57. Test Driving the 2021 Cadillac Escalade with Andrew Hawkins

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Andrew Hawkins: They wouldn’t even need half the cameras that they had, or half of the radar or ultrasonic sensors if the vehicle was just smaller. The size of the vehicle is the whole point. So they have to pack it with all of this expensive technology in order to justify the size of it.

Andrew Hawkins: They can build a vehicle of this size because they can, and because there’s demand amongst their customers to buy a vehicle that’s this big. But they don’t really seem to step back and ask whether or not they should be making a vehicle that is this dangerously huge.

Aaron Naparstek: Hello, and welcome to The War on Cars. Aaron Naparstek here. And I’m not proud of this, okay? But I’ll admit it. I’ve been known to while away an evening clicking through the car review channels on YouTube. These are the sacrifices we make for you guys. It’s intelligence gathering. It’s important work.

Aaron: But seriously, I’ve long been obsessed with the huge divergence between the way that automotive journalists write and talk about cars, versus the realities of living in a car-dependent world that I can’t help but see and feel and experience every time I set foot outside my door. And over time, I’ve noticed that almost all car reviews adhere to two essential rules: First, car reviewers are allowed to criticize specific features. You know, the steering wheel feels a little too loose, or it could use another cup holder back in the third row. But car reviewers never step back and look critically at the role the car plays in the world around it. The cars were viewed as a kind of object unto itself, completely devoid of context. That is rule number one. Second, cars are reviewed from the perspective of the individual sitting in the driver’s seat. Even other passengers are treated almost like inanimate cargo. The guy in the driver’s seat—and it’s almost always a guy—is the center of the world. No one else matters. Here’s an example. This is a YouTube car review channel called Throttle House. It’s terrible, but it’s pretty typical.

[YOUTUBE CLIP: So why, for the money, would you buy a Cadillac Escalade? Reason is, it’s a statement. because in here, I’m king of the road. Every car looks tiny—even the SUVs and trucks. And I have a very aggressive grill on the front. But street presence is not the only reason you get the 2021 Escalade. The stuff in front of me is insane. Right now I have a high quality augmented reality screen right in front of me. I don’t even need to look through the window. I put a lot of trust in the screen right now. And if something comes up too close to you, it does that classic Cadillac move that we discovered in the CT6, and it vibrates my bottom, in a not so unpleasant way.]

Aaron: It’s all there, right? To the extent that the human beings outside of his vehicle matter at all, they exist to be impressed or intimidated. In fact, the driver of this Cadillac Escalade no longer even has to look out the windshield at the world outside of his SUV. It can all be mediated through the augmented reality screen on his dashboard. Like a video game. And if there’s a problem out there, another car or person gets too close, the Cadillac will warn him by gently tickling his tushy. He is, after all, the king of the road.

Aaron: Almost all of the reviews for the 2021 Cadillac Escalade—starting price $78,000, but basically runs you $100,000 after all the features are added—read or sound just like that one. Endless fawning over the 38-inch curved high-definition dashboard screen, the refrigerator/freezer embedded in the back row middle armrest, the pulsating LED light show on the car’s exterior, the growl of the more powerful, less fuel-efficient push-rod V8 engine, whatever that is. The reviews, in other words, sound exactly like the automaker’s own marketing.

Aaron: But there was at least one car reviewer who did it differently. Andrew Hawkins, senior reporter covering transportation at The Verge. Andrew’s review of the Escalade started with a tweet. He wrote, “I’m testing out the 2021 Cadillac Escalade this week, and I can’t get over how dangerously huge this vehicle is.” And attached to the tweet was a photo of Andrew’s extremely cute, smiley, three-year-old son standing in front of the Cadillac, utterly dwarfed by its massive hood and grill. After the tweet, Andrew test drove the SUV for a few days, and then he wrote a review for The Verge headlined “Driving the 2021 Cadillac Escalade was one of the most stressful experiences of my life.”

Aaron: In other words, Andrew Hawkins broke the rules. He took into account not just the perspective of the Escalade’s driver, but also the perspectives of a three-year-old kid and that kid’s parents, and the many other human beings who will be walking, biking, driving smaller vehicles or simply trying to live their lives around this gargantuan SUV with its distracted driver staring at the 38-inch screen on the dashboard. So we wanted to talk to Andrew about that, about his test drive of the new Escalade, his conversations with Cadillac’s product managers, and about what it’s going to take to compel the automobile industry to start taking into account the safety and the lives of the people outside their vehicles.

