2005 Cadillac STS 1SF 4.6L Northstar V8 - 320 HP
Summary:
Best and last American luxury car ever
Faults:
Around 85,000 miles, the catalytic converter got clogged. Fortunately, GM extended the warranty on the cats because this was a common problem (rather than issuing a recall), and it was replaced for free.
General Comments:
This was the best car I have ever owned. I traded it in for a CTS because I bought a house on a hill and needed all wheel drive for the winter, and in retrospect I would have been better off trying to find some other place I could park it when there's a lot of snow and ice on the roads. The day I traded it in, it still rode exactly like the day I got it, and the car was just as silent.
My car was a 1SF model. It had every option available except for adaptive cruise control and some other gimmicky option, I forget.
Most importantly, it had the V8 Northstar. I had the direct injected V6 in a CTS, and it was absolutely pathetic and got significantly worse gas mileage as well, especially in the winter. With the V8, there's plenty of low end power, and I got no worse than 17 MPG in the winter on weeks where I would remote start it every day.
The brake pedal in this car was very different than any other car I have ever driven. It was designed to be very finite, so if you step on it just a little, it would break just a little and it was designed to go all the way to the floor. It was pretty weird at first, but was really a great design that I would like to see all other cars follow. The 1SF model had the performance package and larger rotors, I believe they were 13.5", and they were very powerful. The rotors were never good for more than one set of pads, but never had any vibrations.
Despite having only a 5-speed transmission, the car accelerated extremely smoothly.
The ride on the car was fairly stiff, but took bumps acceptably.
The 15 speaker Bose system was better than most stock audio, but certain frequencies were greatly amplified. I would have liked to seen Cadillac use a better quality brand than Bose.
To clarify why I would never buy another Cadillac or GM car, the CTS I replaced it with was by far the worst car I have ever owned. They would not uphold their warranty when dealers in the area were unable to fix my leaky sunroof, and eventually I had a leaky sunroof that was STILL not fixed after 10 trips to the dealer and the warranty expired. Then every other week, a wheel bearing or strut would go and cost me another $300+, and I traded the car in with only 45k. I checked in on Cadillacforums a year later, right before I traded it in, and my issues were all basically "normal". Additionally, the V6 had abysmal low end power; over 20mph the car needed to downshift in order to accelerate, and downshift twice to have a chance of passing someone doing 35 in a 55 on a two-lane highway -- if they were going much faster than that, I would need an extra long stretch of highway. And if I let the car exceed 10mph going down my hill, the brakes were not strong enough to stop the car before it would roll out into the the road it ends on at the bottom of the hill. And it got no more than 14 MPG in the winter, and that is assuming I use cruise control doing 100% highway driving. The V8 in the STS did better than that and had much more power.
So I might buy another pre-bankruptcy GM car if it was in good shape and the price was right, but I would not even drive a post bankruptcy GM car if it was free! The price of repairs vastly exceeds the payment -- even if I had bought it new.
Would you buy another car from this manufacturer? No
Review Date: 2nd August, 2015
9th Aug 2015, 03:36
Re: The 5-speed transmission - it's not the number of speeds it has, so much as how well they suit the engine in question.
GM has a history of making "speed-deficient" transmissions perform.