GM Super Cruise tested in Cadillac Escalade
Enormous American cars with self-driving technology represent a step beyond what Aussie roads can handle.
Detroit’s vision for the future of electric motoring is a pimped-out Cadillac that drives itself on highways, offers opulent luxury and is so huge you need a truck licence to drive it.
Only America could build the Cadillac Escalade IQ. Australia isn’t ready for cars like this.
More is better
Born in a land where too much is never enough, this car that truly pushes the boundaries of excess.
From the 55-inch digital display upfront to the 38-speaker Dolby Atmos Stereo, 126 colour ambient lighting package and 24-inch wheels, there isn’t a single part of the Escalade where the development team considered dialling things down a bit.
The result is a car that stands out.
Trimmed in leather and lovely open-pore wood, the Caddy’s cabin has opulent seats that are heated, cooled, and built with an internal massage function that kneads away knots in your back.
Priced from US$150,490 ($233,542) in America as tested, it would cost significantly more in Australia once right-hand-drive conversion fees and taxes (including our luxury car tax) are taken into account - perhaps as much as $400,000.
It might be too much
Cadillac’s electric Escalade weighs more than 4.5 tonnes with passengers and cargo on board - you could not drive it on a regular car licence in Australia. That’s because it’s built around an enormous (and enormously heavy) battery with more than 200kWh of storage.
General Motors aimed for maximum bragging rights with the big Caddy, and wanted to claim the longest driving range of any electric SUV in America. The result is an enormous beast with a claimed 740 kilometres of range. It has power to match, with electric motors on the front and rear axles send up to 560kW and 1064 Nm to the tyres, which is enough to fire near enough to five tonnes of luxury wagon to 100km/h in less than five seconds.
Charging is similarly rapid, with 350kW charging speeds returning up to 190km of range in 10 minutes.
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On the road
This is car is so huge that checking your blind spot sometimes involved a second glance over the shoulder as your mind doesn’t initially recognise that there can be so much metal behind you.
It’s huge but doesn’t always feel enormous. Clever rear wheel steering shrinks its turning circle in town and reduces effort on the highway. Adaptive air suspension irons out bumps so that the big Esky glides over imperfections rather than romping and stomping.
Light steering and those enormously powerful motors help to reduce the sense of inertia you might get from big four-wheel-drives, too.
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Super cruise
The Escalade’s top selling point in the US might be General Motors’ Super Cruise, a sort of advanced cruise control that allows you to hand over driving duties to the car on many highways in the States.
Unlike many alternatives on the road today, this is a true hands-off system.
If you keep watching the road ahead, and resist the temptation to pick up your phone, the car will cruise along, passing slower cars, taking motorway exits and maintaining safe gaps to surrounding traffic.
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GM Super Cruise spokesman Jeff Miller says more than 80 per cent of customers with Super Cruise say it makes for a more relaxing drive.
“It’s the comfort and convenience factor,” he says. “love manually driving, but it’s also awesome just to hit a button and relax and have that monotonous task be performed by the car.”
Super Cruise works differently to alternatives such as Uber’s Waymo or Tesla’s Autopilot.
While those cars use lidar or cameras to continuously scan their environment, Super Cruise relies on high-resolution maps of highways pre-scanned by sophisticated vehicles with more than $1 million worth of sensors on board.
It works on roughly one million kilometres of highways in the US, but not in urban environments.
“The reason why we’ve constrained Super Cruise to where we constrained it to is you don’t have to worry about pedestrians,” Miller says.
“There’s a lot of those unknown scenarios that you get into that are more difficult to develop around when you get into city type driving, and that obviously increases the cost of the sensing set that you need to detect those scenarios.”
While Tesla’s camera-based system is relatively easy to apply to new countries, Super Cruise require enormous investment in scanning and mapping roads by General Motors, which uses unique tech not shared with rivals.
It means the feature is a long way off for Australia, which just isn’t ready for cars like this.
Cadillac Escalade IQ
PRICE: About $230,000 drive-away
ON SALE: Not in Australia
WARRANTY: 4-year, 50,000 mile
POWER: Dual electric motors, 560kW/1064 Nm
RANGE: 740km
TOWING: 3628kg
CARGO: 1092L
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