2018 Cadillac Escalade – Premium Luxury At The Race Track


A few weeks ago Cadillac asked if I would like to attend the IMSA race at Laguna Seca as a guest of theirs. They offered me my choice of loaner car for the weekend, and I had already intended to go to the race anyway, so I agreed without hesitation. I chose the venerable Escalade as my weekend steed, being that it shares the same V8 (okay, a sorta similar one) as the DPi-V.R prototypes racing in the IMSA Prototype category they were there to promote. I also received Cadillac hospitality, food, and lodging for the weekend, in the interest of full disclosure. I picked up the truck, and my Canadian photographer friend, Keiron Berndt (who shot all of these glorious photos) at the SFO airport on Thursday evening and headed south to the track. 

First, let’s discuss the race as it went down, then dig into the nitty-gritty of the road-going Cadillac. Running in the Prototype class, Cadillac has fairly well dominated the entire IMSA season. The Wayne Taylor team won the first five rounds of the championship in a row, the Mustang Sampling Cadillac won the 6th round, and the Whelen Engineering car the 7th. Thanks to Balance of Performance, the Cadillacs were slowly reigned in throughout the season, and they finally lost a race at the Road America 8th round. Laguna Seca being the 9th round, Cadillac and the Taylor brothers were once again on the pole position and looking really good. Dane Cameron in the Whelen Engineering car held the lead of the race for Cadillac until the penultimate lap when Renger Van Der Zande forced a mega pass up the inside at the famed Corkscrew. It was an unbelievable finish that will go down in history. Despite losing this race, Cadillac easily won the championship just a few weeks later at Petit Le Mans.


The race was awesome, but Cadillac didn’t win, so we won’t dwell too much on that. Let’s dig into the Escalade. Following race day, Keiron and I found a nice place to shoot the Caddy in the dying sunlight, and I’m definitely happy with how they came out. The kid is still a youngster, and I predict this guy is headed places, because he’s talented, ambitious, and willing to learn from anyone who will teach him. I’m happy to have worked with him on this event, because he’s killer. 

Though the truck has been around since 2015 relatively unchanged, I’d not been in the GMT K2XX version of the ‘sclade yet, and it was an interesting experience. Having grown up in the midwest, I’m quite familiar with GM’s full-size body-on-frame SUVs. I’m not such a proponent of SUVs in general, but I understand why they exist, and at least these giant truck frame beasts are seriously capable haulers, unlike their CUV little siblings. I’ve been in a few of the GMT900 chassis trucks, and this one definitely felt bigger and comfier and quieter. The interior of this truck was about as nice as any luxury automobile I’ve ever driven, with excellent touch points and relatively intuitive switchgear. The one fault I found in the interior is the glove box. Instead of simply having the glove box open like a glove box normally would, Cadillac opted to put an electronically controlled servo in there with an opener button mounted high on the center console to the right of the infotainment screen. It took us far too long to find the button than it should have. Of course, once you know where it is you’ll never forget, but it seemed like a change for the sake of change, and it rubbed me the wrong way. 

The driving dynamics are about what you’d expect for a truck that weighs nearly three tons (seriously, it’s over 5500 pounds). Even with the magnetic ride shocks optioned, the truck is floaty and crashy at the same time, and doesn’t exactly respond to steering inputs in a sports-car-like fashion. That said, it’s better than you’d expect it to be. We used this truck as a moving photography platform for a Porsche Cayman GT4 on highway 1, and while we constantly had to tell the Cayman driver to slow down, we managed to keep a reasonably steady 40 mile per hour pace through some seriously twisty sections of the road down by Big Sur. It wouldn’t be my first choice for such a task, but it worked in a pinch. The 420-horsepower, 460 lb-ft 6.2-liter V8 certainly didn’t hurt things, as acceleration was a titch quicker than ‘jaunty’. The drive down the coast from SFO to MRLS was smooth and comfortable, and the seats make for a sublime ass shelf, but floating this barge through the Highway 101 traffic felt like trying to dock an Oasis-class ship at your local yacht club. I’m used to small cars, and this was a rude awakening. People drive these every day?

This version of CUE was a bit better than prior iterations, but the onboard navigation was less than intuitive. I’ve yet to find a single factory-option navigation that was as good as even Apple Maps (and that’s saying something!), so I’m glad that many manufacturers have simply defaulted to CarPlay or Android Auto integration. Waze owns all, just use that. 

This truck was optioned out as a “Premium Luxury” model with four-wheel drive. Cadillac added Adriatic Blue paint ($595), Power-Retractable Assist Steps ($1750), and Kona Brown leather interior ($2000). Add in the Radiant Package ($2,695), which includes chrome 22″ wheels, a “Galvano” silver mesh front grille, and a chrome exhaust tip, and you’ve got an ostentatious, yet somehow strangely attractive, full-sized SUV with a slap-me-in-the-face price of $94,130. There is a Platinum Package above this one which essentially includes the options that this truck had plus some extra leather which is even more expensive. Considering that this truck adds nearly twenty thousand dollars on top of the base model with two-wheel drive, and almost doubles the starting price of the Chevrolet Tahoe on which it is based, reality sets in quickly. 

Aside from its largeness, exorbitant price, and the strangely placed glove box button, this satellite radio fin made me irrationally upset. Instead of being centered and mounted rearward, this piece was offset and mounted basically directly above the steering wheel. The human eye is trained to find beauty in symmetry, and this just plain felt wrong. 