Aaron: But before we get to all that, support from listeners like you is what enables us to stay up late watching car reviews on YouTube. We couldn’t do it without you. Would we do it without you? I hope not. But go to The War on Cars, click “Become a Patreon Supporter,” pitch in a few bucks to the war effort. Subscribers get stickers and T-shirts and access to exclusive content like Sarah Goodyear’s recent interview with bike legend Gary Fisher, available only on Patreon. And by the way, have you checked out our online store? We just started selling War on Cars coffee mugs. They’re really nice. They’re going fast. Go to thewaroncars.org, click “Store.” You’ll find them there.

Aaron: Okay. Andrew Hawkins, senior reporter at The Verge. Welcome to The War on Cars. Tell me, how did you come to find yourself in the driver’s seat of a 2021 Cadillac Escalade?

Andrew Hawkins: Yeah, it’s sort of like, you know, this was sort of a thing that kind of surprised me when I first started writing about the auto industry a few years back, was that there’s this whole sort of system in place where car companies will just give cars to journalists to test out, to drive around for the purposes of obviously generating content, writing stories. And sometimes that can be, you know, for a couple hours in a day. Sometimes it can be over the course of several days. And sometimes, if they actually want the journalists to write sort of a thorough review of this vehicle, they’ll give them this car for a week or even longer. And Cadillac had reached out to me about testing out the new Escalade. I don’t typically do this that often, especially for gas-powered vehicles. I have a preference for electric vehicles, honestly, because I feel like that’s sort of like the bulk of my coverage on the auto industry is around electric vehicles.

Andrew Hawkins: But at the same time, there was a lot about the new Escalade that our readers found interesting. There’s a giant screen inside of it. There’s a lot of high-tech features embedded in this vehicle. And so I thought it might be interesting to take it for a spin. And I also sort of knew in the back of my head that the Escalade was gigantic. And I’ve obviously been sort of keeping abreast of sort of like the auto industry’s trend toward bigger, larger, more powerful, higher horsepower vehicles over the last few years or even the last decade. But I vastly underestimated how big this vehicle would be.

Andrew Hawkins: The Escalade is most certainly the heavyweight in all SUVs. It is one of the largest, longest, heaviest, tallest, just most powerful SUV out there. And that is sort of a big selling point for Cadillac, too. I mean, they sort of—it’s in all of their marketing materials, this is the king daddy of all SUVs.

Aaron: Andrew picked up his new Cadillac at a garage on the west side of Manhattan, got himself situated and started the half hour drive back to his home in suburban New Jersey. Andrew considers himself a good and cautious driver, but driving the Escalade was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before.

Andrew Hawkins: As soon as I picked up the Escalade in Manhattan, and drove it back to my home in New Jersey, it was one of the most stressful driving experiences of my life. I don’t consider myself to be a timid driver, but that said, driving this car was just—you know, I just soaked through my shirt, driving on the highway back to New Jersey. You know, I just felt like I just kept drifting into the opposite lane of traffic. I was nervous about changing lanes. I was nervous about even just driving at highway speeds in this thing, which is sort of typically where you should probably feel the most cautious. And as soon as I got back to my neighborhood, you know, the streets in New Jersey are not particularly wide, and it just felt even more anxiety-inducing to be driving this vehicle through my very residential neighborhood with lots of kids around, and lots of people sort of walking and lots of bicyclists and pedestrians.

Andrew Hawkins: I see Escalades out in the world all the time. I see them in my neighborhood. I see them all over the place. They’re a very popular vehicle. And it just sort of made me think in my head, like what goes through a person’s mind when shopping for a vehicle, and this being the one that they’d ultimately choose? It just sort of—it was hard to make this connection because it just seemed like it was just too much car.

Aaron: Your typical car reviewer would probably, at this point, park the car and spend an hour playing around with the augmented reality screen and testing out the 36-speaker sound system. That’s not how Andrew did it.

