Five cool cars GM won’t share

Billions of Australian taxpayer-subsided and customer dollars emigrated into General Motors’ Detroit bank accounts over the past half a century.

Sadly, the giant car-maker can’t see fit to send back a few fun toys in return, even at a time when Australians are happy to pay for them as the demise of Australia's last homegrown, V8-powered Commodore draws near. And even when Ford's first global Mustang is a sell-out.

It’s not like GM doesn't have any decent V8s to share with us. It just doesn’t want to. As part of the recent World Car of the Year judging process, we tested four of them from Chevrolet and Cadillac, plus the fuel-sipping new Volt plug-in hybrid, in the hills above Los Angeles.

Chevrolet Camaro SS
The much-lauded sixth-generation Chevrolet Camaro SS coupe received Motor Trend magazine’s Car of the Year trophy just days earlier, though we’re struggling to figure out how (other than Motor Trend bigwig and former Wheels editor Angus MacKenzie going native).

Yes there’s power, and there ought to be. There’s a thumping great V8 up front, and it’s cruelly, rudimentary fast in a straight line. It also gives you a choice of either loud or awesomely loud; depending on what button you push.

It's fast, too, with Chevrolet claiming the Gen V lookalike will cut its way to 96km/h in four seconds flat. (Note: 96km/h (60mph), not 100km/h, which should tell you how much Chevrolet cares about metric markets.)

The SS rocks a 6.2-litre, all-alloy pushrod V8, or rather the 6.2-litre V8 rocks the SS, delivering 339kW and 616Nm of torque. It never really feels like it doesn’t want to punch, but it’s absolutely at its best upwards of 4000rpm. And it dominates the Camaro.

It doesn’t sing and it’s not sweet. It’s a brutal sound, full of compression and induction and fizzing mechanical bits. And explosion. It’s enchanting and, to the uninitiated, intimidating. And it’s fast, capable of both the traditional US muscle car forte of traffic-light battles and punching out of corners both slow and fast.

It’ll stretch the longitudinal limits of the rubber and the multi-link rear suspension even exiting third-gear corners, bellowing and laying black lines. Even in fifth gear, you will find the skid-control light strobing away in the middle of the instrument cluster when you fire the Chevrolet out of bends at its hardest.

It crackles and pops and burbles on the over-run and its timbre changes with surprising delicacy as its revs climb, until it reaches a crescendo just as the rev-limiter brings in the Fun Police. That said, short-shift it at 5000rpm and you won’t feel like you’ve cruelled yourself, because you drop back into the bit of the rev range that starts the theatrics all over again.

For all that, it is far from perfect, proving far less capable of any delicacy of throttle response than even Dodge’s overwrought, wonderfully irrational Hellcat series, much less the great V8s out of Europe or the new Ford Mustang’s more intuitive power delivery.

It didn’t help the seamlessness of the power delivery that our test car was fitted with the six-speed Tremec TR6060 manual transmission, which was full of nicely chosen ratios that felt like they were made on an anvil by a blacksmith.

Couple them with a clutch pedal that takes up almost at the highest point of its travel and you’ve got a driveline that’s born to shunt and jerk. Which it usually does, unless you get your gearshift timing stupendously wrong, and the car shifts with impressive slickness. (There’s a Hydra-Matic 8L90 auto option that must be nicer.)

As a car, though, the Mk6 Camaro’s comfortable most of the time and its handling is predictable, even if it rarely borders on outright fun.

Once its wooden steering gets the nose pointed into a corner, the Camaro is stable and capable and grippy, but it doesn’t feel nimble or alive in any way and it’s almost a relief to square up the wheel on the exit, just so you can punch the throttle to remember that it’s all supposed to be fun. There’s just too much weight over the nose, even with the multi-link rear-end and the magnetic dampers working their hardest.

But there other flaws. Ergonomically, the fresh Camaro cabin is all over the place. To read the low-mounted MMI and navigation screen from directly in front of it, you’d need to be somehow lying with your head in the rear-seat foot well.

