The 2025 Cadillac Escalade IQ caught me off guard. The majority of GM’s Ultium EVs are pretty excellent. I had half a mind to title the (unfortunately named) GMC Sierra EV Denali as our truck of the year, as I was so taken with it. And, every Cadillac-branded EV that we’ve driven has been superb. Almost every review I’ve read of the Escalade IQ is glowing, with some even coming away “gobsmacked,” and I too was gobsmacked… but for all the wrong reasons.
It’s good at EV things, sort of
Let’s start with the basics: it shares the same platform and powertrain as the Silverado EV and Sierra EV, with two giant motors producing a gigantic 750 horsepower, fed by a gargantuan 205kWh battery, which supports 350kW DC fast charging, and has a 19.2kW onboard charger. Not so much on merit of efficient design, but by sheer quantity of on-board material, it has an impressive estimated cruising range of 748 kilometers, with real-world testing showing even more than that. I have a hard time respecting its range because it only achieves it by brute force, which is sort of the antithesis of EVs. But, the amount of engineering and resource that all came together to transport this four-and-a-half ton brick that far under its own power is indeed, gobsmacking.
It drives alright, for what it is
Like its corporate stablemates, it generally drives well, with some caveats that are inherent to any exceptionally large truck that’s also burdened with an entire Toyota Corolla’s mass in battery cells. Four wheel steering helps with maneuvering, but it’s strangely heavily weighted at low speeds, and almost resistant to quick movements – I’d expect smarter variable assist, but maybe there’s only so much to be done with this much force to contend with. It doesn’t quite feel as massive as it is, but it’s still a tad bit ponderous and awkward on the road because it is, inherently, rather massive.
It is very quick for sure, and like its siblings, it’s a little annoying that you have to flip through menus to enable its maximum quickness, but it’s more than quick enough to merge and pass with proper authority even in its most demure mode; anything beyond that is really just showing off. It’s also very quiet, and provides a very low noise floor for the 40+ speaker AKG sound system. Ride comfort is generally okay, but somewhat undone by secondary vibrations from the huge 24-inch wheels contending with the weight of a thousand suns bearing down on them. This same ride was fine in a truck, but less acceptable in a nearly two-hundred-thousand dollar luxury product.
Where it starts coming apart
I would have expected GM to deploy an air suspension system in this Cadillac to differentiate it, like they do with the gas Escalade and top trims of Yukon/Suburban; maybe it’s unfeasible in a heavier-than-heavy-duty vehicle (but you can get a Ram 3500 Dually with a very clever leaf and air spring arrangement, so who knows). Either way, the bones it shares with Chevy and GMC are good, and it’s a competent vehicle at its core. It drives far, fast, and generally fine.
The problem is all the Cadillac stuff on top of that core. They didn’t do any meaningful luxury engineering you’d expect like bespoke suspension, but it is riddled with faux-luxury frills that exemplify everything wrong with modern luxury vehicles. A luxury vehicle is supposed to feel, you know, luxurious, nice, calming, generally lovely, and there’s nothing lovely about being frustrated by overbearing technology implemented without care for detail.
Take, for example, that aforementioned AKG Reference Audio. It is very good at higher volumes, but, as you’d expect from a real studio reference system, it’s a little flat at more pedestrian noise levels, which is forgivable, if perhaps a tad bit disappointing. What is unforgivable is the apparent lack of an equalizer, or customizable sound stages, or anything that any other halfway decent sound system has been doing for decades. Maybe it’s buried somewhere in the IQ’s cursed library of menus, but I and my colleagues couldn’t find it over the course of a week, and if it’s that damn hard to find, it might as well not be there.
The user interface
All of the newest GM vehicles running the new Android Automotive infotainment software are at least a tiny bit too complicated for their own good. They’re not hard to live with, but there’s a lot of pretty core functions that are harder to access than you’d expect, like rain sensing wipers, drive modes, exterior cameras, and even exterior lights. They’re all on screen, all at least a few taps away from home, and the more nuanced stuff is even more buried behind menus, and it’s seldom clear which one. But, it’s generally not egregious, and still easy enough to learn and live with.
