Before heading on a visit to Tahoe last weekend, GM offered me the usage of the corporate’s 9,000-pound monument to excess – the brand new 2026 electric Escalade IQL (starting at $130,405) – for per week to test-drive. Before you proceed, note that I’m not knowledgeable automobile reviewer. TechCrunch has excellent transportation writers; I’m not certainly one of them. I do, nevertheless, drive an electrical automobile.
I used to be immediately game. I’d first glimpsed one last summer at a automobile show, where some regional automobile dealers had stationed themselves at the top of a protracted field dotted with exquisite vintage automobiles. My immediate response was “Jesus, that’s enormous,” followed by a surprising admiration for its design, which, despite its enormous scale, shows restraint. For lack of a greater word, I’m going to say it’s “strapping.” Its proportions just work.
My excitement waned pretty quickly when the automobile was dropped off at my house a day before our departure time. This thing is a monstrosity — at 228.5 inches long and 94.1 inches wide, it made our own cars seem like toys. My first apartment in San Francisco was smaller. Attempting to drive it up my driveway was slightly harrowing, too; it’s so big, and its hood is so high, that for those who’re ascending a road at a certain slope – we live midway down a hill; our mailbox is at the highest of it – you possibly can’t see whatever is directly in front of the automobile.
I considered just leaving it within the driveway throughout the trip. The opposite alternative was doing what I could to grow more comfortable with the prospect of driving it 200 miles to Tahoe City, so I tooled around in it that night and the following day, picking up dinner, heading to an exercise class — just basic stuff around town. After I bumped into a friend on the road, I volunteered as quickly as possible that this was not my latest automobile, that I used to be going to possibly review it, and wasn’t its size ridiculous? It felt like a tank. I assumed: apart from hotels that use SUVs just like the Escalade to ferry guests around, what form of monster chooses a automobile like this?
Five days later, it seems that I’m that form of monster.
Look, I don’t know the way or once I fell for this automobile. If I’d written this review after two days, it could read very in a different way. Even now, I’m not so blind that I don’t see its shortcomings.
It was the Escalade’s performance in a terrible snowstorm that basically won my heart, but let me walk you thru the steps between “Ugh, this automobile is a tank” and “Yes! This automobile is a tank.”
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Just entering into it requires slightly more exertion than would appear to make sense. I’m fairly athletic and I still found myself wondering if this thing shouldn’t include an automatic step stool.
Inside is where digital maximalism does its work. The dashboard opens with a 55-inch curved LED screen with 8K resolution that reads less like a automobile display and more like a situation room. Front passengers get their very own screens. Second-row passengers also get 12.6-inch personal screens together with stowable tray tables, dual wireless chargers, and — with essentially the most lavish version of the automobile — massage seats that may make them forget they’re in a vehicle in any respect. Google Maps handles navigation. And the polarized screen technology deserves its own praise: while certainly one of my kids binge-watched Hulu within the front seat, not a frame of it leaked into my sightline from behind the wheel.
The cabin itself is built across the premise that nobody inside should feel crowded, and it delivers. Front legroom stretches to 45.2 inches; the second row offers 41.3; even the third row manages 32.3 inches. Seven adults could share this machine for a protracted while without fraying one another’s nerves. Heated and ventilated leather seats with 14-way power adjustment come standard in the primary two rows, and the entire operation runs on 5G Wi-Fi.
The automobile also comes standard with Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free driving system, which I’m unsure I quite found out. True automobile reviewers appear to like it; once I tried it, the automobile felt prefer it was drifting to an alarming degree between the outer boundaries of the highway lane, and when that happens, it unleashes an escalating sequence of warnings. First, a red steering wheel icon materializes on-screen. Then your seat pulses haptic warnings against your rump. Ignore those and a chime — each reminder and reproach — fills the cabin. GM calls this impolite series a “driver takeover request.”
Did I mention the 38-speaker AKG Studio sound system? So good.
As for the outside — it is a handsome giant, however it takes some getting used to. At first, I discovered the grille, which is only for show, almost comically imposing. This is unquestionably a automobile for people who find themselves the boss, or need to be the boss, or need to seem like the boss while privately coping with existential crises. Pulling as much as a glass-lined restaurant one night, I’m pretty sure I blinded half the patrons as I swung right into a parking spot perpendicular to the constructing, the Escalade’s headlights flooding through the windows.
Then there may be the sunshine show the automobile launches at any time when it detects you approaching via the important thing or the MyCadillac app. It’s as if it’s saying, “Hey, chief, where we headed?” before you’ve a lot as touched a door handle. (Within the vernacular of Cadillac, that is due to its “advanced, all-LED exterior lighting system,” highlighted by a “crystal shield” illuminated grille and crest, together with vertical LED headlamps and “choreography-capable taillights.”)
It’s, objectively, a bit much. I loved it immediately.
Despite its size, the Escalade IQL is unexpectedly nimble. Not “sports automobile darting through traffic” nimble, but “I can’t quite consider something this colossal doesn’t handle like a battleship” nimble.
