Before I made the trip to Tahoe last weekend, GM gave me use of the company’s 9,000-pound flagship — the new 2026 Escalade IQL electric (starting at $130,405) — for a week to test drive. Before you continue, note that I am not a professional car reviewer. TechCrunch has the best writers on logistics; I am not one of them. However, I drive an electric car.
I was immediately game. I first saw one last summer at a car show, where regional car dealers were stationed at the end of a long field of beautiful vintage cars. My immediate reaction was “Jesus, that’s huge,” followed by an overwhelming admiration for its design, which, despite its enormous size, exudes restraint. For lack of a better word, I will say “belting.” Its measurements just work.
My excitement quickly ended when the car was dropped off at my house the day before our departure time. This thing is a luxury – at 228.5 inches long and 94.1 inches wide, it makes our cars look like toys. My first apartment in San Francisco was small. Trying to drive it up my driveway was a little scary, too; it is so big, and its cover is so high, that if you go up the road in a certain slope – it sits in the middle of the hill; our mailbox is on top of it – you can’t see anything in front of the car.
I thought about just leaving it on the road during the trip. The only other option was to do what I could to get more comfortable with the prospect of driving it 200 miles to Tahoe City, so I tooled it that night and the next day, grabbing dinner, going to exercise class – just the basics in town. When I met a friend on the street, I volunteered as quickly as I could that this was not my new car, which I was about to review, and wasn’t its size ridiculous? It was like a tank. I thought: besides hotels using SUVs like the Escalade to transport guests, what kind of beast chooses a vehicle like this?
Five days later, it turned out that I was that kind of monster.
Look, I don’t know how and when this car fell. If I had written this review two days later, it would have read very differently. Even now, I am not so blind that I cannot see its shortcomings.
It was the performance of the Escalade in the worst snowstorm that won my heart, but let me walk you through the steps between “Wow, this car is a tank” and “Yes! tank.”
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Just getting into it requires more effort than might seem reasonable. I’m fairly athletic and still find 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 cockpit. The front passengers get their own screens. Second-row passengers also get 12.6-inch personal screens and tolerable tray tables, two wireless chargers, and — in the car’s most luxurious version — massaging seats that will make you forget you’re in a car at all. Google Maps handles navigation. And the split-screen technology deserves its own credit: while one of my kids binge-watched Hulu in the front seat, not a single frame of it leaked into my field of vision behind the wheel.
The cabin itself is designed in such a way that no one inside should feel crowded, and it delivers. The front leg reaches 45.2 centimeters; the second line gives 41.3; even the third row controls 32.3 inches. Seven adults can use this machine for a long time without scaring each other’s feelings. Heated and ventilated leather seats with 14-way power adjustment come standard on the first two rows, and everything works on 5G Wi-Fi.
The car also comes standard with Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free drive system, which I’m not sure I got. True car reviewers seem to love it; when i tried it, the car felt like it was drifting at an alarming rate between the freeway’s outer limits, and when that happened, it let off an escalating sequence of warnings. First, a red steering wheel icon appears on the screen. Then your seat hits haptic alerts against your rump. Ignore that and the chime — both a reminder and a reproach — fills the closet. GM calls this disrespectful series a “driver pickup request.”
Did I mention the 38-speaker AKG Studio sound system? Good.
As for the exterior – this is a beautiful giant, but we need to get used to it. At first, I found the grille, purely visual, almost comical. This is definitely a car for people who are not husbands, or who want to be bosses, or who want to look like bosses while secretly dealing with existing problems. Pulling into a glass-fronted restaurant one night, I’m sure I blinded half the patrons as I swerved into the parking lot opposite the building, the Escalade’s headlights filling the windows.
Then there’s the light show the car launches whenever it sees you approaching with the key or the MyCadillac app. It was like saying, “Hey, boss, where are we going?” before you touch the door handle. (In Cadillac parlance, this is due to an “advanced, all-LED exterior lighting system,” highlighted by an illuminated “crystal shield” and crest, as well as vertical LED headlights and “painting-capable taillights.”)
It is, apparently, very little. I immediately fell in love with it.
Despite its size, the Escalade IQL is unexpected. Not “a sports car running through traffic”, but “I can’t believe something so big doesn’t handle like a battleship”.
