Back in February 2017 Cadillac announced that its infotainment system, known as CUE, was dead and it would be replaced by the next-generation Cadillac user experience. CUE stood for Cadillac User Experience, but that's dead now as the American automaker launches the next-gen Cadillac user experience, which it swears isn't CUE.

Confused yet? You should be.

Back up the train a bit and you'll remember that the CUE infotainment system made its debut with the ATS for the 2013 model year, then spread across the lineup as vehicles were introduced or refreshed. On paper it showed promise, but in reality it was a trainwreck. The infotainment and climate systems were controlled completely by a touchscreen and touch-sensitive buttons. Move past the fact that CUE was straight confusing for those unfamiliar with it, the system itself would freeze up, go blank, and sometimes require the car to be turned off and locked just so the system could reset.

Now Cadillac says it's killing CUE and launching its replacement, the next-generation Cadillac user experience. Of course this is confusing as those three words are what CUE stood for, but Cadillac swears CUE is dead.

With CUE dead and the 2017 Cadillac CTS the first car to launch the new infotainment system, I was quite surprised when I started a 2017 Cadillac CTS-V and saw "CUE" splash across the car's infotainment screen.

We reached out to a Cadillac spokesman, who said, "CUE is dead and the 2017 CTS has the next-generation Cadillac user experience. It will simply take us time to re-brand and replace the CUE splash screen upon vehicle startup."

So when a new Cadillac with the next-generation Cadillac user experience is turned on it will say "CUE" on the screen despite it not actually being CUE. Got it?

When pressed for how long we'll continue to see the "CUE" splash screen on cars with the next-generation Cadillac user experience, we were told, "years."

Why? It has to do with model cycles and product planning. It seems not everyone on the various development teams were completely in-sync when it came to launch timing.

TL:DR: The new Cadillac user experience isn't the old Cadillac User Experience even though it will be branded "CUE" on the splash screen for quite some time.