Now we arrive on the frustrations. The front trunk — or “frunk” within the lexicon of EV devotees — operates in mysterious and frustrating ways. Opening requires holding the button until completion. Release prematurely and it halts mid-ascent, frozen in automotive purgatory, forcing you to restart your entire sequence. Closing demands the identical sustained pressure. The rear trunk, conversely, requires two distinct taps followed by immediate button abandonment. Hold too long and nothing happens.
Relatedly, twice, the vehicle refused to power down after I’d finished driving. The automobile simply sat there, running, even when shifted to park and opened the door (which tells the automobile to show off). One clunky solution: open the frunk, close the frunk, shift into drive, then park, then exit entirely.
As for the software, it’s absolutely effective unless you’ve owned a Tesla, by which case, prepare for disappointment. This appears to be true across the board — everyone I do know who owns each a Tesla and one other EV, irrespective of how high end, says the identical thing. When you’ve internalized how effortlessly Tesla’s software dissolves barriers between intention and execution, every other automaker’s software seems like a compromise.
Which brings us to the nadir of the trip: charging in Tahoe during winter. For all its virtues, the Escalade IQL is, by any measure, a thirsty machine. The battery is a 205 kWh pack — enormous, and it must be, since the automobile burns through roughly 45 kWh per 100 miles, which is considerably greater than comparable electric SUVs. Cadillac estimates 460 miles of range on a full charge, and in ideal conditions that holds up. Tahoe in winter, nevertheless, shouldn’t be ideal conditions. We’d also arrived with less charge than we should always have. A series of side trips on the way in which up, including an emergency detour to seek out shirts for a member of the family who had packed none, had eaten into the battery greater than expected. By the point we would have liked to charge, we genuinely needed to charge.
We approached a Tesla Supercharger in Tahoe City that appeared on the MyCadillac app, but after we plugged in to the designated stall, nothing happened. We looked for answers, discovering that even Tesla stations that accept non-Tesla vehicles throttle energy to six kilowatts per hour anyway, however it was a frustrating experience. A close-by EVGo had shuttered a month prior. ChargePoint’s two units on the Tahoe City Public Utility lot were, respectively, broken and willing to attach but not to really charge anything. We briefly contemplated a 35-mile drive to Incline Village, did the mathematics on what stranded would actually seem like, and decided against it. Then I discovered an Electrify America station 12 miles away. We drove through gathering snow, arrived shortly before 11 p.m., and it worked. We sat there for an hour fighting exhaustion before driving home.
The next morning revealed one other issue via an app alert: tire pressure had dropped to 53 and 56 PSI within the front (really helpful: 61) and 62 PSI within the rear (really helpful: 68). I don’t know whether the automobile had been delivered that way or whether something else was occurring — either way, it meant someone standing at a gas station filling tires while being pelted directly within the face with ice. (That somebody was my husband.) The tires held regular after that, at the same time as the week kept doing its worst. For a family trip, it was going great.
At this point, the truth is, I’d have told you that the Escalade IQL is certainly luxurious and ideal for families of 4 or more who value space and technology. I’d inform you it got here burdened by real tradeoffs: forward visibility obstructed by its commanding hood, parking challenges inherent to its dimensions, limited charging infrastructure for a machine this ravenous, and tires tasked with supporting 9,000 kilos. It’s a lovely automobile, I’d have said, however it’s not for me.
However the snow that had began to fall kept falling. Inside two days, eight feet had accrued, making it unattainable to ski — your entire point of the trip — and terrifying to drive. Except I discovered that I wasn’t terrified because we had the Escalade, which, due to its weight, felt like driving a tank through the snow. What might have been harrowing felt serene. It was quiet, it was strong, it was taking charge in a nasty situation.
I also adjusted to the dimensions. By the top of this past week I had stopped mouthing “I’m sorry” to whoever who was waiting for me to determine where to park it. I had stopped caring what it said about me that I used to be driving a automobile whose entire design philosophy is: the owner of this vehicle shouldn’t be waiting in line. Eight feet of snow had fallen, we would have liked groceries, and I used to be the one with the tank, suckers! I could sense my husband falling for the automobile, too.
Then, as tends to occur in Tahoe, the snow stopped and the sun got here out, and the Escalade was just a really dirty automobile sitting within the driveway (sorry, GM!). It was on this moment that I noticed: I still prefer it, and it’s not due to the emergency alone. I really like riding high, with the speaker system flooding the automobile with a favourite soundtrack. That light show still gets me. The automobile’s long, curved LED screen is a marvel, amongst other features.
The frunk continues to be unhinged. I won’t soon forget the panic of not with the ability to charge the automobile where I assumed I could. Parking this thing is really an exercise in patience. I even have strong opinions about unnecessary consumption. None of that has modified.
I just also, one way or the other, want this automobile, so when the GM middleman comes to gather it, I could hide it under a tarp — a really large tarp — and tell him he has the mistaken address.