Andrew Hawkins: And so as soon as I got home, I brought the family out. I was like, “Look at Dad’s new car.” You know, I only had it for a couple days, but at the same time, I wanted to show everybody and, you know, sort of show them how obnoxiously huge it was. And my son was sort of walking around it. And as soon as he walked out to the front of the vehicle, I just knew that this was going to be sort of the moment. And he never stands still for a photo, either. So the brief moment that he actually stood there and smiled for me was sort of the one that I got to tweet out. And it generated a bit of a reaction. You know, I don’t have many tweets that go viral, but this one definitely did.

Aaron: The tweet of Andrew’s three-year-old son in front of the gigantic SUV went extremely viral. But Andrew still had more test driving to do, and a review to write. Cadillac markets the new Escalade as having the auto industry’s most sophisticated array of high-tech safety features. Features like front and rear pedestrian alerts with automatic braking, and a night vision thermal camera to detect humans and other warm-blooded mammals on the road. So does this stuff work?

Andrew Hawkins: There are multiple cameras embedded in the body of the vehicle: in the grille, in the bumper, along the mirrors. There’s haptic sensors. So those are sensors that vibrate, either in the steering wheel or in the driver’s seat itself to indicate when there is something going awry, whether it’s you’re drifting into somebody else’s lane or there’s another vehicle in your blind spot, or if you’re stopped at a stoplight, there’s a pedestrian crossing either in front of you or behind you. This is definitely, you know, in terms of these safety features, one of the most high-tech vehicles I’ve ever driven. But I thought it was really surprising that, despite the presence of that technology, my stress levels were still very high. And that might be because I don’t have a lot of experience driving a vehicle of this size. Maybe if I had had it longer, or if it was actually my personal vehicle, there would be sort of more of a period of time to become acclimated to those features.

Andrew Hawkins: But in the moment that I had it, the couple of days that I had the vehicle, I didn’t find them to be that helpful, because I knew that they were just really a workaround. That if you had better sort of wherewithal while driving the vehicle, if you weren’t up so high, if it wasn’t so wide, you wouldn’t need all these features. Or maybe they would be there, but they would just sort of be supplementary to your own sort of human ability to detect other drivers, other road users, pedestrians, bicyclists, that really you kind of take for granted when you’re driving sort of a more normal-sized vehicle.

Andrew Hawkins: And all that kind of stuff, too, can also be very distracting when you’re driving. You know, when you’re trying to pay attention to the road, and everything is buzzing and dinging around you, and there’s a camera on the center console in the dashboard that you’re supposed to be paying attention to something maybe that’s there and not the road itself. I mean, they wouldn’t even need half the cameras that they had or, you know, half of the radar or ultrasonic sensors, if the vehicle was just smaller. And the size of the vehicle is sort of the whole point. So they have to pack it with all of this expensive technology in order to justify the size of it.

Andrew Hawkins: So it’s really just sort of like it’s—you know, if you’re thinking of things as a chicken and an egg, like, what came first: the size of the vehicle, or the technology that enables you to drive it safely? It’s certainly the size. And that’s just—to me, seems kind of a flawed way of thinking. They can build a vehicle of this size because they can, and because there’s demand amongst their customers to buy a vehicle that’s this big. But they don’t really seem to step back and ask whether or not they should be making a vehicle that is this dangerously huge.

Aaron: This is where it comes in handy being a journalist at a major publication. Whereas most of us just shake our fists and curse at the SUVs as they drive by, Andrew Hawkins actually gets the chance to talk to the people at Cadillac who make and sell these things, and try to get a better idea of what is running through their heads.

Andrew Hawkins: A number of the product managers, and the folks that are in charge at Cadillac did a conference call with a number of the reporters that they would be lending these vehicles to, just sort of to catch them up about here’s what’s new about the Escalade. I was really only interested in talking about one thing, and that was the front blind spot, because I’ve been doing a lot of reading about this, and there has been a lot of great investigations amongst, you know, a lot of great reporting outlets recently about sort of the increasing size of the front blind spot, and how much of a danger that can be in sort of these low-speed crashes that we are seeing more frequently out in the world, whether they’re front overs or back overs. And mostly involving children. I’m a dad. I have two small children, it’s something that I feel very personally strongly about.

