The 9,000-Pound Monster I Don’t Want to Give Back

Before leaving for a trip to Tahoe last weekend, GM offered me the keys to its 9,000-pound shrine to excess — the new 2026 electric Escalade IQL (starting at $130,405) — for a weeklong test. One thing up front: I’m not a professional car reviewer.

I was instantly into the idea. I’d first seen the IQL last summer at a car show, where a few regional dealers had set up shop at the edge of a long field filled with pristine vintage cars. My first thought was: Jesus, that’s enormous. My second thought, unexpectedly, was admiration. Despite its sheer scale, the design feels oddly restrained. For lack of a better word, it’s “strapping.” The proportions…work.

That enthusiasm faded fast when the vehicle showed up at my house the day before we were set to leave. This thing is a beast. At 228.5 inches long and 94.1 inches wide, it made our cars look like toys. My first apartment in San Francisco was smaller. Getting it up my driveway was also a little nerve-wracking — it’s so big, and the hood sits so high, that when you’re climbing at the right angle (we live midway down a hill, with our mailbox at the top), you can’t see what’s directly in front of you.

For a moment, I considered leaving it in the driveway for the entire trip. The alternative was forcing myself to get comfortable enough to drive it 200 miles to Tahoe City, so that night and the next day I drove it around town — dinner pickup, an exercise class, basic errands. When I ran into a friend on the street, I rushed to explain that it wasn’t my new car, that I might be reviewing it, and yes, wasn’t the size completely ridiculous? It felt like driving a tank. I kept thinking: outside of hotels that use Escalades to shuttle guests, who actually chooses something like this?

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

I don’t really know when it happened or how. If I had written this after two days, the tone would have been totally different. Even now, I’m not oblivious to the flaws.

What truly won me over was how the Escalade handled a brutal snowstorm — but let me take you through the steps between “Ugh, this car is a tank” and “Yes! This car is a tank.”

First: just climbing into it takes more effort than seems reasonable. I’m fairly athletic, and I still caught myself thinking this thing should come with an automated step stool.

Inside, digital maximalism takes over. The dashboard is dominated by a 55-inch curved LED screen with 8K resolution that feels less like a car display and more like a situation room. The front passenger gets their own screen. Second-row passengers get 12.6-inch personal screens too, along with stowable tray tables, dual wireless chargers, and — on the most lavish trim — massage seats that could make you forget you’re even in a vehicle. Google Maps runs navigation. And the polarised-screen tech deserves real praise: one of my kids binge-watched Hulu in the front seat, and not a single frame leaked into my line of sight from the back seat.

The cabin is built on the idea that nobody should feel cramped, and it delivers. Front legroom is 45.2 inches; the second row has 41.3; even the third row gets 32.3 inches. Seven adults could ride in this thing for a long time without driving one another insane. Heated and ventilated leather seats with 14-way power adjustment come standard in the first two rows, and the whole system runs on 5G Wi-Fi.

The Escalade also includes Super Cruise as standard — GM’s hands-free driving system — which I’m not sure I fully figured out. Actual car reviewers seem to love it. When I tried it, the vehicle felt like it drifted within the lane boundaries in a slightly alarming way, and when that happens, it starts an escalating warning routine. First, you get a red steering wheel icon on the screen. Then the seat starts pulsing haptic warnings directly into your rump. Ignore that, and the cabin fills with a chime that feels equal parts reminder and reprimand. GM calls this impolite sequence a “driver takeover request.”

Also: the 38-speaker AKG Studio sound system? Incredible.

On the outside, it’s a handsome giant, but it takes time to adjust. At first, I found the grille — which is essentially decorative — almost comically imposing. This is a vehicle for people who are the boss, or want to be the boss, or want to look like the boss while privately managing existential dread. One night, pulling up to a glass-lined restaurant, I’m pretty sure I blinded half the patrons as I angled into a parking spot perpendicular to the building, the headlights washing through the windows.

Then there’s the light show that activates when the vehicle senses you approaching via the key or the myCadillac app. It’s like the car is saying, “Hey, chief — where to?” before you’ve even touched the handle. In Cadillac’s own vocabulary, this is courtesy of its “advanced, all-LED exterior lighting system,” featuring a “crystal shield” illuminated grille and crest, plus vertical LED headlamps and “choreography-capable tail lamps.”

Objectively, it’s a bit much. I loved it immediately.

