The $48,600 Cadillac CT5 Failed Four IIHS Tests. Its Predecessor Had the Most Impaired Drivers in Luxury.

The B-pillar is supposed to be the last wall between you and whatever just T-boned your car at 37 miles per hour. In the 2026 Cadillac CT5, that wall buckled. IIHS engineers slammed a 4,200-pound barrier into the sedan's flank at highway-merge speed, simulating the kind of SUV-on-sedan collision that dominates real-world side-impact fatalities, and the CT5's structure folded inward.^[1] The driver dummy's head slid below the side curtain airbag and struck the windowsill. Hard. That alone earned a Poor rating in the side impact test, but the CT5 kept collecting them: Poor in moderate overlap front, Poor in headlights, Poor in the updated vehicle-to-vehicle crash prevention evaluation.^[2]

Four Poor ratings on a single vehicle is unusual in any segment, but for a Cadillac it is flatly unprecedented. Jessica Jermakian, IIHS senior vice president for vehicle research, put it bluntly: “It seems the crashworthiness and crash avoidance results weren’t important for GM when they were redesigning the Cadillac CT5.”^[3] GM’s response was a masterclass in selective citation: spokesman Kevin Kelly pointed to the CT5’s perfect 5-star NHTSA rating as proof of safety. NHTSA does not run the updated side-impact barrier test, does not evaluate headlights, and uses a lighter protocol for frontal overlap. Two agencies, two very different exams, and right now the CT5 is relying on the easier one.

What makes this worse is what FARS data reveals about the car the CT5 replaced. Between 2014 and 2023, the Cadillac CTS recorded 265 deaths and a fatality rate of 1.32 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, more than double the Mercedes C-Class (0.63) and four times the Audi A4 (0.32).^[4] But the real outlier is impairment. Among 931 CTS drivers in fatal crashes, 25.9% tested positive for alcohol or drugs, the highest impairment rate of any luxury sedan in the dataset, with 20.6% testing positive for alcohol specifically.

So the sequence is this: GM built a sedan whose drivers were, per decade of federal crash data, the most impaired in luxury, then replaced it with a car whose B-pillar collapses when an SUV hits it at 37 mph and whose airbag misses the driver’s head during a side impact. One car’s problem was its drivers. Its successor’s problem is the engineering. No 2027 model year is planned; the earliest structural fix is a 2028 redesign.^[5]

A necessary caveat: the CTS and CT5 are different vehicles, and the CTS’s impairment data reflects its driver population, not a guarantee about who buys CT5s today. NHTSA’s 5-star methodology remains the federally mandated standard. But the gap between “5-star NHTSA” and “four Poor IIHS ratings” on the same $48,600 car should concern anyone who assumes a luxury badge means better protection; a Mazda CX-5 starting at $29,990 earned Top Safety Pick+ in the same round,^[6] and so did the Genesis G80, BMW X3, and Audi A5. If you are shopping for a midsize luxury sedan, check the specific model at iihs.org/ratings before the window sticker, and run your VIN through nhtsa.gov/recalls while you are at it. If you currently own a CT5, know that it scored poorly in exactly the crash type—a heavy SUV hitting your driver’s door at moderate speed—that the updated IIHS barrier was designed to simulate, and that no structural update is coming before 2028.