Andrew Hawkins: But also you talk about blind spots, it’s a blind spot that the auto industry seems to have when it comes to their vehicle sizes and the danger that that poses to the people around it. You especially see it in trucks and SUVs with sort of the high carriage, how tall the vehicle is. And also sort of the front part of the vehicle. The grill are a lot boxier, they’re a lot flatter. They don’t slope as much as they had in the past. And so it really presents a lot more of a problem when it comes to the visibility, you know, sort of what a driver can see. And so I asked their product folks about this front blind spot. And one of the exterior designers was sort of taken aback by the question. He needed me to define what I was asking him about. I don’t think the front blind spot is something, a question that they get that frequently.

Aaron: As in, like, we don’t even know what a front blind spot is? He didn’t know what that meant?

Andrew Hawkins: Yeah. He said, “You know, this is new. And your question catches me a little bit off guard. Is it because they’re so tall out front?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s basically exactly what I’m talking about.”

Aaron: Wow. So they hadn’t noticed that.

Andrew Hawkins: I don’t think it really even factors into the way that they think about the design of these vehicles, otherwise they wouldn’t make them like this. So when I asked them about the size, too, they talked about how their customers really enjoy and demand that space for their passengers and for themselves. It’s very much about the internalizes and not the externalities. It’s about how the people that are driving the vehicles feel about the space, and not about how everyone around the vehicle feels about being—having to walk in front of or around or to the side of, you know, an absolutely gargantuan SUV.

Aaron: Do you think asking that question influenced him? Did you get any sense of whether or not he was going to take that back to the product designers in his company, or work with that information in any way? How did the rest of the conversation go with him?

Andrew Hawkins: I mean, I’m not confident that anything I say or do will ever have any impact on any corporate decision. That ultimately, is more down to, you know, what our shareholders want us to do, or how it’s going to affect our share price. I mean, I don’t have any, you know, delusions that, you know, my reporting or my questions, I think are going to have some sort of serious impact on, you know, a giant multi-billion dollar …

Aaron: Sure. And I’m not trying to make it seem like some grandiose thing. But you did. I mean, the guy said, “You know, your comment catches me a little off guard.” You know, you made him think about something that he hadn’t thought about before, it seems like.

Andrew Hawkins: I mean, it’s very possible. And, you know, his answer was to sort of tick through the list of all of the alert systems and safety cameras, and the technology features that we talked about before as a way to sort of, I think, address my question. But also to sort of brushed aside as being like, “Oh, we’ve thought about that, you know? Like, Maybe I didn’t know exactly what you were talking about, but we have thought about that. And this is sort of evidence of us trying to address that issue.”

Aaron: On October 19, six days after the initial tweet, Andrew published his story on The Verge. The response he received was unlike anything he’d ever seen before.

Andrew Hawkins: So I have been a journalist for feels like a very long time, going on 13, 14 years now. And I don’t think I’ve ever gotten as passionate and vociferous a response as to this article. Both people writing to me to tell me that they agreed with my sentiment and that, you know, these vehicles did not belong on the road, especially in cities. And people calling me all sorts of names and making threats and casting aspersions about my masculinity and all sorts of things. It’s very clear that the war on cars has ascended to being sucked into our larger cultural conflicts that we’ve been having across this country.

Andrew Hawkins: I think every response I got made the assumption that I drive a Toyota Prius. It was just everyone just saying, “You know, you’re a pansy man who drives a Prius. You don’t know what it’s like to drive such a large vehicle. You should just get out of the way and let a real man drive that car.”

Aaron: Let a real man roll over your three-year-old, buddy.

Andrew Hawkins: Exactly. So clearly, the SUV wars has taken on a touch of toxic masculinity. It was pretty much exclusively men that were writing to me. They would sign their names and everything. Like, a lot of guys, they just had no qualms about, you know, like, putting their names and identities to what they were saying to me. Which was kind of shocking, because you think of like, you know, this type of reaction being sort of like the realm of anonymous trolls. But I feel like it was mostly, like, older white men from the suburbs, which is very obviously the Cadillac Escalade’s prime demographic. So I’m not surprised. But at the same time, I was sort of shocked by the level of vitriol that my inbox kind of was overwhelmed with after I wrote this article.

Aaron: So what is it about automobile journalism that’s so broken? That almost feels like those two words together—”automobile” and “journalism”—are an oxymoron? Why don’t more journalists look at the industry and it’s glaringly harmful and destructive products with a more critical eye, or at least the eye of the people outside the car?

