If you are in the market for a high performance luxury sedan, you might go shopping among the German manufacturers first, and that’s fine. But if you plop down $86-grand for a BMW M5, for instance, you’ll get a marvelous sports sedan. But you won’t own the fastest. For that, you’ll need to shop the Cadillac store and spend considerably less for the CTS-V.

The important letter in all this is “V.” It doesn’t stand for anything really other than the hot rod version of various Caddy models, but as far as I’m concerned, it means velocity. A lot of it. Enough of it to peel back your eyelids and have your tongue hanging out like a basset hound in a pickup.

All this is due to a huge lump of metal under the hood. The 6.2-liter V8 usually pulls the Corvette ZO6 around, and you would think that would be enough. But no, Cadillac decided to supercharge and intercool this beast and that sends the horsepower rating into nosebleed territory.

556-horsepower is what we are talking about here, 56 more than the hot Bimmer and more than the E63 AMG Mercedes, all for a starting price roughly 30-grand less. Hit the go pedal from a standing start and you will be at 60 miles an hour in 3.9 seconds, with a 6-speed automatic, not the optional manual gearbox! Leave your foot down and it runs out of steam at around 175 miles per hour.

I even managed to coax it up to 15 miles per gallon in town, about as good as a mid-size 6-cylinder sedan.

The CTS-V is angular and mean. Inside, sumptuous wood delights and hand-stitched leather Recaro seats hold your backside firmly in place. You’ll need it because you’re gripping the walnut steering wheel of the fastest production sedan in the world. It’s solid as a house, handles like you’re wearing it, and runs like a scalded cat.

I don’t want to influence you or anything, but if you’ve got 60-large kind of laying around not doing much, I’d buy it. Tomorrow.