2026 Cadillac CT5 V-Series Blackwing Review: All Hail The King

Well folks, this is it.

Pour one out for a legend: 2026 marks the spectacular Cadillac CT5 V-Series Blackwing’s final year of production as GM phases out the platform to replace both the CT4 and CT5 with one vehicle. Let us not dwell on the loss; the fact that the Blackwing exists and is so incredible to experience, interact with, and drive is a beacon of fire and lightning and brutalist thunder amidst a world of gray.

No car in its class can compare to the CT5-V Blackwing when it comes to inspiring you to have a good time on open or twisty roads alike, and it’s a car that will stand as a legend for eras to come.

Exterior Style:

Despite its unhinged driving manners when you let the Blackwing do its thing, the car’s exterior design is really rather restrained. The test car’s Carbon Fiber 1 and Carbon Fiber 2 packages don’t do that notion any favors, though. The car’s otherwise fairly straightforward and angular bodywork is more luxury car than performance. The big exhaust tips and vents are really the only telltale signs on a base Blackwing that a beast is lying under the hood.

Frankly, that’s how we like our performance sedans: Those who know know, but you can otherwise fly under the radar. Save the flaunt and flash for the sports cars; the best sport and super-sedans only show what they’re capable of when you let them loose.

Powertrain and Fuel Economy:

Oh glory, oh lordy, oh heavenly spectacularness, what a fun time the supercharged 6.2-liter LT4 V8 is.

The thumping engine pumps out 668 horsepower and 659 lb-ft of torque, available for your choosing paired to a Tremec TR6060 six-speed manual or 10-speed Hydra-Matic 10L90 automatic gearbox. The car weighs around 4,100 pounds in either guise, so the power-to-weight doesn’t match that of true featherweights, but at least this car is still hardly over the two-ton mark. It’s not light per se, but it’s certainly light for the class, and the LT4 revels in that.

Goddamn, this car is rowdy. In a world where Corvettes pump out 1,000+ horsepower from the factory, the Blackwing’s paltry 668 horsepower still feels absolutely mega by day-to-day standards. Forget what the internet says; anywhere you go in this car, you’re the big daddy. 

Left foot hard on the brake, right foot hard on the gas, prepare your body and soul, then dump the brake away and let the demon under the hood run free. Rear-wheel-drive is absolutely no match for this much power, even despite the Michelins doing their damndest to keep the car accelerating forward. Needless to say, you can incinerate the rear tires at the lightest prod of your foot with traction control off, and even with every system fully engaged it’s easy to break traction at near-highway speeds when there’s water on the roadways. It’s good—née great—fun, the kind of involving excitement that other cars just don’t tout. You have to drive the Blackwing slightly scared of it, or it will bite you.

And that’s a huge amount of the Blackwing’s charm. In a world littered with EVs and all-wheel-drive cars that can easily out-accelerate the Blackwing, its relatively old-school small-block V8 and Eaton blower bring you immediate response from the accelerator and what feels like a look back into the past. When so many cars are turbocharged, and there’s that minute gap between your right foot and the reaction of the engine, the LT4 really shines bright. It feels like an old racing engine compared to other modern motors.

Speaking of yesteryear, about that gas mileage… Ha. Haha. Hahahaha. Good one. Oh, and speaking of “one,” I often saw gas mileage in the single-digit range during my week of testing this Blackwing (and the others I’ve spent time with, too). You really gotta pay to play with this engine under your right foot. Somehow, though, the press car showed a 17 MPG tally for the 1000-mile Trip A meter, but there must have been a lot of highway involved before my loan. The EPA rates the gas mileage at 13 city, 20 highway, 15 combined, and we all know their test is fairly lenient. Expect sub-15 if you own this car, even babying it. A few hard pulls and you can literally watch the fuel gauge drop before your eyes.

Handling and Drivability:

The aforementioned comparatively light weight also pays huge dividends in the handling and cornering departments.