Andrew Hawkins: I think it kind of can be traced back to this very symbiotic relationship between the industry and the journalists that cover the industry. There’s a lot of glad-handing, and car companies do a lot to sort of build up relationships amongst the journalists in order to generate positive coverage about their products. This is not unique and special to the auto industry. That exists across all sort of business reporting. And I’ll say Cadillac, you know, when I picked up the Escalade, there was a free pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones in the passenger seat that were meant for me. I gave it back to them, because our ethics policy at The Verge precludes me from accepting gifts like that. And I think there was also a gift card, too for, like, $100. I mean, there’s just a lot of, like, gifts and perks and things like that that are sort of exchanged back and forth. And, you know, the good outlets are out there and they disclose that kind of stuff.

Andrew Hawkins: Does that mean I’m more fearless in how I cover the auto industry? Yeah, maybe, maybe not. Not every story I write can really take the companies to task as much as I’d like to. But that said, I did feel like there was an opportunity here, that Cadillac was offering me a chance to drive the Escalade, and I didn’t really feel beholden to them in any way. And I’m also—I lived in Brooklyn for a long time, now I live in New Jersey. I’m aware of how these vehicles exist, especially in an urban setting. And how that is just really—it’s the worst kind of vehicle to be driving in a city, or even just a very dense residential suburban area. And my own personal experience, but also professionally, you know, and being an avid War on Cars listener, I just know that this is …

Aaron: Full disclosure.

Andrew Hawkins: [laughs] I mean, I’m fully in the pocket of Big War on Cars.

Aaron: Yeah, the all-powerful bicycle lobby.

Andrew Hawkins: Yeah, the all-powerful bicycle lobby. It’s really, you know—but I do think that—I agree with you. There is an absence of that kind of perspective in a lot of auto journalism. I think we’re seeing it a little bit more around the edges, and I think especially among the tech journalism and tech press, which I consider myself to be a part of. They’re not traditional auto journalists. They come at it more from a technology point of view. They see sort of the way that the tech industry is having negative effects in our society and our civic society and our democracy. And I feel like that perspective is also being brought over to the auto world, too, because of the effects on climate change, and the really terrible number of vehicle crashes that exist, and fatalities that happen every year that largely get sort of brushed aside by sort of local journalists. But I think tech journalists can see that, and you’re seeing more and more of that kind of perspective being brought into some of the reporting that happens.

Aaron: Andrew reports on, and talks to automobile industry people a lot. So I asked him, what’s it gonna take to get automakers to make their products safer for people outside of the car, and less destructive for cities and the global environment more broadly?

Andrew Hawkins: I think that’s a great question. And I’m very pessimistic when it comes to what I think are some of the solutions, because I think a lot of it is regulatory, and then that is sort of connected very strongly to our electoral politics. And that can be a very dicey thing to sort of want to rely on when it comes to wanting to make change. Because as we’ve seen in just the past election and sort of the last four years, progress can be easily dismantled, and voters can be very reactionary. So I think that there needs to be regulations from the federal perspective. You know, the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration needs to start to incorporate things like pedestrian safety into its ratings on vehicles. Right now, when they crash test vehicles, they only take into account the safety of the driver and the passengers. And they don’t take into account the safety for other road users, especially other vulnerable road users.

Andrew Hawkins: So that’s why you get these really tall grills on these vehicles, because that meets the standard, and there’s an obvious customer demand for that. Pickup trucks and SUVs are the best-selling type of vehicle in the United States. The car companies have figured this out. It’s a high-margin vehicle, they can make a lot of money off of these cars. And really, the only way to rein that in which has an obvious financial benefit to them, is to say there needs to be stricter standards in place when it comes to the size and the dimensions of the vehicle, that takes into account a person walking in front of it. If a person gets hit by a sedan, it hits them on the legs, perhaps. They get pushed up onto the hood of the vehicle, and they’re more likely to survive that crash. Someone gets hit by a Cadillac Escalade, that’s going to hit them right in the chest. You have a much greater chance of being killed, dragged underneath the vehicle if you get hit by a vehicle that size.

Andrew Hawkins: Could it be that, under a Biden administration, we’ll get some stricter regulations in terms of pedestrian and cyclist safety? You can cross your fingers and hope for it, but that also can very easily be undone by a future administration.

