Car Throttle

From the "not surprising but still utterly awesome" department comes the first official photos and details of Cadillac's coolest car ever, the 2011 CTS-V Sport Wagon.  It's a simple concept, but for a while we were all wondering if GM was going to have the balls to actually produce it.  Wonder no more, kids: the CTS-V Wagon is here! It takes all of the tasty mechanical hardware from the CTS-V Sedan and Coupe, and packs it into the sexy wagon bodystyle.  That means that under the hood is the same 6.2L Supercharged LSA V8, derived from the almighty Corvette ZR-1's motor.  With 556bhp and 551lb-ft of torque on tap, that should certainly be enough to haul the kids to soccer practice.  Thanks to an Eaton TVS

Despite being a product of the great Evil Empire, I'm still a fan of Cadillac's CTS-V. It's getting even more desirable for 2011 with the introduction of the 2-door CTS-V Coupe.  We had our first glance at the regular (and surprisingly sexy) CTS Coupe a few months back, and when the Detroit Show starts up in full on the 16th we'll be able to see what one with a whole ton of horsepower looks like! There's not really anything particularly shocking about the CTS-V Coupe, but we should still be thankful that such a car exists in today's eco-greenie-weenie environment.  Dimension-wise, it's almost identical to the sedan - same wheelbase, same 556bhp supercharged 6.2L LSA V8, same 6-speed Tremec TR6060 or 6-speed automatic, same huge

Hennessey Performance Engineering, world-renowned at adding more power to already muscular cars, now turns their sights to the new Cadillac CTS-V. They've released a line of tuning packages for Cadillac's hotter-than-hot Nurburgring smashing sedan ranging from 600 up to 800 horsepower.  Details on these monster Caddies after the jump. The base CTS-V isn't really anything to cough at in the first place.  Powered by a derivative of the almighty Corvette ZR-1's LS9, called the LSA, this pushrod 6.2L supercharged V8 makes a more-than-adequate 556bhp, along with 549 lb-ft of torque.  This translates to around 510 horsepower at the wheels, and 0-60 runs under 4 seconds with manual or automatic transmission. The basic HPE upgrade, called V600, consists of a remapped ECU as well as some mechanical alterations. 

In an undeniable sign of the times, General Motors announced that they would be axing their "HPVO" (Performance Vehicles Operation) division as part of brand-wide cost-cuts necessary for their "economic viability" plan for Congress.  This is alarming news for fans of GM performance vehicles, which is one thing the General does quite well. Don't put the Z06 in cryogenic storage just yet, though: it's not quite the end of the world as we know it. The team of 60 engineers, who worked near GM's headquarters in Detroit, have been redeployed elsewhere into the company to focus on development of more important core vehicles, like upcoming mainstream sedans and crossovers - in other words, the cars that real people will buy in large numbers, which is what GM needs