For the past few decades, if you wanted a heavily depreciated decade-old rear-wheel-drive manual sports sedan, you’d simply open up Craigslist, search for a BMW 3 Series, and know you’re getting the benchmark of its day. Hell, I did, and it’s been lovely. However, it’s now 2024, and a little more than ten years in the past, BMW sort of fell off. The F30 3 Series saw the disappearance of the naturally aspirated inline-six, the disappearance of steering feel thanks to the introduction of poorly calibrated electric power steering, and a decided cheapening of interior materials. So, if you want a decade-old manual rear-wheel-drive sports sedan, what do you buy now? Well, how about a Cadillac ATS?
Yes, the Cadillac ATS was available with a proper six-speed manual gearbox without jumping all the way up to the nuclear-grade ATS-V, and not only was it a better driver’s car than the F30 BMW 3 Series, it was also as close to a four-door four-cylinder Camaro as GM ever sold.
Welcome back to Beige Cars You’re Sleeping On, a weekly series in which we raise the profile of some quiet greats. We’re talking vehicles that are secretly awesome, but go unsung because of either a boring image or the lack of an image altogether.
Shortly after the Great Recession, GM was undergoing post-Chapter 11 renewal, and Cadillac had its eyes squarely on BMW. While the outgoing Sigma platform was competitive, it wasn’t class-leading, so GM started from scratch, developing a new platform called Alpha. Benchmarking the E46 BMW 3 Series, GM ended up with double-ball joint MacPherson strut front suspension, a five-link independent rear suspension setup, huge amounts of structural adhesive, and a 50:50 weight distribution.
It was good enough to make the sixth-generation Camaro ZL1 1LE a giant-slayer, but the first car on the Alpha platform, the Cadillac ATS, was an E90 3 Series-sized sports sedan, and while it came with a variety of powertrain options, the one you really want if you can’t stretch to the ATS-V is the two-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine with the six-speed manual transmission.
Ticking those boxes gave you a stout 272 horsepower and a respectable 260 lb.-ft. of torque, along with a mechanical limited-slip rear differential and a Tremec TR-3160 six-speed manual transmission. Yep, that’s the same transmission as in the current Ford Mustang Dark Horse. If it’ll hold up behind a Coyote V8, chances are it’ll do alright in an ATS, even if you slap on a flash tune.
Oh, but this sports sedan goes further than just a great manual gearbox and a limited-slip differential. Four-piston Brembo front calipers and magnetorheological dampers were also available, the former coming standard on all but the base trim, and the latter coming standard on the top Premium trim. We’re talking about grade-A hardware right here, and on a good stretch of tarmac, the results were spectacular.
Granted, you had to look closely and be keen to notice how brilliant the chassis was because the Cadillac ATS wasn’t a hands-down winner right out of the gate. In 2012, Car And Driver compared a manual 2.0T ATS to the then-new and historically frowned-upon F30 BMW 328i, and the ATS lost. However, you wouldn’t know that by the way Car And Driver adored the handling of the ATS:
Less than two miles into his first handling loop in the ATS, senior editor Tony Quiroga announced, “Yeah, this car is way better.” He raved about the composure and responsiveness of the Cadillac, which was equipped with the FE3 Performance package that brings adjustable magnetorheological dampers, 18-inch summer tires, and a limited-slip differential to the party. The ATS is an easy car to drive fast, even on lumpy 1.3-lane roads in West Virginia, the land of decreasing radii. A safe touch of understeer gives way to near-perfect balance and incredible poise up to the 0.90-g limit. Wheel motions are admirably well controlled and damped, and it seems nothing can upset the ATS’s line. You can drive this car the same way on a rough patchwork road as you’d drive the BMW on a smooth one.
So why did the ATS lose to the worst generation of 3 Series? Well, GM’s four-banger is a little coarser than BMW’s much-maligned N20 four-cylinder, and the Cadillac wasn’t quite as quick, but the bigger issue was an infotainment disaster known as the Cadillac User Experience, or CUE for short. See, Cadillac decided it didn’t need buttons on its center stack, and that one giant capacitive touch panel would be the way of the future. This worked about as well as you might expect. In addition to the vagueness of capacitive touch controls with early haptic feedback, the system was slow, laggy, and yes, unreliable. However, if you set a few hundred bucks aside for an eventual CUE touchscreen replacement, you can pick up a rare manual ATS for sensible money.
For instance, here is a 2014 Cadillac ATS with the 2.0T engine, the manual transmission, and the Brembos for sale in Chicago for $13,500. Not only is it specced in a gorgeous shade of blue, it has a reasonable 107,000 miles on the clock and was originally a Southern car, which may mitigate some of the corrosion that comes with Chicago winters.
Want to go even cheaper? No problem. Here’s a 2014 Cadillac ATS 2.0T manual up for sale in Pennsylvania for $10,995. Sure, beige isn’t the most exhilarating color out there, and this one has a hit on the Carfax, but with 83,388 miles on the clock, one previous owner, and stick-shift excitement, this is a solid amount of car for the money.
How about an even rarer combination, mating this already uncommon powertrain with the elegant lines of a coupe? Well, here’s a manual 2015 Cadillac ATS coupe up for sale in New York for $16,985 with 86,010 miles on the clock. That may be a considerable premium over a sedan, but how often will you see one of these 2.0T coupes with a stick?
The Cadillac ATS wasn’t some American also-ran. It was the best-handling sports sedan of its generation, and you can now get into a proper traditionalist manual rear-wheel-drive version for the price of a normal used car. If you need a little more practicality than a four-cylinder Camaro, this hits the nail right on the head,
(Photo credits: Cadillac, Autotrader sellers)
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