The 9,000-pound monster I don’t want to give back

Before heading on a trip to Tahoe last weekend, GM offered me the use of the company’s 9,000-pound monument to excess – the new electric Escalade IQL (starting at $130,405) – for a week to test-drive. Before you continue, note that I’m not a professional car reviewer. TechCrunch has excellent transportation writers; I am not one of them. I’m just a car enthusiast, one with two electric cars in the family (this is not uncommon in the Bay Area).

I was immediately game. I’d first glimpsed one last summer at a car show, where some regional car dealers had stationed themselves at the end of a long field of exquisite vintage automobiles. My immediate reaction was “Jesus, that’s enormous,” followed by a surprising admiration for its design, which, despite its enormous scale, shows restraint. For lack of a better word, I’m going to say it’s “strapping.” Its proportions just work.

My excitement waned pretty quickly when the car 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 look like toys. My first apartment in San Francisco was smaller. Trying to drive it up my driveway was a little harrowing, too; it’s so big, and its hood is so high, that if you’re ascending a road at a certain slope – we live midway down a hill; our mailbox is at the top of it – you can’t see whatever is directly in front of the car.

I thought about just leaving it in the driveway for the duration of the trip. The other 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 next day, picking up dinner, heading to an exercise class — just basic stuff around town. When I ran into a friend on the street, I volunteered as quickly as possible that this was not my new car, that I was going to possibly review it, and wasn’t its size ridiculous? It felt like a tank. I thought: other than hotels that use SUVs like the Escalade to ferry guests around, what kind of monster chooses a car like this?

Five days later, it turns out that I am that kind of monster.

Look, I don’t know how or when I fell for this car. If I’d written this review after two days, it would read very differently. 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 really won my heart, but let me walk you through the steps between “Ugh, this car is a tank” and “Yes! This car is a tank.”

Just getting into it requires a little more exertion than would seem to make sense. I’m fairly athletic and I still found myself wondering if this thing shouldn’t come with an automated 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 car display and more like a situation room. Front passengers get their own screens. Second-row passengers also get 12.6-inch personal screens along with stowable tray tables, dual wireless chargers, and — with the most lavish version of the car — massage seats that will make them forget they’re in a vehicle at all. Google Maps handles navigation. And the polarized screen technology deserves its own praise: while one of my kids binge-watched Hulu in the front seat, not a frame of it leaked into my sightline from behind the wheel.

The cabin itself is built around the premise that no one inside should feel crowded, and it delivers. Front legroom stretches to 45.2 inches; the second row offers 41.3; even the third row — historically the place where goodwill goes to die on a long drive — manages 32.3 inches. Seven adults could share this machine for a long while without fraying each other’s nerves. Heated and ventilated leather seats with 14-way power adjustment come standard in the first two rows, and the whole operation runs on 5G Wi-Fi. The car also comes standard with Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free driving system, which I’m not sure I quite figured out. Actual reviewers seem to love it; when I tried it, the car felt like 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 — both 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 exterior — this is a handsome giant, but it takes some getting used to. At first, I found the grille, which is just for show, almost comically imposing. This is definitely a car for people who are the boss, or want to be the boss, or want to look like the boss while privately dealing with existential crises. Pulling up to a glass-lined restaurant one night, I’m pretty sure I blinded half the patrons as I swung into a parking spot perpendicular to the building, the Escalade’s headlights flooding through the windows.

Then there is the light show the car launches whenever it detects you approaching via the key or the MyCadillac app. It as if it’s saying, “Hey, chief, where we headed?” before you’ve so much as touched a door handle. (In the vernacular of Cadillac, this is thanks to its “advanced, all-LED exterior lighting system,” highlighted by a “crystal shield” illuminated grille and crest, along with vertical LED headlamps and “choreography-capable tail lamps.”)

It is, objectively, a bit much. I loved it immediately.

Despite its size, the Escalade IQL is unexpectedly nimble. Not “sports car darting through traffic” nimble, but “I can’t quite believe something this colossal doesn’t handle like a battleship” nimble.

Now we arrive at the frustrations. The front trunk — or “frunk” in 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 the entire sequence. Closing demands the same 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 car simply sat there, running, even when shifted to park and opened the door (which tells the car to turn off). Solution: open the frunk, close the frunk, shift into drive, then park, then exit entirely.

As for the software, it’s absolutely fine unless you’ve owned a Tesla, in which case, prepare for disappointment. This seems to be true across the board — everyone I know who owns both a Tesla and another EV says the same thing. Once you’ve internalized how effortlessly Tesla’s software dissolves barriers between intention and execution, every other automaker’s software feels 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 needs to be, because the car burns through roughly 45 kWh per 100 miles, which is considerably more than comparable electric SUVs. Cadillac estimates 460 miles of range on a full charge, and in ideal conditions that holds up. Tahoe in winter, however, is not ideal conditions. We’d also arrived with less charge than we should have. A series of side trips on the way up, including an emergency detour to find shirts for a family member who had packed none, had eaten into the battery more than expected. By the time we needed to charge, we genuinely needed to charge.

We approached a Tesla Supercharger in Tahoe City that appeared on the MyCadillac app, but when we plugged in, nothing happened. We tried two more stalls. A GM representative explained, not entirely helpfully, that Tesla throttles non-Tesla vehicles to 6 kilowatts per hour anyway, but it was a frustrating discovery. A nearby EVGo had shuttered a month prior. ChargePoint’s two units at the Tahoe City Public Utility lot were, respectively, broken and willing to connect but not to actually charge anything. We briefly contemplated a 35-mile drive to Incline Village, did the math on what stranded would actually look 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. I sat there for an hour fighting exhaustion before driving home.

The following morning revealed another issue: tire pressure had dropped to 53 and 56 PSI in the front (recommended: 61) and 62 PSI in the rear (recommended: 68). I have no idea whether the car had been delivered that way or whether something else was going on — either way, it meant someone standing at a gas station filling tires while being pelted directly in the face with ice. That someone was my husband. The tires held steady after that, even as the week kept doing its worst. For a family trip, it was going great.

At this point, in fact, I would have told you that the Escalade IQL is unquestionably luxurious and ideal for families of four or more who value space and technology. I would tell you it came 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 pounds. It’s a beautiful car, I would have said, but it’s not for me.

But the snow that had started to fall kept falling. Within two days, eight feet had accumulated, making it impossible to ski — the entire point of the trip — and terrifying to drive. Except I found that I wasn’t terrified because we had the Escalade, which, because of its weight, felt like driving a tank through the snow. What could have been harrowing felt serene.

I also adjusted to the size. By the end of this past week I had stopped mouthing “I’m sorry” to whoever who was waiting for me to figure out where to park it. I had stopped caring what it said about me that I was driving a car whose entire design philosophy is: the owner of this vehicle is not waiting in line. Eight feet of snow had fallen, we needed groceries, and I was the one with the tank, suckers! I could sense my husband falling for the car, too.

Then the snow stopped and the sun came out, and the Escalade was just a very dirty car sitting in the driveway (sorry, GM!). I still like it, too, and I realize it’s not because of the emergency alone. I love riding high, with the speaker system flooding the car with a favorite soundtrack. That light show still gets me. The frunk is still unhinged. I won’t soon forget the panic of not being able to charge a 9,000-pound car where I thought I could. Parking this thing is truly a stressful endeavor. I have strong opinions about unnecessary consumption. None of that has changed.

I just also, somehow, want this car, so when the GM middleman comes to collect it, I may hide it under a tarp — a very large tarp — and tell him he has the wrong address.