Before my trip to Tahoe last weekend, GM offered me a week to test drive the company’s 9,000-pound monument to excess, the new 2026 electric Escalade IQL (starting at $130,405). Before we continue, please know that I am not a professional car reviewer. TechCrunch has some great transportation writers. I am not one of them. But I drive an electric car.
I played the game immediately. I first saw some local car dealers at a car show last summer, set up at the end of a long field dotted with exquisite vintage cars. My immediate reaction was “Oh my god, this is huge,” followed by incredible admiration for the understated design despite its sheer size. For lack of a better word, I’ll say “strapping.” That ratio just works.
My excitement wore off pretty quickly when the car arrived at my house a day before departure time. This is a monster measuring 228.5 inches long and 94.1 inches wide. They made our car look like a toy. My first apartment in San Francisco was smaller. Driving up to my driveway was also a bit of a pain. It’s so big and the hood is so high that if you’re going up a road at a certain slope, we live halfway down the hill. Our mailbox is at the top. You can’t see what’s right in front of your car.
I was thinking about just leaving it in the driveway while I was traveling. Another alternative was to do what I could to become more comfortable with the prospect of driving 200 miles to Tahoe City. So that night and the next day, I was there tooling, eating dinner, and attending exercise classes. Just the basics around town. When I met a friend on the street, I volunteered as quickly as possible that this wasn’t my new car, that I could review it, and that the size wasn’t outrageous. It felt like a tank. I thought to myself: What kind of monster would choose a car like this other than a hotel that uses SUVs like the Escalade to ferry guests around?
Five days later, it turned out that I was such a monster.
Look, I don’t know how or when I fell in love with this car. If I had written this review two days later, it would have read very differently. Even now I am not so blind that I do not see its shortcomings.
What really blew my mind was the Escalade’s performance in a terrible snowstorm, but let me walk you through the steps between “Oh, this car is a tank” and “Yes! This car is a tank.” tank.”
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Getting into it takes a little more effort than it makes sense. I’m pretty athletic, but I still wonder if this product shouldn’t come with an automated footrest.
Inside is where digital maximalism comes into play. The dashboard opens up to a 55-inch curved LED screen with 8K resolution, making it look more like a control room than a car display. Front seat passengers receive their own screen. Second-row passengers also get a 12.6-inch personal screen along with a stowable tray table, dual wireless chargers, and, in the most luxurious version of the car, massage seats that will make you forget you’re in the car at all. Google Maps handles navigation. And polarized screen technology deserves praise in itself. While one of my kids binge-watched Hulu in the front seat, the frame didn’t escape my view from behind the driver’s seat.
The rooms themselves are built on the premise that those inside should not feel crowded, and they deliver on this. Front legroom increases to 45.2 inches. The second line gives 41.3. The third row also manages 32.3 inches. Seven adults could share this machine for a long time without getting on each other’s nerves. Heated and ventilated leather seats with 14-way power adjustment come standard in the first two rows, and are entirely powered by 5G Wi-Fi.
This car also comes standard with Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free driving system, but I’m not sure I understood it well. Real car reviewers seem to love it. When I tried it, it felt like the car was drifting alarmingly between the outer boundaries of highway lanes, and when that happened it triggered a series of increasingly warnings. First, a red handle icon will appear on the screen. The seat will then sound a haptic warning about your butt. Ignore them and chimes of notification and accusation fill the room. GM calls this rude behavior a ‘driver takeover request.’
Did I mention the 38-speaker AKG Studio sound system? I love it so much.
It’s a handsome giant on the outside, but it takes some getting used to. At first, the grille, which was just for show, seemed almost comically impressive. This is definitely the car for people who are bosses, want to be bosses, or want to look like bosses while dealing with a personal existential crisis. When I pulled into a glass-lined restaurant one night and pulled into a parking space perpendicular to the building, I’m pretty sure I blindsided half the customers. The Escalade’s headlights were flooding through the window.
Then there’s a light show where the car fires whenever it detects something approaching via the key or the MyCadillac app. It’s like saying, “Hey, Director, where did we go?” Before touching the door handle. (In Cadillac’s language, that’s thanks to an “advanced all-LED exterior lighting system” highlighted by a “crystal shield” illuminated grille and crest, along with vertical LED headlamps and “choreographable tail lamps”).
Objectively, it’s a bit like that. I liked it immediately.
Despite its size, the Escalade IQL is unexpectedly agile. Not “sports car speeding through traffic” agility, but “I can’t believe this massive car doesn’t handle like a battleship” agility.
