After many years in the business driving an all-new vehicle that is not even in regular production still is one of the most rewarding moments. This week I took delivery of a 2010 Cadillac SRX from the Captured Test Fleet. What does that mean?
Before the regular production starts for dealer show rooms and ultimately customers, we build a limited number of pre-production vehicles for a variety of purposes, including the CTF. These vehicles are assigned to small group of employees and the purpose is to accumulate hundreds of thousands of miles to identify and eliminate any flaws before the SRX goes on sale by the end of July 2009. Assigned drivers have to report whenever necessary or at least once a week through the OnStar system, where a specially trained CTF advisor takes down comments, remarks and impressions and forwards them to the appropriate engineers and development staff.
I don’t intend to convince you at this point about how perfect my 2010 SRX pre-production CTF vehicle is and how great it drives. Well, it honestly drives and feels great, but my CTF baby is not perfect. And that’s not a bad thing because it allows Cadillac to track down and eliminate any issues with the crossover before the first customers take delivery. After I submitted my first report to the OnStar advisor, it took only a very short time before I was contacted by an engineer to learn about the issue and to schedule an inspection.
The process of assigning early production vehicles to a group of employees is not unique to Cadillac. But I wanted to get the word out that the process really works at Cadillac.
I hope you give the SRX to some not-normally-shaped people. My DeVille is a little short on front legroom and the visor was too low (before I removed it), defects which weren’t fixed until the 2006 redo, 6 years! after the model was introduced. The 3 most irritating things about my 88 Bonneville were all fixed in the 89’s, still two years after model introduction.