Thunder Gray Chromaflair (TGC)  is the color I am thinking of for my next vehicle.  I spent some time around a TGC car at the Cars & Coffee Dallas recently.  I am still an advocate of selecting a Cadillac in a color that contrasts nicely with the chrome  accents.  The TGC is dark enough to contrast with the chrome, but not so dark as to be too hot in the Texas summer or as hard to keep clean as a black car.

This is the photo image from the order book, but in person it is a more striking color.

Now that I have THAT settled, I just need to determine which Cadillac (09 CTS-V or 08 STS-V) and how to pay for it.

One of my favorite features of the Edmund’s site is the true cost to own.  In this feature Edmund’s attempts to show the total cost of ownership of a vehicle, including fuel, insurance, and depreciation.  Here is a sample table for a 2010 Cadillac CTS-V:

Depreciation is the reduction in value of a vehicle due to its current marketable price versus its purchase price.
For example, once you buy a car and drive it home, you frequently could not sell it for the same price you bought it for the next week. Occasionally with rare models you can — but usually you can’t, and the difference between what you could sell it for and the Dealer purchase price can be striking.

Now, depreciation is our friend when buying lightly used Cadillacs. What I am looking for is a 2 year old model with under 20K miles as an affordable super car.

So instead of paying $60K say, after year 1 you could hope to pay $48.5K;  after year 2, $40.7K;  after year 3, $33.8K etc.  This is where the pricing for the CTS-V gets really interesting to me, because one would be able to purchase absolute super car performance at a much discounted price, still in warranty and still a truly terrific car good for many miles of exciting service.  You can already see this working on 09 models now — the least expensive ones I have seen are $47K-50K.  So another year or 18 months of ‘curing’ and this batch could be aged well enough to enjoy!