Cadillac Finally, Really Got One Right

It’s easy to forget that General Motors is an engineering powerhouse. The company is infamous for industrial-grade cheesiness and unmitigated cost-cutting, so its groundbreaking, game-changing stuff often debuts on forgettable products that fail to showcase the company’s ingenuity. In the rare case that GM manages to overcome its worst instincts and fit its incredible technology on a truly compelling product, it produces a world-beating vehicle. The 2021 Cadillac Escalade is one such example.

I can’t say I was expecting it. That Cadillac used to be the Standard of the World sounds more like a cruel punchline than an accurate fact. Despite being the flagship of GM’s fleet, Cadillac often feels lost at sea; the company has a vast arsenal of research and development talent, but seemingly no real clue where to point it. Nearly 20 years ago the company launched the first production magnetorheological damper, a truly revolutionary technology that would go on to appear in Ferraris, Audis, Shelby Mustangs, and Corvettes. But it launched on the Cadillac STS, a car so wholly forgettable that I had to google it to make sure I was getting the visuals right.

This helped kickstart the company’s performance kick, during which it caught up to the chassis tuning and powertrain prowess of the golden age of BMW. When it arrived at the top of its self-created Everest, Cadillac realized that no one really cared. The cars still had cheap interiors and the same stigma. Besides, sedans were dying, and the folks who wanted BMWs kept buying BMWs. So instead of buying the vehicles built with the wrong goals, Cadillac buyers opted for cars like the XT5, which seemed to be built with no real goals at all. The lone exception to this entire plotline was the Escalade.

The Escalade avoided the constant name changes, the pivots, and the misplaced ambitions. It kept doing what it did, never particularly amazing but always beloved by its slice of executives and hip-hop stars alike. Somewhere along the way, Cadillac realized that this is the only nameplate it had to work with. It would be what reinvented Cadillac, like it or not. Now, at long last, they’ve put the money in to make it happen.

The design leans into what has always been at the core of the Escalade brand: Brash, in-your-face excess. There is no subtlety here, just a gut-punch grille with a slab-sided monster behind it. It is clean, simple, and overwhelmingly huge. It makes no attempt to imitate the svelte shrink-wrapped muscularity of its German competition. The Escalade may lack the badge snobbery of a Mercedes-Benz GLS or a BMW X7, but neither will ever match its sheer presence. There’s a swagger here, the kind you get from I-got-mine-centric American excess. To some, this is vile. But they weren’t going to buy Escalades anyway.

Inside, you’ll find that for the first time ever an Escalade interior can back up a six-figure price tag. Supple leather and lacquered wood cover every surface, arranged in flowing patterns with aluminum brightwork as an accent. There is a massive curved OLED screen the likes of which you’ll only find in a Porsche Taycan or a $5000 TV. In front of it, another OLED forms the digital gauge cluster, with another small OLED screen serving as your trip computer and settings panel.