Faults:

Absolutely nothing. It has run on fuel, oil & filters for 40,000kms since I've owned it!!!

General Comments:

Advantages:

Excellent long and longer distance vehicle. Thought it would let me down on a 8000km road trip across Europe, when the check - engine light came up and on the last 500km to home it started to "rattle" in the engine-room and the screening said Error??? (don't remember). Mechanic said on the phone this could result in a 7000.- Swiss Francs (16 hours of work to change the timing-chain, at 120.- CHF per hour) repair. Thank god, I only had to add a liter of oil. Check engine light disappeared (deleted it). The rattling too. PFFFFFFF!!

What I really like is:

Up to speeds of 200km/h one feels like you're a living room and totally safe like Mamma's womb, listening to the superb Bose sound system. The only things to be heard are the wind and a tiny bit of engine noise. Above these speeds the 3.6L engine has to work to hard and becomes vociferous at or above about 5000RPM.

The gas / mileage rate is great on highways. 10 liters at 140km/h (85mph) for 100km (65 miles) distance at constant speed.

When I was looking to buy it, I was also looking at a Merc E-350 and BMW 535, which are at least up to me the direct competition of the STS by then (2006). In Switzerland they all had double the price tag with same engine size back then with around about 60k km on the clock. Which leads me to...

Disadvantages:

Very low resale value up to impossible resale, as Cadillacs are not very common cars in Europe. Furthermore, lots of people have got burned into their brain that American cars are gas guzzlers, which they where indeed in the 60s and 70s, but which is totally untrue for US-cars built (way before) after the year 2000. But: "was der Bauer nicht kennt das frisst er nicht!"

For the navigation system there is after 2006 or 2009 no update available, which results in the fact that the system doesn't know entire neighbourhoods/streets and highways built after 2006/2009. Furthermore it is sometimes very much to be interpreted where "she" in fact pretends to lead one.

Flipside of the coin, we always got to our destinations. Sooner or later :))

Use on snow is due to the rear wheel drive... (hate it) terrible to impossible. Which is why on the 4.6 V8 STS you can get it as an 4x4 wheel drive, which I would highly recommend to everyone if living in "snowy" regions.

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.