Cadillac, it turns out, does a great Tesla impression—for about 30 miles at least.

That’s roughly when the battery runs dry on its new CT6 hybrid sedan. For the next 400 miles, the stately vehicle uses gasoline to mimic a BMW, which isn’t a bad thing at all.

As the auto industry’s luxury giants slowly turn their big guns toward Elon Musk and his factories in Nevada and California, they are launching a wave of machines to weaken his defenses. Cadillac’s new hybrid joins a growing field of plug-in leviathans, including BMW’s 740e, the S550e from Mercedes, and the Porsche Panamera 4 E-Hybrid.

Make no mistake: With all-electric ranges below 40 miles, these are in a different class than Tesla. They are more like the Toyota Prius, albeit with far more opulent fixings and much better performance.

I was 20 miles north of Cadillac’s Manhattan nerve center before I started burning prehistoric plankton. “Just tip into it a little here when you get a chance,” Mike Kutcher, lead development engineer on the car, coached from the passenger seat.

The car will hit 78 miles per hour on electrons only, but with a goose of the pedal, the combustion engine murmured to life. It was barely perceptible; With the stereo on, the only indication of which system was powering the car would have been a sliding scale on the cluster gauge.


The killer app, according to Kutcher, is an all-new variable transmission that seamlessly blends the electric input from the battery in the trunk with the old-fashioned explosions from the cylinders up front. General Motors Co. built the gear unit from scratch and the CT6 is the only vehicle using it at the moment.

The automobile offers 335 horsepower, and it gets from 0 to 60 in an urgent 5.2 seconds whether its burning gas or not—a testament to that magic trick of a transmission.

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