TANGLED UP IN BLUE

Can the old-school Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing stand up against the modern Audi RS7 Performance and the plug-in-hybrid BMW M5?

- BY ANDREW KROK / PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARC URBANO

IN 1966, AT THE FREE TRADE HALL in Manchester, England, Bob Dylan played a two-set show. He started with his older folk tunes, on which he'd first risen to fame, and the reception was warm. Set two, however, was Dylan's new stuff, richly layered electric compositions—and the heckling began. At one point, a voice from the crowd cried out, “Judas!” Unfazed, Dylan leaned into the mic and sneered, “I don’t believe you,” and then thrust the audience headlong into the electrified bombast of the now-legendary “Like a Rolling Stone.”

If the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing were a Dylan album, it’d be his 1962 eponymous debut. Both the car and the LP are reverently old-school. The Caddy holds true to the traditional roots of the supersedan, with a massive pushrod V-8 out front and two driven wheels in the back. It feels like history, almost as if it's on loan from a museum.

The Audi RS7 Performance exists somewhere between the tried-and-true and what lies ahead, like The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The RS7 stands as a sort of status quo, as many contemporary sporting machines rock the combination of a twin-turbocharged gas engine and standard all-wheel drive. What you see is what you get—no surprises here, just some solid folk music reflecting modern beliefs.

The BMW M5, on the other hand, is a Stratocaster plugged into a wall of Marshall amps, a literal and metaphorical shock to the system. It's the one-two punch of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, which put electrification front and center in a genre where it didn't exist before—and perhaps where it wasn't wanted. Between its SUV-like curb weight and the addition of e-motivation, this supersedan may as well wear a name tag that says “Mr. Iscariot.”