The Cadillac Escalade IQ’s version of this Android Automotive interface is egregious. The 33-inch screen in the brilliant Cadillac Lyriq and Optiq was apparently not enough for the Escalade IQ, nor was the beautifully tiered 38-inch display that was just rolled out in the 2023 Escalade. No no, clearly more screen is obviously more luxurious, and as such, the IQ gets a 55-inch monster that spans the entire dash, with an ungainly seam for the passenger’s third of this digital whale.
More screen does not equal more goodness
As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also an 11-inch display ahead of the center console that’s less of a long reach, primarily used for climate control. It’s a gimmick that Land Rover tried with the Range Rover years ago, realized that more screen is not more good, and rightly eliminated it for 2023. It didn’t work for them, it isn’t great at Audi, and the same idea at Lincoln is a big step backwards there, too – but they’ve implemented their mega-screen slightly more elegantly.
None of these screens are great, either. The inexplicable “gauges” have a low-rent refresh rate, and replacing the “gauges” with a large Google Maps display in front of the driver is generally more useful, but has an abrupt, ugly transition to the rest of the screen, which also has a map display on its home screen. To GM’s credit, it is crisp and quite responsive to touch, but still trails industry leaders in terms of overall slickness of operation – again, this is okay on a work truck, less okay on a very expensive flagship.
Questionable choices
The problem is the layout, or lack thereof. It’s not pretty. It’s not intuitive. Core functions are buried on screen, and said screen is a serious reach. This is supposed to be mitigated by a rotary control knob that’s exclusive to Cadillac, but the interface is exceptionally poorly suited to it, and you’ll spend more time fighting with it trying to get your cursor where you want it to go. Worse still, the knob has a very unsatisfying, hard, loud, cheap feeling click that almost discourages you from using it. Mazda has this figured out on thirty thousand dollar economy cars, but GM still can’t get haptics right.
That reminds me: there’s no escape with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto here. You’re stuck with this, and its annoying quirks with phone integration and message notifications, like its tendency to mute whatever you’re listening to when you get a message… and then not unmute it. On the tech front, it also has handy blind spot cameras that pop up on screen when you use the turn signal, which is a very nice feature from the Hyundai/Kia/Genesis conglomerate. Unlike that Korean cabal, the camera feed pops up in the middle of the dash, away from where you’d think to look, and not in the cluster in front of you. It’s also very low resolution, which is jarring on the otherwise sharp display.
Doors, and the incorrect answer to a question nobody asked
Speaking of misguided digital gimmicks and things that shouldn’t be on a screen, this Escalade IQ has electronically opening doors. I don’t mean an electronic release like the Ford Mustang Mach E (which is foolish there, too), I mean electrically powered doors that swing open and closed for you. I can see an instance where this might be impressive, like when my colleague Imran picked me up from the airport in a gas-powered ‘25 Escalade earlier this year, and was able to use the smaller touch display to swing the door open for me as I approached. That was neat – but more for him than me, I just thought he reached over and opened the door.
…but how often are you doing that? Outside of that very specific circumstance, they’re a nuisance. It’s a door. I don’t want to wait for a digital nanny to do it for me, I’d rather just do it myself, especially since the nanny is inept at their job. If you’re not standing in the right spot, it’ll swing open when you click the door handle button, stop when it senses an obstacle – the obstacle is you – and then close when you click the button again, prompting you to start over. More often than not, it just made me look and feel like a fool, especially when I was trying to open the door in a tight parking spot and it didn’t sense the vehicle next to me, and then I had to fight it to stop opening, and then fight it to not close, because I still wanted to, you know, get out.
Even if you disable the function, the “assist” motors are still connected and still creating drag, so instead of swinging open on their own, they wait for you to tug at them, and then try to swing open or closed with your movement, clumsily reproducing the experience of operating a perfectly normal car door. Before anyone brings up the fact that the BMW 7-Series (that I adored) also does this, it does it far better, to a point where I didn’t notice until it was pointed out to me, and then I kept on using them as perfectly normal doors, because powered doors are the answer to a question that nobody asked. Why Cadillac has decided to spend so much energy providing a terrible answer to that non-existent question is beyond me.
