Manoli Katakis 
When the presentation of the 2020 Cadillac CT4-V and 2020 Cadillac CT5-V concluded, GM President Mark Reuss was immediately swarmed with questions. Particularly, any kind of clarification as to why the V-Series badge is now bestowed on what could be considered a trim level, and not the high-octane performance powerhouses we were expecting.
The short answer, was that there will be “two versions” of V-Series. However, coming from a company that recently approved of preposterous naming schemes such as Bolt/Volt, now Blazer/Trailblazer, and Cadillac badging its vehicles based on Newton meters (which consumers don’t understand here), this answer didn’t help.
“We got rid of all the V-sports, and in the case of the CT6 we have one V-Series, that’s the Blackwing,” Reuss pointed out. For all intents and purposes, it now appears that V-Series as we’ve known it is the new V-Sport, as we’ve briefly known it.
Reading between the lines, Mr. Reuss kept referencing to the “Blackwing” engine of the 2020 Cadillac CT6-V in the media scrum. We believe this to be more than a clue, and expect Blackwing to be the range-topping performance badge that V-Series was up to this point.
Multiple sources within GM confirmed to Muscle Cars & Trucks that this is the case.
To refresh, V-Sport was a sort of mid-range level between the standard models and the full-on Cadillac V-Series products. The best example was the third-generation CTS V-Sport, which featured a 420 hp, 430 lb-ft twin-turbo LF3 V6 engine. It slotted above the 335 hp CTS 3.6 and the 640 hp CTS-V. Despite its logical placement in the lineup, the CTS V-Sport sold abysmally.
When asked if Cadillac Blackwing would be the designation of the high-end performance models going forward, Reuss smiled, and as if rhetorically, asked “what do you guys think of that?”
With just about everybody nodding their heads that it should, Reuss simply said “that’s good input.” And certainly having a Cadillac Blackwing badge on a model would help distinguish these alleged “two-versions” of V-Series. Reuss confirmed the higher-end version, which was not announced yet, will be more in line with expectations.
Should Cadillac go in this direction, it would mean that Blackwing would be more than just an engine in the 2020 Cadillac CT6-V. It would mean that it would outright replace V-Series in the Cadillac family of vehicles, to which Reuss described as “the hammer.”
