22nd Feb 2025, 17:22
This is the original reviewer providing a one-year update for my 2010 Cadillac DTS. Since the previous update, I have put 8,298 miles on the car and the odometer now stands at 111,004 miles. During that interval, I have replaced the windshield wipers and had the oil changed twice. I also had the orange coolant assessed and had the rear brakes inspected. They still make a howling noise, but after several visits to the garage and a second opinion, no-one can find a mechanical problem and they all assure me that the brakes are safe. So I guess I have to live with the howling until it's time to replace the pads again and then I can explore different options for pad material. Perhaps ceramic will be less inclined to howl.
I am pleased that there were no repairs during this segment. Have I turned the corner? My graph of the cumulative average expense seems to have peaked at around 89,000 miles. Since then, the slope of the curve has been slightly negative, going from an average of 26 cents per mile at 89,000 miles to currently 20 cents per mile. If this keeps up, I may have to retract my statement about it being a money pit. With luck, the issues I had before 90,000 miles are the same as other cars that have those issues at 120,000 miles and hopefully they are behind me now.
About 5,500 miles of this year's interval was highway miles, so the car continues to serve the purpose of a road trip car. I drove it to the upper mid-west twice, each a 950 mile one-way drive. In October we drove it through the Appalachians to South Carolina and Charleston, then back home via the Blue Ridge Parkway (beginning in Virginia because of the storm damage in North Carolina) and Skyline Drive on vacation. The car did a great job, was comfortable and got good mileage on all trips. It's still the vehicle my wife prefers for road trips. I put it away for the winter in December to keep salt and corrosion off of it, but we're looking forward to taking it out again for the road trip season.
I have put about 43,000 miles on it now. Even though I have spent nearly $9,000 on it, I feel more that it's earning its keep and it has kept 43,000 miles off the 2017 Explorer I bought new. The Explorer would have 110,000 miles on it right now if not for the Cadillac, and I might be feeling a little glum about seeing the car I bought new for $32,000 now have 110,000 miles on it. So we will hope things keep going well in the coming year, and I'll provide the next update in a year or sooner if something catastrophic happens.
7th Feb 2026, 19:16
I am the original reviewer posting an approximate one-year update for my Cadillac DTS. Since the last review, I have put only 4,718 miles on the car and it now stands at 115,722 miles. The reason for the low mileage is that I used a different vehicle for a couple of substantial road trips that involved some light off-road driving that would not have been appropriate for the Cadillac.
During the interval, I changed the cabin air filter at 115,705 miles after about 15,000 miles since the previous change. On these post 2010-decade cars, I feel as though this is about the last thing I'm able to change by myself any longer.
I had the oil changed, tires rotated, a TPMS sensor replaced, and had the driver's side mirror tightened - probably somebody had used it as a hand rail in a parking lot and loosened it - at 115,714 miles all at a cost of $488.
Finally, there was a more major repair last April near the start of the driving season (I put the car away for the winter from January to April). I was driving to a vacation home about a thousand miles away. Things started out well but about 300 miles into the trip, the "service traction control" message appeared. At first it was intermittent and I thought a sensor had been jarred loose because I was driving on I-70 in Indiana, which has the worst stretch of interstate in the country in my opinion, anyway. Miles of pound-pound-pound because they don't just repave the entire highway, they excavate out slots around cracks and refill them with concrete so there is always a divot that you hit with a maddening cyclicity. Then the message disappeared until the west side of Indianapolis at which time it came back on but stayed on steadily instead of only intermittently. I thought well, I guess I can live without traction control for a day. I grew up driving 1970s cars when there was no such thing. However, by Illinois, the "check engine" light had also come on to accompany the "service traction control" message. The car seemed to be running fine so I thought it was just an attention-getter or perhaps just some sympathetic association. By this time, I was over half-way to my destination. By the time I hit the Wisconsin border, now about 700 miles in, I could tell gas mileage had dropped and noted a loss of power. When I stopped at a rest area about 800 miles in, the engine was running noticeably rough and choppy. However, I was only two hours from my destination so the incentive to gut it out was strong. By the time I got off the interstate 25 miles from my destination, the engine would not idle smoothly and I was lightly keeping up the RPMs in neutral at stop lights, but of course now you're only 25 miles from destination after putting 950 miles behind you, it's nearly 8 pm, so you have to go for it. It got me there, poor thing, so I commend it for that.
