Cadillac ATS, CTS Rank 7th, 9th In AutoPacific’s Most Ideal Aspirational Luxury Car Study

Cadillac just took another step to becoming a top-tier luxury brand that American premium car buyers want to own, as two of the brand’s models were ranked in the top 10 in AutoPacific 2013 Ideal Vehicle Awards’ Most Ideal Aspirational Luxury Car category.

The Cadillac ATS and CTS ranked No. 7 and No. 9, respectively, with the two Cadillac sedans trailing the Audi A5 in first, Volvo S60 in second, and the BMW 3-Series in third. The only other brand to place two nameplates in the top 10 of the Most Ideal Aspirational Luxury Car category in the U.S. market was Audi, with the aforementioned A5 taking first and the A4 taking fourth in the luxury category.

“The IVAs are awarded to those vehicles whose owners like them just the way they are,” said George Peterson, president of AutoPacific, an automotive research and consulting firm based in Tustin, Calif. “We interpret this to be a positive result for marketers, product planners, researchers and engineers who have developed and launched the vehicle executed best for what their target market wants.”

AutoPacific’s Ideal Vehicle Award (IVA) takes into account the results of the organization’s New Vehicle Satisfaction Survey, and identifies the top-performing vehicles on a yearly basis. The firm surveyed more than 52,000 car and light-truck owners, with a battery of 15 questions aimed at finding out how owners might want to change their vehicles — or whether they’d like to keep them exactly how they are. The results are from the owners of the vehicles themselves, with AutoPacific stating that there’s not one better “to evaluate a vehicle than the owners themselves”.

In that regard, AutoPacific’s IVAs measure the union between a customer’s expectations and reality, since an ideal vehicle is one that meets the owner’s expectations for the product at time of purchase. Therefore, AutoPacific’s IVAs are quantitative gauges measuring how closely a vehicle matches an owner’s expectations, with the buyers who are least likely to want to change their vehicle being the ones who are driving their “ideal” vehicle.

The criteria for the awards includes exterior styling, exterior size, passenger roominess, cargo space, driver’s seat comfort, driver’s seat visibility, info/entertainment technology, interior lighting, power and acceleration, ease of getting in and out, interior storage compartments, ride, handling, safety features, tires and wheels.

The Overall Winner of the 2013 Ideal Vehicle Awards was the Mercedes-Benz ML-Class, the highest-ranked premium brand was Porsche (followed by Volvo in second and Audi in third), while the highest-ranked popular (mainstream) brand was Ram.

The GM Authority Take

Good news for Cadillac. Let’s see how the brand and its product fares when the all-new 2014 CTS sedan, 2014 ELR, and all-new 2015 Escalade come to market.