Road Trip! We Put the 2025 Cadillac Escalade IQ’s Huge Range to the Test
Can the electric Escalade get us from San Francisco to L.A. on one charge?
Cadillac recently launched its luxury juggernaut electric SUV, the Escalade IQ, in San Francisco, California. Yours truly was called upon to attend said launch, and, hey, guess what? I live in Los Angeles. Guess what 2.0? Cadillac is claiming the hulking EV has a 460-mile range. Depending on how you go, S.F. is about 400 miles from L.A. You thinking what I’m thinking? Road trip! A road trip where we could find out if the Escalade IQ could make the trip on a single charge? More important, why fly when you can drive, and especially when you can drive something as frankly magnificent as the latest and perhaps greatest from Cadillac? (You can read our full First Test on the IQ here.)
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A Real-World Test
Right off the bat, allow me to state that had we gone the boring way down Interstate 5, we could have easily but mind-numbingly made the trip on a single charge. When cameraman Alex Valencia and I climbed aboard the ’Slade (MT’s social media pro Jofel Tolosa shadowed us in our long-term Mazda CX-70), the dashboard was showing 96 percent state of charge (SOC) and 449 miles of range. So right away you can see the big beauty wasn’t fully charged up. Hey, when you’re doing a range test, 11 miles can make a big difference.
As we started making the accompanying video, I decided going the boring way would result in a boring watch and an even less exciting read. So, I used the Escalade’s built-in Google Maps to make sure we went down Route 101, adding a stop for lunch at the fantastic Madonna Inn and a final destination of Joy, a delicious Taiwanese noodle joint near where Valencia and I both live. Total distance? 421 miles, leaving us a 28-mile buffer. It was definitely doable, although frankly I’m totally the wrong man for the job.
A few years back I was the first non-Lucid employee to drive the Air. Specifically, I drove the Air Dream Edition R, which, along with 1,111 horsepower, had an EPA-rated range of 471 miles. It was a two-day test drive, with day one consisting of blasting up Angeles Crest Highway on big fat 21-inch summer tires (whee!) and day two being a 408-mile drive from Beverly Hills to San Francisco on 19-inch wheels wrapped in low-rolling-resistance tires. Our two-car caravan went so slow that after a stop in S.F., the cars had enough range to drive another 35 miles south to Lucid HQ. Afterward on Instagram, I said, “Until the human bladder gets reengineered, I’m officially retired from long-range EV tests. They’re really dull to do.” Talk about a piss take.
What I had wanted to do with that Lucid was drive it like I would drive any other car on a road trip, something I was eventually able to do with another Air, the Grand Touring Performance. Spoiler alert: I drove the 1,050-hp car real fast and had to stop and charge to make it home. However, I did get to experience how rapidly Lucids can charge, which is arguably more important than absolute range. This Escalade IQ trip would be a combination of my two Lucid drives. We weren’t going to go slow, but we also weren’t going to blast it up to 100-plus-mph every time the opportunity presented itself. Would we make it? And if we had to charge, how would that go?
How It Went
Among the worst things you can do to an EV in terms of range is just drive straight on a freeway for hours on end. Part of the magic of EV efficiency is that when you “brake,” you’re most often using the motors to decelerate, effectively running them backwards and recharging the battery. In normal city driving, as much as one third of the energy flowing out of the battery can be recaptured via regenerative braking. A wide-open, American-style road trip offers nearly none of those opportunities. Serious EV road-trippers also learn that speeding, running the A/C or the heater (both of which are electric in EVs), charging phones, playing music—all of that takes energy that could be devoted to spinning the wheels.
Us? We ran 10 mph over the speed limit (just keeping up with traffic, officer) the whole way, with the heat, seat massagers, and Google Maps running, and using Super Cruise as much as possible, because it’s awesome. Super Cruise is the best hands-free driver assistance system on earth right now, and it’s standard on the Escalade IQ. Even so, using it and its sensors has to chew at least a little into the range of the IQ. Super Cruise behaved extremely well on this trip, performing remarkably as always, with one hiccup: It suddenly stopped working.
I quickly was on the phone with a Cadillac representative, who asked if I was wearing a baseball hat. Indeed, I was! I took the hat off and voilà, Super Cruise worked again. Turns out that certain baseball hats, when tilted just so, interfere with the camera that watches the driver’s eyes to make sure they’re on the road. So, the deactivation wasn’t an unexpected problem but rather a safety guardrail. I later put the hat back on and angled the bill up a skosh and experienced no more problems. Factoring those 15 in, I’d estimate I allowed Super Cruise to do the driving for 90 percent of the trip.
