The Escalade embodies the American luxury car ideal, and now it's gone electric.
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The 2025 Cadillac Escalade IQ first drive: 460 miles on a single charge
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That looks about right. I'm frequently in a Silverado assembly plant, and they have one of every generation of truck the plant has ever made since the 1980s side by side in the atrium. It's funny how barebones the trucks used to be, and how they've progressed. The earliest one doesn't even have a headliner. Just the metal roof. You'll never find another example of a 1986 with less than 5 miles on the odometer.
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It's fully Google-fied as far as I can tell. Meaning it's all Android Automotive.
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Which to me make it the perfect "Beverly Hills Soccer Mom" kind of vehicle.
(Edit: that, or the "upscale black car" kind of limousine service vehicle)
At least the conspicuously excessive consumption is at least a bit less conspicuous in terms of the amount of gasoline burned...
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Ha, and nobody buys the 2D anyway. Every one of those bros needs the 4D. It is another 2 feet longer and with even less bed room.
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Drivers of these behemoths will learn that their huge payments exempt them from any remaining shred of moral culpability for their lifestyle choices. It's a perk of the immortal rich.
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Give it six months and it’ll depreciate down into your price range
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A significant portion of Ars US readership can afford this vehicle. 1 in 11 US households is a millionaire household excluding the primary residence and retirement savings.
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You know how there is a rocket rule that helps determine the payload you can lift given that the amount of fuel that you ALSO have to lift? I wonder if there is something like that for how many miles you can drive an EV given the weight of the battery that needs to get you there. To what degree are there diminishing returns.
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TLDR: The invention of the wheel was revolutionary
There is a little bit of that, but from what I've read air resistance (which is primarily controlled by frontal area and frontal shape and increases with the square of the speed) is much bigger limiting factor than weight for that as heavy things can roll without much energy (as seen by mile long freight trains or that fact that a single (very strong) human can pull a large airplane.
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The hybrid is rated for a combined cycle of 37MPG, but owners report exceeding 40MPG. My dad has one and the lifetime average is over 40.
Not sure why you're comparing a pickup, even a compact pickup, to compact sedans. Might as well say a bicycle is more efficient. The point was a lot of modern cars have very little payload, but the Maverick has decent payload capacity for such a small truck. Something comparable would be the small corssovers you mentioned, which have half the payload capacity and fairly similar rated efficiency (RAV4 hybrid is 37-40).
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BananaWarrior
Ars Centurion
I obviously haven't driven this. But I did test he Hummer EV and was pleasantly surprised.
If it wasn't for GM shenanigans I would recommend it.
If it wasn't for GM shenanigans I would recommend it.
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I wasn't the one who brought up the comparison of a pickup vs a sedan. The OP claimed his Maverick had "similar" MPG to that of a compact sedan - which struck me as optimistic. Turns out he was comparing a hybrid to a gasoline only vehicle which I pointed out didn't seem like a sensible comparison to make aside from the fact that a Ford Maverick gets excellect mileage for its vehicle category?
Do you agree or disagree with that point?
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I don't see the issue with saying a hybrid pickup is able to match the efficiency of a pure ICE compact sedan. I think it's obvious the point being made is that hybrids allow for getting the efficiency of an economy shitbox in a vehicle class that is notorious for poor efficiency.
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For better or worse, he omitted that it was a hybrid initially, which I found misleading (to be fair, it might have been an honest mistake to forget to mention that - but I still think it was misleading).
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Even more exciting is that it qualifies for the full $7,500 tax credit, at least for the LT and RS models. If there are other models they don't qualify.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/tax2023.shtml
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You can pretty much assume that when anyone is talking about the Maverick, they mean the hybrid. That's the one people care about. That's the one that never sits on the lot.
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And if you put Maverick and compare to CK - almost same size
so there are small trucks like before...but more people want bigger ones unfortunately
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Wow - just wow. Anything over 7,000 pounds should require a CDL. Obviously will never happen in this enshittification era of the US.
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The problem with that for BEVs is that batteries are heavy, and you need a lot of them for a decent range. The Model X is the size of a small minivan, and weighs 5400 lbs with a GVWR of 6000 lbs.
