GS430. The V8 certainly moves, zipping to 60mph in 5.8 seconds and the brakes are nothing short of brilliant, offering plenty of feel, excellent resistance to fade and producing stopping distances more suited to a lightweight roadster than a big saloon weighing over two tonnes with a couple of occupants and a tank of juice on board.

I like American cars. I can forgive them their foibles and revel in their honest, big-hearted values. The problem is the Cadillac STS doesn't come across as wholly American. It's wearing the sharp tailoring of a European suit and as such, comes under a more intense scrutiny. Judged against the best of its peers, it's still some way lacking and doesn't have ironic cheesiness to fall back on either. Cadillac's best ever saloon car somehow contrives to be the one you're least likely to buy. Go figure.

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