The only upside to this is that there’ll never be glare off the thing because the sun never sets low enough to bounce light back up to your eyes.

Then there are the air-conditioning vents that combine clever (aping the Audi TT by controlling temperature with the external ring) and awful in one helpfully condensed package. The ones flanking the quite-nice dashboard are fine, if a little oversized. It’s the ones in the middle that are a problem.

If you’re one of those people whose gearshift hand gets sweaty during or after heavy manual labour, then the Camaro has an air-conditioner for you. The oversize vents blow air directly on to the gear lever and because there are two of them you’ll get your hand blasted with air no matter which slot the shifter is in. Seriously, someone should show this set-up to bathroom hygiene specialists around the world. John Dyson, eat your heart out.

Sadly, while all this is going on, the upper half of the cabin remains either too cold or too hot (whichever state it was in when you got into it in the first place) for more than half an hour because the two dash-flanking vents aren’t enough to significantly alter the higher air space.

The upside is that the materials used to create this ergonomic wonderment are actually a long way upstream of the last Camaro, which paid faithful homage to Bakelite. The touch and feel of the switchgear is a big step up from what we have come to expect from Chevrolet, and a move in the right direction.

The seats are terrifically accommodating, with a wide range of adjustments and support levels and it’s easy to quickly find a great driving position.

The vision from the driver’s seat is an issue, with great, fat A-pillars and not much by way of rear vision, leaving you with the feeling that you’re driving a rolling pillbox.

There isn’t much by way of rear seat room either, and it’s about on par with the Porsche 911 for knee capacity, though it eats the German car for luggage space.

Chevrolet Camaro 2LT
So it comes as something of a revelation to step into the Camaro 2LT. With a 250kW/385Nm version of GM's new-generation 3.6-litre V6 up front, it’s far and away the best car in the family.

Where you’d once deride a V6 Camaro owner as a bit short on funds, this time around you’d praise him/her as the Camaro connoisseur because the lack of weight over the front-end turns it into the family sweet spot.

It’s quick enough for most days, and it’s strong enough above 3500rpm, though a little soggy beneath that. Our test car had a paddle-shift six-speed Hydra-Matic 8L45 automatic transmission (“Hydra-Matic” sounded much nicer before Marvel started bad-mouthing it) and it’s a far nicer way to get around.

Where it shines is wherever corners are. There is a delicacy about the steering the SS doesn’t have, there’s a willingness, nay, a giggling, adolescent enthusiasm about being adjusted minutely mid-corner, either by the steering or the throttle, or both.

It’s far easier to live with at the edges of its handling envelope and even if it slides just as willingly, it does it on predictable, intuitive excess speed rather than excess power.

You can throw the LT into a corner from just about any speed and the front will scrub a touch, bring the back-end into play and drift through. The angle of the drift is always up to the driver.

Even when it’s fully loaded up, it is capable of taking off-camber demonics or heavy-bump hits without upsetting its overall attitude. It’s just wonderfully balanced with magnificent body control. This, not the SS, shows what the GM Alpha platform is really capable of in Camaro guise.

The lighter gearbox is also far nicer to live with and far more accurate, and then there are the advantages in fuel economy. It’s almost as though someone at GM forgot the car would ever need to carry a V8 and designed it around the V6 instead. Then the need for a V8 snuck up on them.

Sadly, anybody in an SS (or anybody who has recently heard an SS) isn’t ever going to see an LT driver as anything more than a wimp, even if they’ve actually made the smarter choice.

Cadillac ATS-V
The Alpha architecture brings us neatly to the Cadillac ATS-V. Nominally, it sits on the same architecture as the Camaro, though Chevrolet insists its version is 70 per cent unique. That’s partly to pull the costs down, because there is a lot of aluminium in the ATS-V’s underpants, but that’s not the end of the exotic.

Saying it uses the same V6 as the Camaro is like saying the younger (more hirsute) version of Prince William is the same as the sumptuously-eared weirdo, Prince Charles.

