Saleofcar.com :Cadillac

Cadillac CTS (2004)
for sale

Price: US $200.00

Description:

LONG STORY
Someone is going to get a terrific car and I KNOW I’m going to regret parting with it, much as I still do my ’37 Ford flatback, two MGAs, a mint ’65 Pontiac GrandPrix, etc. etc.…all cars from my past I wish I still had. This is certain to be another. I looked constantly for over a year to find a clean example of the first series ‘V’. I drove several but many owners had clearly beat on their cars or ‘modded’ them as though they were some kid. I finally found this one at a Cadillac dealer in January 2012 with just 47k miles on it. It had been a one-owner, non-smoker car purchased originally from the same dealer but having then spent some time in Florida (snowbirds, I guess). I took it as a good omen that the original dealer hadn’t just wholesaled it given its age. I’ve had it for the 2+ years since.
I am a baby boomer manufacturing executive who instantly fell in love with its whole 21st century luxury muscle-car vibe after years of driving German sedans. Accelerate at anything above a snail’s pace and you’re rewarded with a most delicious small-block motor music that instantly transported me back to my mis-spent youth. It’s absolutely addictive. Now then my father, the crusty old Tool and Die Maker, taught me early on to respect machinery and so, while I definitely enjoy the occasional thrill ride through the gears at 6k RPM, (it comes out of third at nearly 100 mph so you run out of legal road nearly in seconds!), I also knew that the engineer’s true intent for the ‘V’ was for it to be a world-class road car, not a dragster. And so I have never done a burn-out, I never speed-shift, and am constantly dancing around PA’s infinite supply of potholes so as to not pound on the car’s suspension and rims. I basically baby the car for 99.99% of my driving. I guess the motor-music, and the car’s excellent handling/ride dynamics have really been enough for me. That, and the intent I had to preserve it in all its glory well, forever. Consequently, this car is a bonafide bone-stock total cream-puff. And yes, that means it still has the dreaded ‘skip-shift’ feature! (NOTE: just shift out of first at 2, 800+ RPM and it will shift into second like you want it too. But if you expect to get stuck in stop-n-go traffic jams a lot, get the $12 cable off eBay that defeats it. I never did because the intention was to keep the car completely stock, well, with the exception of the run-flat tires anyway!).
The exterior is as faultless as you could expect for a nearly 12 year-old car that’s actually been driven; certainly well below the usual expectations for road rash or scratches. The interior too is in excellent shape; I’m guessing the original owners, like me, did not cart around kids or pets. The front seats look three years old and the back seats can’t be told from new. In my possession the car has always been garaged (I think too the original owner) and during my winters has been parked there 75% of the time. People NEVER believe they are in an eleven year old car, and usually think it’s two or three years old. And that’s the way I like ‘em!
But understand too that while it’s an outstanding example of the first year ‘V’ it’s also not ‘concourse ready’ and heading to Pebble Beach. It came with curb-rash already installed on a couple of the rims (can’t anyone parallel park anymore?) and there is a tiny stone chip on the lower right passenger side of the windshield. The headlight nacelles also show that common perimeter fading that seems to have also been pre-installed at the factory. Almost nothing else is worth mentioning so I haven’t even bothered to photograph any of its miniscule little imperfections like one would if they were selling a show car. It’s a daily driver, albeit one that is loved and cherished by a total car-nut who never intended to part with it.
It now has 67, 800 miles on it and in my 20k miles of ownership it has been absolutely trouble free. Sure, it needed a battery, a set of tires (which are NOT run-flats BTW), and just now the rear rotors. But it has never let me down, not even hinted at it. It is as reliable as any Japanese car I’ve ever owned, only unlike those it has tons of driver’s-car mojo. The ‘V’ is not just transportation; it’s a whole visceral driving experience, even when you’re just running errands. I admit that I half expected the Cadillac service center to hit me with a ton of “..you should also..” fixes when they inspected it, you know; motor mounts, bushings, bearing seals, etc. Nope, instead the car came up absolutely clean which is not only a testament to the easy life this car has had, but also to the dealership’s honesty (Ruggeri Cadillac in West Chester, PA).