I don’t care for it, obviously the people building it didn’t care either
Then, there is the topic of build quality; it is abysmal. It would be embarrassingly bad on a cheap Chevy, let alone a $194,589 Cadillac flagship. The frunk door is obviously sunk on the right and raised on the left. The right tail light sits so much higher than the left that there’s a visible air gap. The lower door mouldings don’t even closely line up with the front fenders, and the rear doors are so misaligned that both upper trim pieces stick out like a sore thumb. The chrome wings on the front fenders don’t line up with the doors.
The tailgate doesn’t line up with the roof. There’s a wrinkle in the front driver’s fender and a kink where the charge door has met the rear fender. There’s deformation in the rubber insulation at the base of the insulation, as well as the top of the tailgate. To cap it off, I know press cars tend to lead hard lives, but the paint is beat like it’s been through a cheap, dry machine wash every day for years, and it’s not even a year old.
If this were an old car, I’d call it a ten-footer if I were feeling generous. I used to be in charge of purchasing vehicles for an independent used car dealer, I used to (and often still do) inspect cars with real money on the line every day, and I wouldn’t want this if it were free. It looks like a haggard piece that’s been in many accidents and sloppily repaired, and I wouldn’t want it anywhere near my showroom. The driver’s scuff panel looks like it’s wearing a decade worth of scuffing, and something in the headliner is rattling on the passenger side, too. It goes on; the more we looked, the more we found. All this with just 16,000 kilometers on the clock; if I didn’t know any better, I’d think this had had its odometer rolled back. No deal.
And yet, it gets worse
Even if it were impeccably built, and you’re maybe the sort that likes more screen and isn’t fussed about intuitive digital design for one reason or another, there is the embarrassing issue of the panoramic moonroof. It has no powered sliding sun shade; instead relying on a folding contraption stored in the frunk that needs to be awkwardly clipped into place. How anyone at Cadillac thought this would pass muster is completely beyond me.
Oh, and the frunk still has no convenient means of closing. It’s so long that unless you’re tall, you won’t be able to reach it once it’s open, there’s no button in or around the frunk to shut it, and you’re stuck using either the key fob or the screen inside to awkward close it (in Cadillac’s defense, this is a fault shared with every other GM EV truck, but I wasn’t as pissed off about it before).
Somehow, it isn’t even good at being big
That reminds me of one, last, crucial pain point: it’s not particularly comfortable. The front seats are nice, the massage works well, and there’s plenty of room to stretch; ride comfort leaves a bit to be desired, but static comfort is good. The all important rear seats, while fitted with very nice chairs, don’t have much room to work with, and getting in is a little awkward as a result – which should never be the case in a vehicle like this.
To add insult to injury, the third row is compact-car tight, and almost useless with the VIP second row slid back, and it gets even worse. While the seat can be moved forward fairly obviously, you have to use a button that is hidden out of sight to retract it – and like the doors, you can’t just do it manually. Good luck getting back there either way, the second row seatbelt perfectly dissects the path to the third row. This damned monstrosity is hopeless.
If you don’t have anything nice to say…
I know General Motors can do brilliant things when they want to. Cadillac’s other EVs are brilliant. GM’s Ultium EV platform is so impressive that Honda saw fit to put their name on it. The Chevy Equinox EV is the closest anyone has come to dethroning the Tesla Model 3 in sales volume, and rightfully so. We love GM’s big trucks and SUVs (so much so that they’ve taken home recent Truck of the Year awards at my urging), and it’s hard to believe the Corvette came from the same company, because it is a masterpiece of engineering (which took home last year’s overall Car of the Year award, again at my specific urging).
For the love of God, wrap it up
This 2025 Cadillac Escalade IQ is not one of those highlights. It is a scathing condemnation of the buying public if they believe this is what we want in a luxury vehicle; I would love to have been a fly on the wall for their focus group testing for this rolling series of mistakes. Like the final season of Game of Thrones, the 2025 Cadillac Escalade IQ is such a disappointment that it retroactively stains prior works that I thought I liked, and makes me second guess if they were worth my or anyone else’s attention at all. Gobsmacked, indeed.
