Cadillac, playing technology catch-up to competitors such as BMW, Audi and...

Cadillac, playing technology catch-up to competitors such as BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz, held demos of its connected 2013 XTS sedan that’s shipping to dealers this week at the Classic Car Club in Manhattan. The company is rolling out its CUE (Cadillac User Experience) connected car technology as a standard feature in the XTS, and it will be offered in new Cadillac vehicles as they come out, Andy Gellatly, technical fellow for user interfaces at General Motors, told us behind the wheel of an XTS late Wednesday. Limited versions of the technology will be available for other GM cars in 2013, Gellatly said, but those won’t have the motion-sensing or haptics features of the full-featured CUE. MSRPs for the XTS range from $44,075 to $60,385 depending on feature package. The system is based around an 8-inch capacitive-touch display which shows navigation maps, audio settings, XM and Internet radio station information and media stored on a user’s smartphone or tablet. Each XTS buyer gets a free iPad, Cadillac said. A compartment under the dash is designed to conceal the user’s connected phone or tablet, which, when paired with the unit, provides the wireless broadband connection for the system. Standout features of the CUE include haptics that provide a light “thump” to a user’s finger when pressed to indicate a command was received, Gellatly said, since capacitive screens rely on visual feedback. The screen goes dark when not used for 20 seconds or so, but users can wake it up quickly to see a song title by approaching the screen with their hand, which brings a screen alive through motion-sensing, he said. Users can place calls, requests points of interest and access music and radio stations by artist, track or channel name using speech recognition as well, he said, while demonstrating the speech-recognition feature. In our demo, the system interpreted “Blues Brothers” as “Blues Traveler,” though. Cadillac has a few apps at launch for the phone with more to come, Gellatly said. Having an application framework in place and a public software development kit -- along with the ability to leverage a smartphone’s data plan -- makes the future capability of CUE “open-ended,” Gellatly said. Cadillac will certify all apps to ensure they meet certain standards, including that they don’t lead to driver distraction, he said. Design work on CUE was done at GM’s tech center in Warren, Mich., Gellatly said. He wouldn’t provide the name of components suppliers.