When we pulled into the Madonna Inn for a nice, long lunch, it became pretty obvious we were going to have to charge. We’d driven 232 miles but consumed 260 miles of range. The Escalade IQ told us we had 190 miles left to go; we could maybe get to Joy 188 miles away, but we’d arrive on digital fumes. More likely we just wouldn’t make it. We made the incredibly easy decision to charge the beast. Here’s the cool part about the year 2025, at least in EV hotbeds like California. There were tons of places to charge up. Had we had a NACS adapter with us, there’s a great, compatible Tesla Supercharger station about 3 miles from the Madonna Inn. Alas, we didn’t have an adapter. There’s a Tesla Supercharger station at the Madonna Inn, but it’s the variety where you can’t use an adapter. No big deal, as even searching only for 350-kW chargers, we were spoiled for choice.
Because doing so took us off the highway and gave us a bit of country two-lane driving, we elected to charge in the bucolic Danish town of Solvang, California. We found an open 350-kW Electrify America charger, plugged in the Cadillac—and I hardly believe this next part—it just started charging. The future is now! And, man, did it charge! We saw a peak of 279 kW, which is fast for an Electrify America station. We plugged in with 94 miles of range showing and the SOC at 23 percent. The three of us made a pit stop inside a nearby grocery store, and 10 minutes after we'd plugged in, we had gained more than 100 miles of range; the IQ now said it could travel 206 miles. We let the Caddy stew on the charger for another 10 minutes then left with the battery at about 60 percent and the computer showing 290 miles before empty. That’s nearly 200 miles of range in 20 minutes. We’ll take it.
The rest of the drive was a nonevent. Somehow the traffic wasn’t bad, even driving across the San Fernando Valley into the east side of Los Angeles on a rainy Friday night. We got to Joy a leisurely eight hours after we left San Francisco’s Dog patch neighborhood with 125 miles of range showing. However, it was Friday night, York Avenue was hopping, and we couldn’t find any parking. Of course, we ended up too tired for a full-on sit-down meal, so we went to a less hip part of the neighborhood for some tacos from a truck. Arguably the better move.
As for the Cadillac Escalade IQ, what a magnificent colossus of a road-tripper. It’s hard to express just what a luxurious grand slam of an SUV Cadillac has created. The big-boy range is just the cherry on top. Besides, stopping for 20 minutes to charge over the course of an eight-hour adventure is nothing (and half of that time involved people using the restroom). Had we traveled at the speed limit, we would have easily made the 421-mile trip. After our informal trip, MotorTrend’s test team strapped its gear to the IQ. On our official 70-mph MotorTrend Road-Trip Range test, we learned the claimed range is only 10 percent higher than our test result of 415 miles; most EVs are worse, some much more so. We could have made it without charging, but I’m sure glad we didn’t.
When I was just one-year-old and newly walking, I managed to paint a white racing stripe down the side of my father’s Datsun 280Z. It’s been downhill ever since then. Moral of the story? Painting the garage leads to petrolheads. I’ve always loved writing, and I’ve always had strong opinions about cars.
One day I realized that I should combine two of my biggest passions and see what happened. Turns out that some people liked what I had to say and within a few years Angus MacKenzie came calling. I regularly come to the realization that I have the best job in the entire world. My father is the one most responsible for my car obsession. While driving, he would never fail to regale me with tales of my grandfather’s 1950 Cadillac 60 Special and 1953 Buick Roadmaster. He’d also try to impart driving wisdom, explaining how the younger you learn to drive, the safer driver you’ll be. “I learned to drive when I was 12 and I’ve never been in an accident.” He also, at least once per month warned, “No matter how good you drive, someday, somewhere, a drunk’s going to come out of nowhere and plow into you.”
When I was very young my dad would strap my car seat into the front of his Datsun 280Z and we’d go flying around the hills above Malibu, near where I grew up. The same roads, in fact, that we now use for the majority of our comparison tests. I believe these weekend runs are part of the reason why I’ve never developed motion sickness, a trait that comes in handy when my “job” requires me to sit in the passenger seats for repeated hot laps of the Nurburgring. Outside of cars and writing, my great passions include beer — brewing and judging as well as tasting — and tournament poker. I also like collecting cactus, because they’re tough to kill. My amazing wife Amy is an actress here in Los Angeles and we have a wonderful son, Richard.Read More
