At home with the Cadillac ELR, looking for the charge

The future arrived in my driveway last week in the form of a Cadillac ELR, but the present wasn’t quite ready to accept it. With a design based on Caddy’s wild Converj concept vehicle, a drive train and underpinning directly lifted from the Chevy Volt, and a price tag that could buy an entire Detroit city block, the ELR needed to be ready to fly. In my modest surroundings, it barely crawled.

Like the Volt, the ELR has a 37-mile electric-only range before the gas engine kicks in for another 300 miles. The guys dropped it off with a full tank of gas. They popped the trunk. There sat the charging cable.

“You driven the Volt?” one of them said.

“Yes,” I said.

“It works like that. You plug it in.”

If only I’d actually been an ELR buyer. At the end of January, Cadillac announced that it would be including a complimentary 240-volt charging station, plus installation, with the purchase of every $75,000-plus ELR. "Professional installation of the fastest home-charging unit is a natural way to mark the introduction of ELR to the luxury market,” said the brand in its release.

Having that station included — which, given that I had the car for seven days, was a total impossibility — would have created quite a different experience from the one I had.

The ELR arrived with its battery totally drained. They’d driven it down to Austin from Dallas. The ELR’s 37-mile electric range barely got them out of the Metroplex. And they weren’t going to charge it; even at the fastest public stations, that takes four hours and they had other cars to deliver. The system isn’t set up to leave electric-car testers in any other state than high and dry. Either is my house.