The controls are both delicate and hefty, the chassis alive and composed. You are in control of your own driving fate in the Blackwing; sure, there’s (very competent and complex) computers on board, but they don’t do much more than help you not crash coming out of a corner or when launching hard off the line. The Blackwing just lets you drive, and rewards you beautifully regardless of how hard you’re pushing.

Drivability on the Blackwing spectrum is truly phenomenal, especially considering how much performance is on tap. It’s such an easy car to drive whether around town or on the highway that if it wasn’t for the LT4’s burble and how easy the motor makes acceleration from any speed, you can easily forget just how potent it is. But one slip or deliberate prod of the right foot and you can suddenly see extra-legal speeds or go very sideways within seconds, so you have to respect the car a bit more than in comparable vehicles that have all-wheel-drive.

Even so, if you want to daily drive the Blackwing and pretend it’s a point-to-point Prius-esque people carrier, it’s happy to oblige (save for that gas mileage aspect; yikes).

Ride Quality and Comfort:

Given what the suspension is tasked with managing when the engine is at full chat, Blackwing's ride quality is very respectable. You definitely know this car is tuned for performance every time you go over a bump, but kudos to the chassis engineers for putting together underpinnings that are nothing short of amazing.

Comfort is high, though there isn’t a ton of room in the back seat and the roofline makes loading children and car seats in and out a bit of a harder task than is ideal. It’s much less useful as far as the family use case goes compared to the M5 Touring, or RS6 Avant for that matter, but it’s only slightly less back seat-friendly than the M5 sedan.

Remember when there was a CTS-V Wagon, though? Oh how we long for a Blackwing Wagon…

Up front, the driver and person riding shotgun will be more than pleased with the accommodations; heated, ventilated, and massaging seats certainly help, and there’s enough space to get comfy when on a long haul. You can’t forget that the Blackwing is based on what is already a luxury car, so that it rides well and has good baseline levels of comfort isn’t a shock.

Interior Style and Quality:

Cadillac hasn’t been known for its interior style in, well, eons. That’s not any different here in the Blackwing, as the car is very function-forward as it puts design in the proverbial passenger seat. That’s not something we find issue with, though it does bring down the dealer showroom “wow factor” some.

Quality is decent though, with our one qualm in the style-and-quality realm being GM’s choice of switchgear. There are a lot of sub-$50k car buttons and knobs in there, all of which are hard to palate at the Blackwing’s $100k base and $150k as-tested prices, but that’s like criticizing the best BBQ you’ve ever eaten for the restaurant having thin napkins. You’re not buying the car for its buttons, so maybe we’re nitpicking for no reason.

Technology & Infotainment:

This generation of Cadillac (and General Motors) infotainment is very good. It brings everything you want front and center in the dashboard, and the way the screen angles towards the driver in the case of the updated CT5 interior architecture makes toggling through HVAC, media, or performance-related menus and settings incredibly easy, even when on the move.

The whole infotainment is truthfully really pleasant to use: It’s fast to respond, intuitive, and it avoids being overwhelming even despite the 33-inch screen effectively dominating the dashboard and interior as a whole. This iteration of GM infotainment even has wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, which GM foolishly removed from its next round of infotainment for reasons only their finance department can justify. Our only complaint is you have to use a cheap-feeling dial to control it when not using the touchscreen functionality, but otherwise it doesn’t leave us asking for anything more.

SuperCruise, too, surpasses what you expect given the confines of modern pricing structures. We have a hard time loving hands-free driving aids (ADAS) as hardcore driving enthusiasts, yet SuperCruise continues to impress.

Value Dollars and Sense

Do dollars and sense really matter here? When the prospective buyer wants a car that meshes high-power Corvette thrills, excitement, and thrust with Cadillac luxury, refinement, and performance? And has the money to pay for it all?

