Only America could build the Cadillac Escalade IQ. Australia isn鈥檛 ready for cars like this.
More is better
Born in a land where too much is never enough, this car that truly pushes the boundaries of excess.
From the 55-inch digital display upfront to the 38-speaker Dolby Atmos Stereo, 126 colour ambient lighting package and 24-inch wheels, there isn鈥檛 a single part of the Escalade where the development team considered dialling things down a bit.
The result is a car that stands out.
Trimmed in leather and lovely open-pore wood, the Caddy鈥檚 cabin has opulent seats that are heated, cooled, and built with an internal massage function that kneads away knots in your back.
Priced from US$150,490 ($233,542) in America as tested, it would cost significantly more in Australia once right-hand-drive conversion fees and taxes (including our luxury car tax) are taken into account – perhaps as much as $400,000.
It might be too much
Cadillac鈥檚 electric Escalade weighs more than 4.5 tonnes with passengers and cargo on board – you could not drive it on a regular car licence in Australia. That鈥檚 because it鈥檚 built around an enormous (and enormously heavy) battery with more than 200kWh of storage.
General Motors aimed for maximum bragging rights with the big Caddy, and wanted to claim the longest driving range of any electric SUV in America. The result is an enormous beast with a claimed 740 kilometres of range. It has power to match, with electric motors on the front and rear axles send up to 560kW and 1064 Nm to the tyres, which is enough to fire near enough to five tonnes of luxury wagon to 100km/h in less than five seconds.
Charging is similarly rapid, with 350kW charging speeds returning up to 190km of range in 10 minutes.
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On the road
This is car is so huge that checking your blind spot sometimes involved a second glance over the shoulder as your mind doesn鈥檛 initially recognise that there can be so much metal behind you.
It鈥檚 huge but doesn鈥檛 always feel enormous. Clever rear wheel steering shrinks its turning circle in town and reduces effort on the highway. Adaptive air suspension irons out bumps so that the big Esky glides over imperfections rather than romping and stomping.
Light steering and those enormously powerful motors help to reduce the sense of inertia you might get from big four-wheel-drives, too.
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Super cruise
The Escalade鈥檚 top selling point in the US might be General Motors鈥 Super Cruise, a sort of advanced cruise control that allows you to hand over driving duties to the car on many highways in the States.
Unlike many alternatives on the road today, this is a true hands-off system.
If you keep watching the road ahead, and resist the temptation to pick up your phone, the car will cruise along, passing slower cars, taking motorway exits and maintaining safe gaps to surrounding traffic.
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GM Super Cruise spokesman Jeff Miller says more than 80 per cent of customers with Super Cruise say it makes for a more relaxing drive.
鈥淚t鈥檚 the comfort and convenience factor,鈥 he says. 鈥渓ove manually driving, but it鈥檚 also awesome just to hit a button and relax and have that monotonous task be performed by the car.鈥
Super Cruise works differently to alternatives such as Uber鈥檚 Waymo or Tesla鈥檚 Autopilot.
While those cars use lidar or cameras to continuously scan their environment, Super Cruise relies on high-resolution maps of highways pre-scanned by sophisticated vehicles with more than $1 million worth of sensors on board.
It works on roughly one million kilometres of highways in the US, but not in urban environments.
鈥淭he reason why we鈥檝e constrained Super Cruise to where we constrained it to is you don鈥檛 have to worry about pedestrians,鈥 Miller says.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of those unknown scenarios that you get into that are more difficult to develop around when you get into city type driving, and that obviously increases the cost of the sensing set that you need to detect those scenarios.鈥
While Tesla鈥檚 camera-based system is relatively easy to apply to new countries, Super Cruise require enormous investment in scanning and mapping roads by General Motors, which uses unique tech not shared with rivals.
It means the feature is a long way off for Australia, which just isn鈥檛 ready for cars like this.
Cadillac Escalade IQ
PRICE: About $230,000 drive-away
ON SALE: Not in Australia
WARRANTY: 4-year, 50,000 mile
POWER: Dual electric motors, 560kW/1064 Nm
RANGE: 740km
TOWING: 3628kg
CARGO: 1092L