Let's say you bought a Cadillac CTS-V Sport Wagon, with a 6.2-liter, 556-horsepower Corvette V8, six-speed manual transmission.... thundering through the quarter-mile in 11.9 seconds at 116 mph, according to my colleagues at Car and Driver, who do impeccable instrumented testing.
....this wagon is about as esoteric an automobile as you're likely to find. Statistically speaking, General Motors will sell exactly none of these cars, the Detroit equivalent of Zoroastrianism.
But if you did buy one, what would you do with it? You'd have a lot of options.
Such a car would be useful if you wanted to duck car-pooling duty or avoid field trips with the Cub Scouts, because no child emerging weepy and jelly-kneed from the back seats of this supercharged washing machine will ever want to get back in.
Perhaps you could put on demonstrations for the local high-school physics club, using the g-meter built into the car's instrument cluster to show exactly what more than 1 g of lateral acceleration feels like. It feels like a fat lady is trying to push you out the side window. Or if not physics, the Greek club, since like Antaeus the V-Wagon maintains an Olympian grip on the earth and draws strength from it. Maybe you could help out at the police training range, letting cadets chase you to improve their hot-pursuit driving skills. Then, having been completely demoralized, these plebes will quit to become firemen. The world needs firemen.
The only people who will want this car are people like me, dizzy enthusiasts and car lovers, but more than that: car reviewers. Car reviewers cycle in and out of dozens of new cars every year. We buy not, neither do we lease. And because of that, we can afford to fall in love with a snot-flinging rodeo bull like the V-Wagon (or cars like the now-defunct Dodge Magnum, the Audi RS6 Avant, Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG Estate or the Europe-only BMW M5 Touring). If we were spending our own money, we might reasonably ask why a station wagon needs to be faster than a mid-1990s Lamborghini.
By DAN NEIL at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703555804576102202985268590.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