Dollars matter more than emotion for some, but that’s not the case for a Blackwing buyer. We mere mortals—those like yours truly and most other journalists reviewing Blackwings—have to juggle things that most six-digit Cadillac buyers don’t often consider. Still, you have to be a special kind of buyer to seek out the CT5 V-Series Blackwing. It’s not exactly your grandma’s Caddy, and the way you can option and spec this car above and beyond its core sure is something. Emotion overrides financial sense, through and through.

For the sake of looking at the money aspect, the 2026 Cadillac CT5 V-Series Blackwing starts with a $98,900 base price (before Destination), which is probably the best way for most people to buy. Not that anyone needs 668 horsepower in the first place, but everything else that can be added really just goes above and beyond and makes only incremental differences as far as the on-road and daily-driving Blackwing experience goes. Track drivers, the few of them, might feel differently though, so GM has options on tap for that glorious bunch.

The big ticket item in this test car’s spec is the $18,000 Precision Package which adds, per Cadillac:

• Increased spring rates, larger front stabilizer bar and revised suspension bushings
• New front steering knuckles and rear suspension toe links which allow for more aggressive wheel alignment for track usage
• Recalibrated subsystems: MagneRide dampers, steering, chassis controls and Electronic Limited Slip Differential (eLSD)
• Carbon ceramic brake package

Whether you want any of that on top of an already-incredible vehicle is not for us to discuss, but I’ve said it before and will say it again: $18k buys a lot of tire, gas, and track day insurance. Yet for argument’s sake, $18k probably doesn’t mean much to someone who can afford a Blackwing, and the cost of the package will probably return at least half of the deal on the back end should someone (for some ungodly reason) go to sell the car.

Buyers probably also don’t need the $13k worth of carbon fiber draped around this car, and the stick shift would save you $3,675. Super Cruise is solid-- we’d keep that-- but $107k buys an otherwise pretty perfect CT5 Blackwing.

No doubt that’s still a ton of money. It’s a relative value proposition compared to an M5 or even the way this test car was optioned (which can run up to right under $160k with the Deep Ocean package and shipping via an enclosed carrier; GM is really milking this car’s final year). Even the Blackwing we tested last year was optioned similarly and “only” cost $138k, so there’s certainly some price creep, and the last M5 I tested was $141k. The four-door M5’s sedan counterpart starts at $123k and can be optioned to almost $150k, while Porsche’s closest offering (the Panamera GTS) is going to be $50k more if you so much as look at the build sheet the wrong way. Points to the Blackwing so long as you keep the add-ons in check.

Final Thoughts:

Twenty-two years ago, Cadillac debuted the CTS-V to take on the BMW M5, and the legacy that led to the modern Blackwing is dotted with attempts to match Corvette performance with Cadillac refinement on a budget that has its successes and failures. Versus an ebb-and-flow of rivals, we come to the back half of 2026 and find it’s only the Blackwing among its immediate competitors that still feels like a car with lineage and tactical, feel-it-in-your-hands-and-soul ties to its predecessors. Every ounce of that is for the better, and the Blackwing is the best-driving, most exciting gas-powered sedan on sale today.

Let us wax poetic: It doesn’t get better than this. The 2026 Cadillac CT5 V-Series Blackwing is the only pure, raw (yet comfortable) ultra-high-performance sedan left on the market. Everything else (wagon competitors included) coddles to the point of detriment as far as driving goes, and the Blackwing simply makes every outing an experience or adventure. Though the all-wheel-drive and hybridized competition is quicker off the line and generally more efficient, the CT5-V Blackwing is the easy “forever car” pick of the litter thanks to how it makes you feel when behind the wheel. This car’s driving experience just doesn’t exist anywhere else in the class, and it’s a sad thing for us enthusiasts to acknowledge this year is the last time the modern Blackwing will be on sale. It’s one for the ages, and we will miss it dearly.

(The manufacturer provided insurance and a tank of fuel for this loan, and big thanks as always to the team at FMI for arranging and coordinating logistics. - RB)