Enter Evoq, which is meant to give more than a casual indication of what Cadillac will be like in the next Millenium. Seat time in Evoq was worthwhile, but most of the important future stuff could be gained from other aspects of the ride-and-drive.
The fact that the ride-and-drive took place at all was considerably telling. There are people who say that when Evoq was unveiled at Detroit in January it wasn't going to be a real car, just a style exercise, but popular reaction forced Cadillac to put one together for guys like me to drive and write about.
It takes an enormous amount of effort and money to take a vehicle from Please Don't Touch status on the auto show circuit to Put The Hammer Down status on a test track.
This was evident in the comments of the exhausted and anxious engineers who were shepherding the roadster they'd hand-built in a couple of months. "There are 10 rules to this drive," said my old friend Pete Lewis as we got ready to take the Evoq out. "Rule One is don't hit anything. Rules Two to 10 are refer to Rule One."
You have to think Cadillac is serious about changing its direction when it goes to that much effort and expense to show off a car that has to be at least two years from production, but that reality was clear in the way John Smith talked about Evoq and Cadillac over the last year.
Smith is the general manager of Cadillac, but more importantly he seems to have Golden Boy status within the most senior reaches of GM's hierarchy. Smith is the only person running a GM division to be a vice-president of the corporation, and he turned down a bunch of top jobs while he waited for one he really liked.