I made an appointment with the local Chevrolet garage and during the time it was sitting in my garage waiting for the service appointment, the issue seemed very much in doubt as to whether the Cadillac was going to be okay. I even was preparing for the eventuality that I might have to drive my 1975 Dodge Charger SE back home if the Cadillac had gone down. I had been doing catch-up maintenance on the Charger and going on trips up to 200 miles in preparation for making that trip if the need ever arose and now it was looking like it had.
Turns out the Cadillac had a bad coil pack, cylinder #3 misfire. The cost to repair was $584 and then it ran just fine and got me all the way home back East. There were a couple of surprises for me on that. It taught me that the "check engine light" isn't just for emission control stuff. I've heard of some people that just blow them off as a "pay your mechanic light" although that has never been my philosophy. I was also surprised that the misfire would trigger the traction control service light.
This car has had other repairs that I have felt were premature, but to me, a bad coil pack at 115,000 miles on a 15-year-old car does not seem unreasonable. Rather than being mad about another repair, the episode actually made me like the car more because hey, it got me home even under duress.
When I took the car in for the oil change, the Service Advisor got in to start it and I overheard him say "Boy, they don't make 'em like they used to." I'm on record here as stating that 2010 was no pinnacle of GM quality so I asked him what he meant by that. He came right out and said the DTS was just outright made better and had visibly higher quality than the new Cadillacs he was seeing. It made me appreciate what I have but also made me question why people are paying over $100,000 for junk because that was certainly the implication. So, I will definitely continue to take care of my DTS and keep it going for as long as it will go. I've had it from the horse's mouth: the new car will be more expensive and lower quality than the old car.
18th Feb 2024, 17:54
This is the original reviewer posting a one-year update for my 2010 Cadillac DTS. Current mileage is 102,706 miles, which means I have put about 5,600 miles on the car over the past year. It would normally have been a couple of thousand more, but I've had a little project going on at my second home about a thousand miles away and had also wanted to do some hiking accessible off dirt tracks, so driving my 2017 Explorer made more sense last year. Still, the good news is that there were no repairs, though I should hope so with such an abbreviated interval.
I had the oil changed and tires rotated at 100,586 miles at a cost of $200. I had the spark plugs, air filter, and cabin air filter changed at 101,016 miles at a cost of $500.
I looked back at my records and can quantify what I'd said about this car being more expensive than others I've owned. For years, I've graphed expenses and mileage in Excel spreadsheets, and fit a linear curve to a graph of miles versus cumulative cost. For the Cadillac DTS, with a correlation coefficient of 0.97 and R squared value of 0.95, the slope of that linear regression line shows I've spent $1,000 every 5,000 miles for an average 20-25 cents per mile. This is maintenance and repairs, not gasoline. For comparison, my 2002 Ford Explorer, with a correlation coefficient of 0.98 and R squared value of 0.97 defined a linear regression slope that showed I spent $1,000 every 10,000 miles for an average of about 10 cents per mile, including the $3,750 I paid for it at a repo auction. And the king, my 1985 Dodge Ramcharger with a correlation coefficient of 0.94 and R squared value of 0.90 defined a linear regression with a slope showing I spent $1,000 every 15,000 miles for an average cost of 7-8 cents per mile. Of course, the money spent on the Ramcharger and 2002 Explorer are in dollars of the early 2000s, so inflation may be a consideration for direct comparison to nearly 20 years ago.
Still, it's enough to show how many repairs the Cadillac has needed compared to my two previous used cars. It should be said, though, that the Ramcharger benefited from being simple and an earlier era vehicle that I could work on myself to a large degree. That in itself can show you that for somebody strapped for cash, as I was 20 years ago just trying to get on my feet with my first real job out of graduate school, driving a cheap old car that you can work on yourself will be a huge benefit to helping avoid a car payment and torpedoing your financial future.
For the final comparison, the maintenance on my 2017 Explorer works out to an average of $1,000 every 40,000 miles, but because I paid something like $32,000 for it, that works out to an average of about 50 cents per mile. That's double the Cadillac, which I paid nothing for and kind of consider to be a money pit. I know this site is about cars and not finances, but if I had a chance to share a little tip from my 50-some years, I'd say avoid the attractive looking money pits and avoid the new car payment. If your goal is to impress others, it's not working. Get a cheap beater, save up the cash you would have spent on car payments, and someday you will be very glad. That person in the new, or worse yet, used but recently financed, BMW next to you at the light is probably more broke than you are!