Bleh, the new GM vehicles are only an improvement insofar as they're less crappy than the heaps of junk they're replacing.

The american automotive press has been a little too ready to be complimentary of american cars that they've been a bit too kind.

Case in point, the new Cadillacs. A couple years back I happened to ride in a DeVille and thought, hey the ventilated seats are nice, but the plastic in here is of worse quality than a Corolla or Civic. After reading article after article about how the new Caddys were so much better than old ones, I was thinking they'd be pretty damn nice.

Then a ladyfriend of mine got a job at a Cadillac/Hummer dealer here. After work one day I stopped by to say hi and just checked out a coupla cars sitting in the showroom while I was waiting for her to finish up with a customer. The interiors as a whole were sub par. The CTS is second-rate among regular midsized cars like the Accord, Camry, even Mazda6. The STS doesn't come close to most entry lux cars in the low-mid 30s. The Escalade is nice enough if you disregard the blocky design that looks like it's fresh out of mom's 1984 Vista Cruiser. The new DTS wasn't out yet so the DeVille was still an "old" Caddy and thus appropriately crappy. The XLR was alright but certainly not up to the level of stuff costing tens of thousands less.

Now sure, these interiors weren't bad per se, but after all the hyperbole in the american automotive press about how Caddy had been all turned around I was at least expecting them to be up to par with the competition. No way. And if you read about the new Caddys in say, a British magazine, they're straight up about how the interiors aren't that great. Of course they have their own biases about British cars but that's another issue.

The point here is that GM's supposedly best new lineup is still pretty bad. Yes their new products are a step up from the steaming piles of crap they had been trying to hock at dealerships, and yes that is a step in the right direction, but they still have a great distance to go before their cars are truly up to par with the competiton.