Aaron: So if we can’t depend on federal regulators to protect us from oversized, dangerously designed vehicles, what can city governments do?

Andrew Hawkins: So I do feel like that there’s something that cities can do to impose restrictions. We’ve seen this in Europe, where there have been some cities that have said they want to impose certain weight restrictions on the types of vehicles that are allowed within certain geographic areas of their city. I think something similar can be done in the United States, and I would hope that we start to see some more bold ideas from our policymakers because it’s just going to get worse. The vehicles are just going to get bigger and more dangerous to the people that have to sort of exist on the outside of them. And it’s going to be really bad. And we can’t just count on autonomous vehicles coming to save us because that’s decades away. We can’t count on the technology in the vehicles to save us because that’s not a guarantee, and it can be really distracting and easily sort of ignored by the driver. So I just think that there needs to be something done from a policy perspective because otherwise, you know, what hope is there?

Aaron: So Andrew did his test drive. He confronted the Cadillac product managers with the problems that he saw. He wrote his review, and he broke the cardinal rules of automobile journalism, and wrote from the perspective of the human beings who exist outside the car. Does it make a difference, are the automakers paying attention?

Andrew Hawkins: You know, going forward, I don’t think that the Escalade is going to get any less big. If anything, it might even get even bigger in future iterations. But that said, I do think that there is a a role that the journalism and the tech press and auto journalists especially, but also local media can play in hopefully influencing these car companies to maybe dial it back a little bit when it comes to the dimensions and the geometry of their vehicles.

Andrew Hawkins: There was a great investigation last year by this local TV station in Indianapolis that really kind of brought the attention from blind spots to me, and I think a lot of people, when they sort of did a test with a lot of the new pickup trucks and SUVs. And they lined up a lot of kids in front of them to show how many children could sort of go hidden in front of a vehicle before a driver could actually see the tops of their heads. And the Escalade was the worst offender of all the vehicles that they tested there. I think they had something like 12 children lined up in front of the vehicle before the driver could actually see the tops of their heads. And that was—to me, that was really an eye opener. So if local outlets like that are doing these kind of things, as well as sort of big national publications, and we’ve seen a lot of investigations from some of those publications as well, into the deleterious impact of SUVs on climate change and greenhouse gases, hopefully that will eventually influence these companies to make the right decisions. I mean, they’re definitely pumping a ton of money into electrifying a lot of vehicles. I don’t see a lot of effort being made to sort of scale back on some of the design flaws that I think are inherent in some of these big vehicles. But, you know, we can always hope.

Aaron: Hey, that’s it for my conversation with Andrew Hawkins, senior transportation reporter at The Verge. Thanks for listening. I’ll put a link to his review of the 2021 Cadillac Escalade in the show notes. If you like what we’re doing here at The War on Cars, please pitch in a few dollars via Patreon. Go to thewaroncars.org, click “Become a Patreon Supporter,” help fund the war effort. We’ll send you some stickers, t-shirts and you’ll have access to bonus episode content available nowhere else.

Aaron: Special thanks to our top Patreon sponsors: the law office of Vaccaro and White in New York, Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Drew Raines and Virginia Baker. Don’t forget special discounts over at Cleverhood.com on all of their rain gear. It is designed by bicycle riders for bicycle riders. Go to Cleverhood.com, use coupon code “waroncars” when you check out. Rate and review The War on Cars on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Email us at [email protected]. Find us on Twitter and Instagram @thewaroncars.

Aaron: This episode was produced by me, Aaron Naparstek. It was edited by Ali Lemer. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear, our logo by Dani Finkel of Crucial D Designs. On behalf of my co-hosts Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, I am Aaron Naparstek, and this is The War on Cars.

[YOUTUBE CLIP: There’s an easy conversation feature which uses microphones and the speakers to facilitate talking amongst the front and rear seats, and it even includes a button right on the steering wheel to activate it. The seats include massage, there’s a rearview camera mirror, wireless Apple CarPlay and a very smart and modern rear seat entertainment system that allows for sharing content from screen to screen and for sending navigation suggestions to the driver. The kids will love this. And how about a refrigerated center console that also has a freezer setting. Indeed, the Escalade has you covered.]

[YOUTUBE CLIP: I am very impressed with this Escalade. It’s everything you’d want a $100,000 SUV to be and then some.]