Assuming 5 passengers at 200 lbs., you're overloaded at 6400 lbs., and Tesla also advertises a 5000 lb. tow capacity. This is proof all manufacturers fudge the capabilities, because most utility trailers empty weigh 500 lbs. + leaving no weight capacity left over for cargo assuming an emaciated teenage driver at 100 lbs.
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IDK, why's it matter? I was making a simple statement that a Maverick can have similar efficiency to something like a Corolla while effectively handling heavier hauls.
Lol. From your link, the Hybrid Maverick beats all trims of ICE Corolla in efficiency because, despite what comparison you choose to use, the EPA standard is 60%city/40%highway (since we're arbitrating "apples-to-apples"). But again, the initial point was the efficiency and hauling capacity.
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To put it in context, this vehicle weighs about the same as an armoured Mercedes S Class Guard, which comes with VR10 ballistic protection, its own air supply, and 4 inch thick glass in the windows.
I hope that it has good brakes and a limiter.
I hope that it has good brakes and a limiter.
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Would full regen braking be enough to fully stop a ~9,000 pound vehicle for stop signs/traffic lights? Or would blending in the mechanical brakes be necessary most of the time? To say nothing of emergency stops.
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It would be interesting if Ars could get some European free lance writers to cover some vehicles there. I suspect that the overall reader response would be just to get us Americans even more upset about where we live than we already are.Meanwhile the only alternate vehicle that has been suggested for coverage is a piece of vaporware, that were it shipping would be full of comments about how impractical it is for normal people's needs.
We can only cover what exists.
The real problem is the lack of cheap EVs, not that we're ignoring them. That's why the comments have this vague handwaving feel and never mention specific vehicles we're ignoring. People want them, which is understandable, but the actually existing part is harder.
(And yes, we have a US-centric view, because that's where we are based. But as been noted already, we do cover vehicles that won't make it to the US or are at least not announced for here yet. But the US is a not-unreasonable focus just given where we all live.)
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I sure wouldn't agree with that; at the end of the day, he's getting 40mpg in a relatively affordable vehicle, and whatever's under the hood is an academic distinction.
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Fair enough maybe I'm being too fixated on that particular aspect. I understand the original point that a pickup is better equipped to actually be handling heavier payload gracefully and that modern, smaller size pickups can be very fuel efficienct if automakers were so inclined to make them that way.
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And as a corollary to that, I don't much care whether someone's driving a Maverick, or an Escalade IQ, over some different form factor. I'd rather people electrify and boost efficiency whatever it is they're buying, and if it's gotta be a giant electric brick, that's still better than anything comparable that's burning gas.
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It's fine for rappers and TikTokers, I guess, but nothing cobbled together by the UAW and sold under a GM badge is worthy of consideration by truly discriminating HNW types.
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A big miss for the US is not doing enough to mandate/incentivize hybrids. The technology has been refined for a couple decades, and for at least the last decade every US-sold make/model should have a base hybrid that's as cheap or cheaper to the buyer than the ICE-equivalent.
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I agree; I think every new vehicle made after 2010 or so could have and should have been a hybrid. There's literally no reason not to, and whether it's a truck or a passenger car or a performance vehicle, they can all be improved by hybridization.
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Does this exist as like, a standard adult sized car? Like, two rows, not fifteen feet tall and not fifty feet wide? I actually really like a lot of the design of this car outside of the absolute enormity of it. Is there a Cadilac model that might be more to the interest of someone in Europe?
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If they electrified the CT4, it might be worth considering in Europe -- it'd certainly be the correct size. The biggest challenges would be parts supply (you can barely get Cadillac parts in North America from what I hear), and Trump's pointless trade war with every nation with a democratically elected government - the uncertainty of escalating tariffs would absolutely torpedo the value proposition relative to say, the new CLA.
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The only American car that did somewhat okay outside of the US was the ford fiesta. Everything else is quite simply too big and unreliable.
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Need me to Google that for you, or can you find your way to information about the Lyriq and Optiq on your own?
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I think you forgot that both were European-designed Fords sold in the US, not the other way around.
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He didn't qualify that statement, and in any case, Ford is Ford. The Fiesta was not designed for the US market either, so it's in the same category as the Fusion and Mondeo, which is to say American cars that did very well outside the US. It's not a revelation that product designed for one market might not have much appeal in different markets.
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