Now we get to the point of frustration. The front trunk, also known as the “frunk” in the EV enthusiast’s lexicon, works in mysterious and frustrating ways. To open it, you need to hold down the button until it’s done. If you disarm it early, your mid-ascent will stop and you’ll be frozen in automotive purgatory, forcing you to start the entire sequence again. Closure requires the same constant pressure. Conversely, the rear trunk requires two separate taps and requires you to immediately give up the button. If you wait too long, nothing will happen.
Related to this, there were two instances where the vehicle refused to turn off even after I was done driving. The car sat there and ran even when I moved it to park and opened the door (instructing the car to turn off). One clunky solution: open the frunk, close the frunk, put it into drive mode, then park and get out completely.
As for software, if you’ve never owned a Tesla, there’s absolutely no problem. In this case, prepare to be disappointed. This seems to be true across the board. Everyone I know who owns both a Tesla and another EV, no matter how high-end, says the same thing. Once you internalize how easily Tesla’s software bridges the barrier between intent and execution, every other automaker’s software feels like a compromise.
The most difficult part of the trip is recharging in Tahoe during the winter. For all its virtues, the Escalade IQL is a thirsty machine by any standard. The battery is a huge 205kWh pack, and it needs to be. That’s because the car consumes about 45 kWh per 100 miles. This figure is significantly more than that of comparable electric SUVs. Cadillac estimates it will have a range of 460 miles on a full charge, which it can achieve under ideal conditions. But conditions in Tahoe in the winter are not ideal. We also arrived with less money than we should have. A series of side trips on the way up, including an emergency detour to pick up a shirt for a family member who hadn’t packed anything, drained the battery more than expected. By the time I needed a charge, I really needed a charge.
I approached the Tesla Supercharger in Tahoe City as shown in the MyCadillac app, plugged in to the designated stall, and nothing happened. We found the answer when we discovered that even Tesla stations that accept non-Tesla vehicles throttle the energy to 6 kW per hour, but it was a disappointing experience. The nearby EVGo closed a month ago. Two devices at a ChargePoint on the Tahoe City Public Utility lot were each broken and willing to be plugged in, but not actually charging anything. We briefly considered driving the 35 miles to Incline Village, did the math on what stranded people would actually look like, and decided against it. Then I found the Electrify America station 12 miles away. We drove through piling snow and arrived just before 11pm and it worked fine. We sat there fighting fatigue for an hour before driving home.
The next morning, an app notification revealed another problem. Tire pressures dropped to 53 and 56 PSI in the front (recommended: 61) and 62 PSI in the rear (recommended: 68). I have no idea if the car was delivered that way or if something else is going on. Either way, it meant someone was standing at a gas station filling up a tire and getting hit with ice directly in the face. (That person was my husband.) Even though the worst week continued, the tires have held steady ever since. It was a great family trip.
In fact, at this point I wanted to say that the Escalade IQL is undoubtedly luxurious and ideal for families of four or more who value space and technology. I would say it was burdened by the practical trade-offs. There’s forward visibility hampered by the hood, parking issues given its size, limited charging infrastructure for such a greedy machine, and tires that have to support 9,000 pounds. I would say it’s a beautiful car, but it’s not for me.
However, the snow that started falling continued to fall. Eight feet piled up in two days, making it impossible to ski, which was the whole purpose of the trip, and I was also scared of driving. The weight made it feel like I was driving a tank into the snow, except I wasn’t scared at all because I had an Escalade. What could have been painful felt calming. He was quiet, strong, and took control even in bad situations.
I also tried the size. By the end of last week, I stopped saying “I’m sorry” to anyone who was waiting for me to figure out where to park. I no longer cared what it said about me that I was driving a car whose entire design philosophy meant that the owner of this car was out of line. I needed groceries because there was 8 feet of snow and I was the only one with a tank, you idiot! I could feel my husband falling into the car too.
Then, as often happens in Tahoe, the snow stopped all at once, the sun came out, and the Escalade was just a very dirty car sitting in the driveway (sorry, GM!). I still love it, and that was the moment I realized it wasn’t just because of the emergency. I love riding high with the speaker system filling the car with my favorite soundtrack. That light show still fascinates me. The car’s long curved LED screen is its most striking feature.
The frunk is not yet released. The panic you felt when you couldn’t charge in the place you thought you could charge is something you won’t soon forget. Parking this is truly an exercise in patience. I have strong opinions about unnecessary spending. None of that has changed.
I also want this car somehow, so when the GM broker comes to pick it up, I can hide it under a very large tarp and tell them I have the wrong address.
