Arkansas vs South Carolina Football Cadillac Road Trip

My Wife and I drove from Plano, Texas to Fayetteville, Arkansas to visit family & attend the Arkansas-South Carolina football game over the weekend.   This was our first road trip in our Cadillac STS-V.  The V is a high performance Cadillac model, which makes it a fun car for a road trip.  It is roomy and has many luxury features, such as comfortable, fully adjustable leather seats, roomy cabin,  individual climate zones, and entertainment features.

2008 STS-V Suede Seat center inserts

The V is NOT economical, unless you consider odd metrics that consider power and MPG together.  In its current setup the STS-V is making 490+ hp at the crank.  We averaged just over 21 mpg each way, somewhat better coming down the Boston Mountains than going up.  I think this is a good trade off for a performance touring car, as the STS-V has more range than I care to drive in a sitting anyway.  We certainly had plentiful power for highway touring.

There was road construction almost all the way through Texas and across Oklahoma.  Good to see jobs at work, but not convenient for traveling.  Overall the roads were good, and traffic to/from Fayetteville was fine.

We used the nav system in the STS-V for monitoring progress to/from and for getting around town while in Fayetteville.    I like the constant feedback from the system about how many miles left to go and predicted time required to get there.   My Wife pointed out that the system seemed to be assuming some very sporty speed of travel toward the end of the trip, but the predicted time was close.

Lots of traffic on game weekends — it was also Arkansas’ homecoming — so one mistep and you’d be stuck waiting to get back into traffic again.    I updated the nav disk to the current one earlier in the year.  The nav system was accurate and helpful.  We turned off the voice prompts frequently, but because the nav system gives updates in the heads-up display I was able to navigate just great in run silent mode.

I didn’t know how to change the time for daylight savings, although when my son did the same thing I had been trying it instantly and easily went to time adjust mode.  Clearly I was doing something wrong but ‘hold down the button that shows the time to change the time’ seems simple and hard to get wrong.  Anyway, all good and I could have cracked the manual at a gas stop if it were more urgent.  My son assured me the problem was age-related.

Originally the STS-V came with runflats, as it has different size wheels and tires front to back, and no spare tire.  I changed the runflats to normal tires, but added a can of tire goo and an air pump for emergencies.   I am still of the opinion that touring cars should have a full size spare, but we had no tire issues on the trip.

We had great seats for the game, and it was a close game until toward the end.    Overall a fun trip.

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