The car’s radio and door control buttons have the usual paint peel common to ALL V’s, showing that even now, in 2015, GM still hasn’t figured out how to paint plastics (it’s not a good idea anyway; you should always mold the color in). But at least their cars don’t rust away like before; way back when I used to be able to ‘hear’ my ‘80 Suburban rusting away in the driveway at night. The paint on this car however, all original I believe, is beautiful. They finally figured that out.
People always wonder then: why would someone be selling a car like this; it being super-rare uber-performance car, with super low miles, in super condition, and even having a high collectability factor. For me it’s the fact that I have only a two-car garage (my wife’s Audi S4 6-spd cabriolet has one side, and I don’t want to pay for offsite car storage) and also that whole winter thing. The ‘V’ has too much power for slick roads, even with the traction control engaged, and I was never ‘at ease’ driving it on winter roads. So during those months it mostly sits in the garage, driven only occasionally, while I am relegated to my old beater ’99 Pathfinder. I’m simply tired of not having a true driver’s car I can enjoy year-round. I love cars, and driving, WAY too much to suffer through 3 or 4 months of that kind of torture year after year. So I’m jumping back into the German fire (with both feet) and am getting a BMW 335xi 6-spd. It could easily be a very poor decision I will live to regret, especially if the value of these first-series V’s starts to climb, which I think they eventually will. Hagerty, the collector car insurance people, named the 2004 ‘V’ one of the top-ten future collectibles of the first ’00 decade.
Given that, I had also started collecting literature for the car with the intention of course that I was never going to part with it. So I have an excellent original full-color Cadillac sales brochure as well as the secret ‘training playbook’ provided to the salesmen when the car was first introduced. There are a few other magazine articles, road tests etc. in the folder too that the new owner will get, along with all my receipts, and the car’s CarFax report at the time I bought it.
One Last thing. I recommend you come see it first (if you can) and we’ll take it out for a test drive. But I absolutely will not tolerate this car being abused, not even once during a ‘test drive’. You’ll easily be able to find complaints on the internet about the ’04 and ’05 V’s having ‘weak’ rear ends prone to failure. Truth be told the vast majority still have their original diffs because it all depends on how the car was used (or rather, abused). All of those failures resulted from hard launches (i.e., drag racing or burn-outs) which induced severe wheel hop that the independent suspension was never deigned to handle. This is not an old solid rear axle 1970’s muscle car; it is a world-class road car. Drive it the way the engineer’s intended and the rear end will last the lifetime of the car. Mine is in perfect shape and I intend it to stay that way while it’s in my ownership. So if I suspect you’re some sort of a tire kicking miscreant bent on ‘seeing what this thing can do’, then I will drive the car while you sit in the passenger seat. My dream is to transfer ownership of this car to another mature adult owner who will continue caring for it and try to preserve it the way I have. To me the V is more than a modern day hot-rod luxury muscle car; it’s the first serious performance car that helped to re-launch Cadillac’s image and that the motoring cognoscenti took seriously. It’s truly a piece of future motoring history, and that makes it a true ‘milestone’ car worth cherishing.
And to be absolutely truthful, I have a few days to change my mind about this whole thing. And as the days pass, I feel like I just might, unless of course the reserve has already been met. So if you want an excellent, adult-owned and never abused bone-stock first-year V, click the buy-it-now button before I change my mind. I’ll even leave the little Bluetooth gadget in the car that provides the not-even-offered-then-on-the-V option that the morons at GM marketing decided ‘V’ owners didn’t need. It lets you place and receive calls through the car’s radio and also stream music from your iPhone, which is why I never bothered to get the in-dash multi-CD player fixed (which anyway makes a great place for the iPhone holder to be installed)! I mean, who uses those anymore anyway?
Uh oh, I’m seriously starting to rethink this whole thing again……………………..

_{update: 2015-05-26}