Road test: Cadillac CT6 Platinum

Cadillac: as American as Mom’s apple pie, and so on. Except its attempts to crack Europe have left it eating humble pie instead.

Taking on the might of Mercedes, BMW et al in their own back yard was always going to be a fool’s errand. So having now learned that painful lesson, Caddy is back with a new generation of cars. This time, it’s going for more of a niche – cool, quick, well kitted premium motors which appeal to people who yearn to stand out in a crowd.

Good plan. But it’s where you sit, not stand, that might be the problem. Yep, on the left. Here we have the CT6, the first of the brave new Caddys, which seeks to woo people who’d otherwise buy an XJ, A8, S-Class or 7 Series.

These are people who expect to be spoiled. So good news is that there’s only one model in the range – and it comes with every last bit of kit Cadillac could think of.

Unfortunately, nobody at Cadillac seems to have thought of a diesel engine.

So it’s a left-hooker, and it’s petrol only. Said petrol is a 3.0-litre V6 with 411bhp, though, so it’s no slouch.

At £69,990 it’s no bargain, either. So it’s going to have to be good to make any sort of sense.

But it’s not. Not enough, at least. Dynamically it acquits itself better than you might expect, but to find that out you first need to sit in it – and the moment you do that, if you’re looking for reasons to switch from an S-Class, the deal’s already been broken.

Sure, the kit’s all there. Everything’s lavishly big, and the materials look the part. But touching them gives the game away – their quality is a league below the Europeans’, and the multimedia systems are eclipsed by the best on the market. It would be too much to call it all fur coat and no knickers, because there’s plenty of space, the seats are very comfy and you get some tasty surprise-and-delight stuff like a rear-view mirror that turns into a wide-screen monitor on demand. But none of that comes close to matching the standards set by the S-Class et al.

Comfort is aided by a generally good quality of ride, but a rather desperate engine note spends much of its time telling you the V6 motor is wishing the gearbox would stop messing around and just shift up already.

Talking of desperation, 28.2mpg and 223g/km are pretty hideous figures in this day and age. But they’re real – as is a 0-62 time of 5.7 seconds, though it doesn’t actually feel that fast when you’re driving.