The Cadillac’s version uses titanium conrods, low-inertia twin turbochargers (with 18psi of maximum boost pressure) to generate stupendous gristle, with 603Nm of torque and 356kW of power exploding out the back of the V6, into the transmission and on to an electronically controlled limited-slip diff out the back.

There is a multi-link rear-end full of aluminium bits, there are 18-inch alloy wheels as standard, there are six-piston Brembo anchors up front and heaps of other tech bits that scream Munich rather than Detwah.

And it’s awful. Well, it’s not quite awful, but drive it gently out of a parking lot and all that specification seriousness overrides the active magnetic ride suspension to feel hard and crude.

There’s not damping finesse over LA city streets, no subtlety to its movements laterally, longitudinally or even vertically. And you wonder what it’s all about.

And then you find the hills. And then it makes sense.

There was a time when M and AMG did cars like this. They don’t anymore. They think there’s more money to be made in two-tonne luxury sleds than outright race cars masquerading as road cars, but they didn’t give Cadillac the memo.

So what Cadillac has built is a mid-sized C63/M4-type coupe that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to anybody dawdling around in the first seven-tenths of its performance envelope.

And then, as you keep pushing, it’s like the ATS-V peels back the layers of awkwardness and rewards you. Then it rewards you more and more for giving it the chance to pummel and power and shine.

At 3.8 seconds to 96km/h (pesky American measurements, sorry), it’s one of the fleetest V6 cars going around anywhere. And that measurement doesn’t feel outrageously optimistic to us.

It doesn’t even sound like a V6 and it sure doesn’t sound like a turbo motor. It sounds deep and gruff and crushingly overwhelming. There isn’t much by way of unwanted tremor or harshness, and it just wants to go. Delicately fiddling the skinny pedal isn’t going to make it your friend. It wants you to smash it, all the time.

It’s the same with the handling. Cruise around and it’s almost all awkward. Push it hard and, other than the intrusively thick steering wheel spokes, it all makes sense.

Even its six-speed manual ‘box makes more sense than the Camaro’s unit, combining a no-lift shift with launch control to make it a jet.

Its body control is rock-rigid and the nose just points and points, daring the rear-end to try to track with it or let go. When it lets go (with every safety net removed), it does it progressively most of the time, snappily sometimes and cheerfully at low speed.

It’s so tautly suspended that it’s not going to ride out the bigger mid-corner bumps by keeping the bodyshell flat, but it’s too tenacious a gripper to concede the fight, either. It will wobble and bite again and go again.

It’s aggressive to look at, with a wickedly sculpted carbon-fibre bonnet, carbon-fibre lip spoiler on the boot and even a carbon-fibre splitter. It’s icky to look at from the driver’s seat, though. There’s that clunky steering wheel with its get-outta-the-way fat spokes and a piano-black surround for the centre console that Cadillac has contrived to make look like cheap plastic.

But it’s not cheap, at $US74,140 in the US. Even that is a big step up over the $US62,665 stock price, but ours had the $US6195 track performance package, another $US2300 for its sports seats and, astonishingly, another $US1085 for the Cadillac User Experience (which is a fancy piece of packaging designed to make $US1100 satellite-navigation look less like $US1100 satellite navigation).

But the real story of the ATS-V is that the last thing remotely like this to come out of Germany was the old M3 GTS. And it was a caged-up track car.

Cadillac CTS-V
And the ATS-V has a big brother that follows along exactly the same lines of thinking. The CTS-V is a $US83,995 bundle of get-there-faster, claimed by Cadillac to be track-ready.

It’s not track-ready. It’s track-dependent. It’s only a coincidence that it’s legal to drive on the road. It’s not to be recommended for most of the people, most of the time, because that it can be done doesn’t mean it should be.

If you do, you’ll curse a bit most days, when you run the 19-inch alloys over square-edged hits, rollers or just about any road surface that doesn’t look like something Hermann Tilke just overcharged a patsy government for.