The Cadillac Escalade is the automotive equivalent of a power move. It’s brash and in your face, over the top luxury for the sake of. You really want people to know you’ve arrived when you pull up in this extreme machine. This truck goes against every automotive tenet I hold true, and yet somehow I don’t find myself hating it. It was the old-school American luxury that I’m used to, a reasonable facsimile to the driving experience I’ve had in so many Lincolns, Buicks, and Cadillacs of the past. You experience the road much the same way you would operate a television remote with winter gloves on; there is little tactility and even less sensation of motion. If you desire a disconnect from the world around you, Escalade provides. 
By contrast, the remainder of Cadillac’s lineup is filled with gorgeous, flowing, futuristic designs, and dynamically excellent automobiles. The Escalade is incongruous with the current design language, featuring slab sides, an upright grille, and too-big everything. It also feels nothing like any of its brand mates from a driving experience perspective. Though they share a somewhat spurious engine connection, the Escalade is the ideological opposite of Cadillac’s DPi-V.R prototype. It might be the ideological opposite of a modern Cadillac. At least they stopped making the Escalade EXT
[Disclaimer: Cadillac provided the vehicle for the purpose of this review. All images copyright Keiron Berndt/Hooniverse 2017]

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10 responses to “2018 Cadillac Escalade – Premium Luxury At The Race Track”

  1. robbydegraff Avatar
    robbydegraff

    This is a gorgeous review, nice work

    1. Zentropy Avatar
      Zentropy

      I agree, that was a great write-up, even though the Escalade doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I particularly liked the phrase “sublime ass shelf”.

  2. Maymar Avatar
    Maymar

    Part of me wonders if putting the glovebox release on the dash was so the driver wouldn’t have to reach over quite so awkwardly (like a McMansion, these are big enough to let you ignore your family), but ultimately it’s an awkward reach to the glovebox no matter what. Also, the 3rd row is just cruel.
    Nice trucks otherwise, but I don’t think I could justify stepping up from a Tahoe/Yukon (and frankly, if I’m getting something this big, might as well go whole hog and get the Suburban/Yukon XL), since they’re more suitable for the right kind of rich person (for the record, I’m neither kind of rich person).

    1. 0A5599 Avatar
      0A5599

      After they depreciate a couple of years, Escalades sell for about the same price as a loaded Tahoe/Suburban with similar miles. But with the Cadillac, you get a bigger, more powerful engine (currently 6.2L, not 5.3L as the article states), better suspension, better headlights, more bells/whistles, etc. As an added bonus, original owners of Cadillacs tend to be meticulous about following service schedules, and having the dealership perform the work, so when they hit the used market, Escalades tend to be better maintained than WorkingMom’s Chevy SoccerWagon.

  3. Sjalabais Avatar
    Sjalabais

    “Premium Luxury” – I think a lot of people have come to accept “premium” as a real thing, sort of between middle quality and can’t-afford-this-time-honoured-luxury. 20 years of marketing mumbo jumbo does that. But it is incredibly revealing how the combo of these two words strives to achieve something that doesn’t exist: Is it “premium” or is it “luxury”? Or is it something in between or above? Or is it “de luxe” like a Trabant or Wartburg with a radio? Reading this from a continent away, I also wonder who buys these: Is it a mixed demographic? Or does a cliché follow them?

    1. duurtlang Avatar
      duurtlang

      I’ve always considered old-school Mercedes (up to and including the W124) as a Premium manufacturer. Cars that just oozed quality, even when you drove an utterly bare bones underpowered version. My experience with a 4-speed manual W124 200D comes to mind. That car was built like a bank vault and seemed to be made of materials that would last an eternity. Even the engine was smoother than it had any right to be, even after many decades and countless of hundreds of thousands of kms.
      Nowadays it’s all marketing bullshit.
      Last year I visited the US and rented a 2016 Chevrolet Impala Limited. Not known as a luxury car or a premium one, I realize that. Quite the opposite. Still though, it was the exact opposite of that Mercedes. It actually had an insane >4 times the power of the Mercedes, but it never invited you to drive faster than how fast you’d drive the Mercedes. The Chevy had a lot of extra features, but they were all very poorly implemented. The Chevy seats had 6k miles on them, rather than the 400k+ kms of the Mercedes cloth seats I remember, yet the Chevy seats were really uncomfortable and already showed more wear than the ancient Mercedes ones. The Chevy seats were power adjusted though, so making it better marketable than a car with properly designed/built manual adjustable seats.
      It’s the whole issue nowadays, imho. People cross shop with check lists, resulting in ‘adequate’ cars with lots of poorly implemented bullshit rather than well built cars with fewer but better ‘options’. I’d rather have great manual adjusted seats with nice cloth than uncomfortable seats that happen to have (cheap) leather and are power adjustable. Marketing people might not agree, but I see the former as “Premium” and the latter as “Luxury”.

    2. Maymar Avatar
      Maymar

      I will vouch for premium as slightly more than recent marketing mumbo jumbo. Consider Alfred Sloan’s model for GM – Buick was set up as a premium product, Cadillac was the luxury car.
      “Premium luxury” sounds like the sort of nonsense needed to appeal to the sort of person who can’t stop with the conspicuous consumption though, lest they can’t keep the distractions from letting themselves get a little too introspective to consider the emptiness of their lives.

  4. Alan Allawi Avatar
    Alan Allawi

    I love Cadillacs. I have both 1978 bronze color Coupe Deville All original with 17K miles & 2013 Escalade EXT Premium black on black with 33K miles.

    1. Alff Avatar
      Alff

      Hemmings published a profile of a bronze Coupe Deville about a year ago. Yours?

      1. Alan Allawi Avatar
        Alan Allawi

        No. I purchased my 78 Coupe Deville from https://www.connorsmotorcar.com in Pennsylvania