Despite the size, the Escalade IQL is surprisingly nimble. Not “sports car slicing through traffic” nimble — but more like “I can’t believe something this huge doesn’t drive like a battleship” nimble.

Now for the annoyances. The front trunk — the “frunk,” if you speak fluent EV — behaves in strange and aggravating ways. To open it, hold the button down until it’s fully open. Let go early, and it stops mid-lift, forcing you to start all over. Closing requires the same sustained pressure. Meanwhile, the rear trunk works the opposite way: it needs two separate taps, then you must immediately release the button. Hold it too long and nothing happens.

Twice, the car also refused to shut off after I finished driving. It just sat there, powered on, even after I shifted into park and opened the door (which is supposed to trigger shutdown). One clunky workaround: open the frunk, close the frunk, shift into drive, then back into park, then exit.

The software is perfectly fine — unless you’ve owned a Tesla, in which case, you’re likely to be underwhelmed. That seems to be a universal truth among the people I know who have both a Tesla and another EV, no matter how premium the alternative is. Once you’ve lived with Tesla’s ability to remove friction between what you want to do and actually doing it, everyone else’s software feels like a compromise.

Which brings us to the low point of the trip: charging in Tahoe in winter. For all its strengths, the Escalade IQL is, by any definition, thirsty. It carries a 205 kWh battery pack — enormous, and necessary, because it consumes about 45 kWh per 100 miles, notably more than comparable electric SUVs. Cadillac estimates 460 miles of range on a full charge, and under ideal conditions, that seems plausible. Tahoe in winter is not ideal. We also arrived with less charge than we should have. A handful of side trips on the way up — including an emergency detour for shirts for a family member who had packed none — drained the battery more than expected. By the time we needed to charge, we truly did.

We drove to a Tesla Supercharger in Tahoe City that appeared in the myCadillac app. Still, when we plugged into the suggested stall, nothing happened. Digging for answers, we discovered that even Tesla stations that allow non-Tesla vehicles may throttle charging to about 6 kilowatts per hour, which made the whole situation feel even more maddening. A nearby EVGo station had shut down a month earlier. The two ChargePoint units at the Tahoe City Public Utility lot were broken — willing to connect, but unwilling to actually charge. We briefly considered driving 35 miles to Incline Village, did the math on what being stranded would look like, and decided against it. Then I found an Electrify America station 12 miles away. We drove through thickening snow, arrived shortly before 11 p.m., and it worked. We sat there for an hour fighting exhaustion before heading home.

The next morning brought another problem via an alert: 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 if the vehicle was delivered that way or if the cold weather alone was responsible — either way, it meant someone standing at a gas station filling tires while getting pelted directly in the face with ice. (That someone was my husband.) Family trip vibes: immaculate.

At that point, the Escalade IQL is undeniably luxurious, and probably perfect for families of four or more who care about space and technology. It comes with major trade-offs: limited forward visibility due to that commanding hood, parking challenges baked into its dimensions, struggles with charging infrastructure for a machine this hungry, and tyres tasked with carrying 9,000 pounds. It’s beautiful, I would have said — but not for me.

Then the snow that had started falling kept falling. Within two days, eight feet had piled up, making it impossible to ski — the whole point of the trip — and genuinely frightening to move around town. Except I wasn’t that frightened, because we had the Escalade. Its weight made it feel like driving a tank through snow. (They held steady after we inflated them, even as the weather stayed brutal.) What could have been stressful felt calm. It was quiet. It was strong. It felt in control when conditions weren’t.

I also got used to the size. By the end of the week, I stopped mouthing “I’m sorry” to people waiting for me to figure out parking. I stopped caring what it said about me for driving a vehicle whose design philosophy can be summarised as: the owner of this car is not waiting in line. Eight feet of snow had fallen, we needed groceries, and I had the tank, suckers. I could feel my husband falling for it too.

Then, as Tahoe often does, the storm stopped abruptly, and the sun came out. The Escalade was suddenly just a very dirty car sitting in the driveway (sorry, GM!). And in that moment, Irealisedd: I still liked it, and not just because it saved us during the storm. I love sitting high up with that sound system blasting a favourite soundtrack. The light show still delights me. The long, curved LED screen is genuinely impressive, among plenty of other features.

The frunk is still a mess. I won’t forget the panic of not being able to charge where I thought I could. Parking is still a patience test. I still have strong opinions about unnecessary consumption. None of that changed.

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