Up front, the four-door sedan totes the core of the Camaro SS’s 6.2-litre V8, but adds a 1.7-litre Eaton supercharger.

That amps the V8 up to stupid (though not quite Hellcat stupid), with 477kW of power at 6400rpm and a manic 854Nm of torque from 3600rpm.

That torque is always there, threatening the rear tyres with destruction, the horizon with violence and all but two of the eight-speed automatic’s gears with redundancy.

For all that, though, the CTS-V is only a tenth quicker to 96km/h than the ATS-V, hitting the (not globally recognised) mark in 3.7 seconds and steaming on to a claimed 321km/h top speed (up on the V6 Coupe’s 304km/h).

Oddly, it’s not a claim we’ve tested, nor is it a top-speed claim we’d question. Broadly speaking, the five-seat Caddy has got everything it needs technically to get there.

Like its little brother, the harder you push the CTS-V, the better it responds, biting harder and harder, cornering flatter and flatter, pushing out of corners with more response and turning the most boring road into a series of challenging corners by the simple expedient of making the straights disappear.

It’s not just fast, it’s stupendously fast. It’s Italian-supercar fast, but in a gruff American way, full of bellowing V8 and whining supercharger.

It holds another advantage over the coupe by having a far more delicate and precise throttle response, which you can use to fiddle it and change its stance mid-corner.

But the fastest CTS is hamstrung by its ordinary cabin treatment, with an interior stitched together in a way that wouldn’t leave Audi in a first-generation prototype, much less a production car. It’s also got the same fat steering wheel spokes that get in the way and the same centre console that is at once clearly expensive to make but feels cheap to touch.

Nominally, Cadillac says it’s a rival for the BMW M5 or the E 63 AMG or the Audi RS 7. In reality, nobody is going to cross-shop these cars because three of them overlap in philosophy and one of them is standing over by itself, determined not to join them. More power to it.

But there was a fifth GM car in our test pack and it’s less about petrol power than the other four. It’s more about electric power.

Chevrolet Volt
OK, so it's not a V8 and may sit at the opposite end of GM's model range to this quartet of hairy-chested Cadillacs and Camaros, but like them Chevy's second-generation Volt won't be built in right-hand drive and therefore won't be sold here.

With the combination of a 399Nm electric motor and a 1.5-litre range-extender four-cylinder petrol engine, the MkII Volt is a more convincing car than the first, dropped into a less convincing time for hybrids.

Oil is cheap in the US, which means both fuel is cheap and the long-chain hydrocarbons at the core of plastics manufacturing are also cheap, which might be why Chevrolet chose to endow the Volt’s interior with so much of it, in such variety.

The dashboard is layered in all manner of plastic concoctions, none of it luxurious, and all protruding a long way from the base of the windscreen and into the cabin. Oddly, it’s all protruding a long way into the driver’s side of the cabin, making the car feel a bit too asymmetrical.

But the core of the Volt is better than it was. The battery pack uses fewer cells than it did before, though it holds more go-juice.

It’s still very quiet when it moves off and never gets loud until the wind noise begins to dominate things above 90km/h.

It’s a nice thing to drive around town, with a comfortable ride, easy handling, easy operation and you never once have to think about what’s going on with all those power electronics or big brain governing it all. You just step on the pedal and go, step on the other one and stop.

It does both things well, it’s composed and it’s convincing, except for its interior plastics and some cheap trim pieces (particularly around the luggage area) that don’t stack up to the new Toyota Prius -- surely it’s key rival.

GM claims 106 miles per gallon (2.2L/100km), though that rises to 5.6L/100km when the four-cylinder petrol motor has to kick in to keep things moving when the battery is flat. Which still isn’t bad, considering it’s carrying around a couple of hundred kilos of dead battery and a spare motor that’s not chipping in, either.

At 1607kg, it’s lighter than the last Volt and more practical, with five doors and reasonable rear-seat comfort. It also feels like a serious machine, seriously put together. Shame about the interior, but the car is fundamentally high-quality.