MORTEFORTAINE, FRANCE: The farther away a car is from actual production when your drive it, the farther away it is from the way it's going to be when it shows up in dealerships.
That reality has to be firmly in mind when you take a vehicle out for a spin, but nothing in my experience matches my time on a privately owned test track in this tree-rich town north of Paris in a Cadillac Evoq.
Officially, this hyper-expensive 2-seat roadster doesn't have absolute final approval from General Motors to go into production, and even if it did it's probably not going to look exactly like the prototype or use the same chassis or have the same engine or body specifications or be in any way exactly like it was the recent afternoon I drove it.
Despite all that, the session set up here for North American and European auto writers may be the most important Cadillac test drive in history, since the Evoq concept car that debuted this past January at the Detroit auto show is the first signpost from GM as to where its premier division is headed.
Generally speaking, that direction would be ``around the world." After almost 100 years of success in North America, Cadillac will become GM's leading division and carry the corporate banner to every market in the world where luxury cars are sold. That is the vision, at any rate.
To see the vision come to fruition, Cadillac must move itself from its current position as leading seller of traditional North American luxury cars to purveyor of international products. Such a shift in perception will require a new style, a new range of products, a new way of designing and producing cars, pretty much a new everything.