Now we come to frustration. The front trunk – or “frunk” in the lexicon of EV devotees – works in mysterious and frustrating ways. Activation requires holding the button until complete. It is released early and stops midway, frozen in the car wash, forcing you to restart the entire series. Closing requires constant uniform pressure. The rear trunk, in contrast, requires two separate taps followed by a quick release of the button. Hold for a long time and nothing happens.
Similarly, twice, the car turned off the power after finishing driving. The car simply sits down, runs, or is moved to park and opens the door (turns off the car). One solid solution: open the frunk, close the frunk, shift into drive, then park, then exit completely.
As for the software, it’s pretty good unless you own a Tesla, in which case, prepare to be disappointed. This seems to be true across the board – everyone I know who owns a Tesla and another EV, no matter how high end, says the same thing. Once you internalize how easily Tesla’s software removes the barriers between intent and execution, every other automaker’s software feels like a compromise.
Which brings us to the nadir of the trip: charging at Tahoe in the winter. For all its good features, the Escalade IQL is, by any measure, a dry machine. The battery is a 205 kWh pack – it’s huge, and it needs to be, because the car burns about 45 kWh per 100 miles, much more than comparable electric SUVs. Cadillac estimates 460 miles of range on a full charge, and in ideal conditions it holds up. Tahoe in the winter, however, are not ideal conditions. We came with less money than we should have. A series of side trips on the way up, including an emergency detour to get some shirts for a family member who hadn’t packed, drained the battery more than expected. When we needed to charge, we really needed to charge.
We approached the Tesla Supercharger in Tahoe City from the MyCadillac app, but when we connected to the selected dealership, nothing happened. We searched for answers, and found out that even Tesla stations that accept non-Tesla cars draw 6 kilowatts per hour anyway, but it was a frustrating experience. The nearest EVGo had closed a month ago. Two ChargePoint units at the Tahoe City Public Utility facility, respectively, were broken and willing to connect but not charging. We briefly considered the 35-mile drive to Incline Village, did some math on what the stranded would look like, and decided against it. Then I found an Electrify America station about 12 miles away. We drove through the snow, arrived before 11pm, and it worked. We stayed there for an hour fighting fatigue before driving home.
The next morning revealed another problem with the application warning: the tire pressure dropped to 53 and 56 PSI in the front (recommended: 61) and 62 PSI in the rear (recommended: 68). I don’t know if the car was delivered that way or if something else was going on – either way, it meant that someone was standing in the garage filling up the tires when they got hit right in the face with snow. (That was my husband.) The wheels stuck tight after that, as the church just kept getting worse. For a family trip, it was fine.
At this point, in fact, I would tell you that the Escalade IQL is undeniably luxurious and perfect for families of four or more who value space and technology. I can tell you it comes loaded with real trade-offs: forward visibility obstructed by the curb, parking challenges commensurate with its size, limited charging infrastructure for the gnarly machine, and tires tasked with supporting 9,000 pounds. I would say it’s a nice car, but it’s not for me.
But the snow that started to fall kept falling. In two days, eight feet had accumulated, making it difficult to ski – all around the trip – and scary to drive. Except I found that I wasn’t panicking because we had an Escalade, which because of its weight, was like driving a tank on snow. To my surprise, he felt calm. It was quiet, powerful, and controlled in a bad situation.
I also got used to the size. By the end of this past week I had stopped saying “I’m sorry” to anyone who was waiting to see where I was going to park. And I stopped paying attention to what it says about me that I drive a car whose whole design philosophy is: the owner of this car does not wait in line. The snow had fallen, we needed groceries, and I was the one with the tank, suckers! I saw my husband cross the car, too.
Then, as is often the case in Tahoe, the snow stopped all at once and the sun came out, and the Escalade was the dirtiest car sitting on the road (sorry, GM!). It was at this moment that I realized: I still love you, and it’s not just because of an emergency. I love riding high, with the speaker system filling the car with a favorite song. That light show still gets me. The car’s long curved LED screen is impressive, among other features.
The frunk is still unchanged. I will never soon forget the fear of not being able to charge the car when I thought I could. Parking this thing is really an exercise in patience. I have strong opinions about unnecessary consumption. None of this has changed.
And I just, somehow, want this car, so when the GM middleman comes to pick it up, I might as well hide it under a tarp – a really big tarp – and tell him you have the wrong address.
