2019 Cadillac CT6

THE STANDARD OF THE WORLD, ONCE AGAIN

Cadillac put the world’s first series-production V-8 into a passenger car in 1915, and for the better part of a century the division’s identity was inseparable from the eight-cylinder engine it designed and built for itself. The Northstar, introduced for 1993, was the last of that line to reach volume production. When it was retired in 2011, the V-Series cars that followed turned to Chevrolet’s supercharged small-blocks — formidable engines, and blisteringly quick ones, but not Cadillac’s own.

That changed in March 2018, when General Motors announced a clean-sheet 4.2-liter twin-turbocharged V-8 designated LTA and known within the division as Blackwing. Its two twin-scroll turbochargers were mounted in the valley between the cylinder banks rather than outboard of the heads, an arrangement that shortens the exhaust path to the turbines and very nearly eliminates lag. The block is aluminum with pressed-in iron liners; the main caps are cross-bolted, the crankshaft and connecting rods forged, the exhaust valves sodium-filled. In CT6-V tune it produced 550 horsepower and 640 lb-ft of torque, delivered through a 10-speed automatic and a rear-biased all-wheel-drive system, with Magnetic Ride Control and Active Rear Steer beneath it and 370 mm Brembo monoblock calipers at the front.

Remarkably for a modern production engine, no Blackwing was ever assembled on a line. Each was built by hand, one technician to one engine, at General Motors’ Performance Build Center inside the Corvette assembly plant at Bowling Green, Kentucky, and each was finished with a plaque bearing the words Blackwing V8 alongside the name and signature of the person who built it.

Cadillac opened the CT6-V order books on the morning of 14 January 2019. By half past two that afternoon the entire American allocation of 275 cars had been claimed, and a second run was announced shortly thereafter at a four-thousand-dollar premium. Production nonetheless proved brief, and not for want of buyers: General Motors had committed $2.2 billion to gutting the Detroit-Hamtramck plant and rebuilding it as Factory ZERO for electric-vehicle assembly, and the last CT6 of any kind came down the line on 24 January 2020. Approximately 1,200 Blackwings were completed in total. 504 of them went into CT6-Vs for the 2019 model year.

CT6-V # KU144699

KU144699 was completed at Detroit-Hamtramck and has known a single custodian. He took delivery on lease in December 2019 and subsequently purchased the car outright from the leasing company in 2022, and it has been registered in Brookline, Massachusetts throughout. The accompanying Carfax report lists two owners for that reason alone — the lease title and the buyout title are recorded separately, and both were issued to the same address.

The report is otherwise as clean as these documents come. No accident or damage is recorded, no structural or airbag event, and no odometer discrepancy. The title is clean. Twelve services appear, very nearly all of them performed by Colonial Cadillac of Woburn, Massachusetts, beginning with the pre-delivery inspection in December 2019 and continuing without meaningful interruption to the present.

Two entries deserve particular note. In December 2022 the car was submitted for a Ceramic Pro coating carrying a lifetime warranty, with the wheels and calipers, the glass, and the interior treated at the same time. In December 2025, at 20,429 miles, all four brake rotors were replaced together with the front and rear pads, and a new battery was fitted. A windshield was replaced in July 2025.

Real carbon fiber dresses the fascia, door cards, and console; a carbon fiber lip spoiler sits on the deck; the car rides on gloss-black twenty-inch wheels beneath a panoramic roof. All four wheels are free of curb rash, and the carbon trim is unmarked, including the high-touch console panel. Both keys accompany the car, together with the owner’s literature, the service file, and the factory accessory case, which remains sealed and unopened.

The Blackwing was never fitted to any car other than the CT6, and Cadillac has not engineered a V-8 of its own in the years since. For the collector drawn to the last genuinely Cadillac engine, hand-built and signed by the person who assembled it, #KU144699 is an exceptionally well-kept and thoroughly documented example of the only car that ever carried one.

Now available at AVI Gallery in Newton, Massachusetts and with worldwide shipping assistance available.