Model Cadillac BLS 2.0T 175hp
Price From £25,628
Top speed 137mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 9.7secs
Consumption 31.4 mpg (combined)
Emissions 216g/km (road tax band F)
At the wheel Nicholas Parsons
They'd rather walk Jack Nicholson
On the stereo Classic FM
En route for Downtown Basingstoke
When someone tells you a spanking new Cadillac is going to be left on your doorstep, you tend to get ideas. A Cadillac! The name alone trails its myths - of high-end limos the length of football fields, and of the kind of not entirely tasteful symphonies in chrome beloved of high-flying American businessmen and the older brand of rap star.
One is also inclined to ask: "Is my doorstep big enough?" And perhaps: "What will the neighbours think?" The expression "gas-guzzler" may not have been coined specifically to describe a Cadillac, but it has come to apply to them, in common with most other American cars, and may even be deemed to fall a little short. Historically, Cadillacs don't just guzzle gas. They gargle with it and spit it out in the dust by your shoes.
I'm sure General Motors, under whose globe-girdling umbrella Cadillac resides, knows what it is doing. Yet, with concern about emissions becoming more audible and resistance to big cars and their users growing from a mumble of discontent into something more concrete, one could politely suggest that there have been more hospitable moments in history for a company such as Cadillac to expand its European operation.
But received ideas and blind anticipation alike suffer a humbling fall at the sight of the Brit-ready, right-hand-drive saloon, known as the Cadillac BLS. Cadillac is pleased to emphasise that, of all the cars is has ever produced, this is "among the most compact". Now, anyone who has ever hired a car in America will be familiar with that country's entertainingly elastic definition of the term "compact", which roughly translates into European English as "two very large cars welded together at the bumpers". And one can only speculate on the heroic, red-faced straining and breathing-in that took place around the Cadillac drawing board in order that this car could come in at just under five metres in length.
Even so, that makes the finished BLS no more space consuming than any other executive-sized Audi, Mercedes, or even Peugeot. And perhaps this would be a good moment to mention that the BLS was designed in Europe and put together - it slightly dispirits one to report - in Sweden. Accordingly, the better part of any generic reckless American brio has been sacrificed to ideas about the European market. Finns, yes; fins, no. As for chrome, there is a strip of it along the bottom edge of the windows, but not in any other places where it might surprise you.
Still, the BLS is triumphantly unembarrassed about having edges, which sets it apart from today's apologetically rounded-off and conscientiously softened saloons. True, the bonnet of the BLS is tucked under in a manner that would not have been dreamed of by Cadillac in the days before European Safety Standards began thinking about the welfare of pedestrians. But you could rip paper on the crease along the boot, a thumping trunk, the rear aspect of which features surely the first properly sheer vertical descent seen on a new vehicle in the past 25 years, excluding buses and waste disposal carts.
Note, also, the vertically stacked headlights and the tall, emphatically flat sides, which can put you in mind of the kind of thickened-to-order, blastproof combat limos in which presidents or paranoid heirs to construction industry fortunes go about.
Otherwise, though, this is a Cadillac boiled down for British A-roads and Belgian bypasses. You may catch a hint of the car's lineage in the deluxe interior - not least the cream-leather upholstery - and in the soft bonging noise with which the BLS informs you that you have omitted to fasten your seatbelt. Plus the dashboard boasts a centrally mounted analogue clock - for some reason, a token of serious prestige in the saloon car world, and yet, if we're being honest about it, no more than a travel-alarm in disguise.
But the spongy suspension of US highway legend has given way to a firmer, Germanic ride, and the engine is racy and competitive, made for ducking and diving rather than cruising and gliding. My automatic was fitted with one of those manual overrides whereby you can stage a one-person coup at any point and wrest control of the gearbox away from the car - anathema, surely, in a Cadillac, of all vehicles. Isn't the right not to have to change gear manually written into the American Constitution, right after the stuff about guns?
No matter. Even by Americanising the soundtrack on the hi-fi and driving on the wrong side of the road where possible, one couldn't escape the feeling that one was at the wheel of another interchangeable Euro-motor. Would a fin have hurt? Even just a little one.
