Cadillac is joining the fray with numerous other luxury automakers with its new CUE advanced infotainment system. CUE – standing for Cadillac User Experience – brings navigation, audio, Bluetooth connectivity, and vehicle settings into one user-friendly, in-car system. The all-new XTS large sedan will be the first to receive the CUE system next year, followed by the new ATS small sedan and SRX crossover.
CUE relies on two screens – an eight-inch touchscreen display at the top of the center stack, and a 12.3-inch LCD display for the information panel – along with a traditional-looking, gloss-black and metal-accented center stack. However, the controls placed on the center stack aren’t your typical physical controls – they’re touch-sensitive, and give a pulsing haptic feedback when touched. Hiding beneath the gloss-black faceplate is a storage bin to hide cell phones, MP3 players, and the like.
The new gauge cluster is configurable, and controlled by steering wheel mounted buttons (some touch-sensitive, some normal buttons). Though its three circular gauges look remind us of the similar TFT display in the current Jaguar XJ, the Cadillac’s screen looks far more sophisticated and customizable to the user’s taste.
The central display has been designed with a number of slick new features; including multi-touch, swiping, and proximity sensors that light up icons as your finger gets closer to the screen. Cadillac looked to smartphones and tablets for inspiration for the system, and aimed to make it both simple and intuitive to use but still loaded with all kinds of features for technophiles. The home screen can be reconfigured by dragging icons, and allows for up to five shortcuts at the top of the screen, similar to the dock on an iPhone.
In presenting CUE, Cadillac also gave us a good look at both the exterior and the interior for the new XTS sedan, which is expected to make its debut next month at the Los Angeles Auto Show. The interior is otherwise fairly traditional, with a horizontal dash swathed in double-stitched leather and wood trim, a console-mounted shifter, and the 8-inch touchscreen dominating the center stack. The exterior – shown by way of a rendered graphic placed within one of the CUE displays — looks almost identical to the XTS Platinum concept that debuted at last year’s Detroit auto show.
