The 2025 Escalade IQ is packed with tech, but it doesn’t come cheap

General Motors is continuing its tech-forward push with the new 2025 Escalade electric vehicle (EV) and if you have $160,000, there’s a lot of interesting tech packed away in here. All of the driving bells and whistles can be added on, it comes with every safety feature imaginable and three years of Super Cruise self-driving tech.

As an EV, it’s best in class with an estimated range of 720km, which if true, follows this year’s trend of super long-range EVs. That said, this big battery will take a while to fill. GM’s marketing says it will take 10 minutes for every 160km with a top-of-the-line fast charger, but that’s contingent on finding a charger that fast, how much charge you already have, the temperature of your battery and the charger, along with other variables.

Inside the SUV, Cadillac is running a giant infotainment/instrument cluster screen that runs on top of Android Automotive, and this time there’s no way to use phone projection if you’d rather use CarPlay or Android Auto. Google’s automotive backbone is decent, but many people might need to sacrifice the convince of phone projection.

Beyond the 800-volt battery architecture, the new Escalade also takes a version of the Hummer EV’s crab walk mode to make parking the Escalade a little easier. On the Escalade, the new version is called ‘Active mode’ and this allows you to turn all four tires up to seven degrees so you can slide the car around corners or diagonally into parking spaces. It doesn’t perfectly move 90 degrees left and right, but the system is unique and makes parking this giant car easier than you’d expect.

All the tech inside

The first thing you’re greeted with is the giant screen. It’s big, bright and responsive as it stretches from behind the steering wheel and into the centre console space. We’ll get to that in a bit.

First, the Escalade also has a lower screen to control car features like the AC, seat controls and other car settings. For example, you use this screen to enable Active mode. If you spec your Escalade with power doors, you can also open/close them from this screen. The car is smart enough to adapt to what’s on the screen, so when you park, the door controls appear. Normally when driving, it shows climate controls since that’s what people will use the most.

The bottom screen will take some getting used to for most drivers since there are a lot of buttons and menus to dive through, but most of the common controls like AC and seat warmers should be easy enough to find. In the model I tested, there were also seat warmer/cooler controls built into the door. The seat position controls were also moved up here and Cadillac says it lets them make the seats roughly two inches larger than before.

There are also a few wireless charging pads in the cockpit, and depending on your spec, there can even be some in the back. These are all actively cooled and can provide up to 15-watts of power. If you need more juice, there are three USB-C ports and a 12-volt outlet in the centre console. Alongside these, there’s also an HDMI port if you have the optional passenger display.

This passenger display is only visible to the passenger because it uses a neat polarization effect when the car is in motion, but once parked, both people can see it. Its got access to a web browser, YouTube and it can also show off some of the car info like current charge and distance driven. This screen is handy, but due to the curved nature of the top edge, you don’t get that much screen real estate. Full-screen videos are not bad, but I still would have liked Cadillac to move the video player all the way to the left to take advantage of the bottom of the screen.

The car also comes with some AKG/Cadillac Bluetooth headsets to use with the screens, and in a brief test, they were better than I expected. You can, of course, connect your own Bluetooth headphones, but it was fun to test the included set. There are also two screens in the back seat, but they’re rectangular, so content fits on them a lot better. They also have access to YouTube, YouTube Kids, Hulu (U.S. only) and an HDMI port. You can play the audio from any of the screens over the car’s speakers as well.

Android everywhere

The Android-based infotainment screen is huge and looks incredibly sharp. The screen itself has solid motion control and colour too. It might not be colour-accurate enough for photo editing, instead, it’s very saturated and it looks great as an infotainment unit.  It was also bright enough that I never had any issues under the Californian sun even with the tinted skylight in the roof that can’t be closed.

The first portion of the screen is behind the steering wheel and for most of the drive, I had it set to show Google Maps information. This was quite handy, but I found that since the map stretched across so much screen, I needed to adjust the wheel to make sure I could see the turn-by-turn section. It would be nice for GM or Google to have more than one Maps configuration for this screen to make it more usable by different-sized people who need to put the wheel in different spots.

There is also a night vision camera you can display here that will help you see people or animals that might be on the side of the road. This has been on other Cadillacs before and seems to work well here.

Moving over to the main display, it’s a little hard to reach and I wish it would have been put closer to the driver. There is a control wheel in the centre console that I’m sure some users will enjoy, but I think as the world adapts to touch screens more and more, people will be reaching out to touch them.

Along the bottom of this display is a small section where you can anchor your favourite apps. Beside that, there’s another section that tries to predict what apps or features you might want at any given time. For instance, when you’re driving, it might be a shortcut to toggle the regenerative braking, and when you stop, you might see the button to open the glove box.

The main screen feels very reminiscent of what I tested on the Lyriq three years ago so it’s sad to see that Cadillac hasn’t been able to upgrade its design since then. It all works fine, but the design could be stronger and more consistent. However, most of the modern features you want from a car work here. Navigation via Google Maps is great,  you have access to lots of music or media streaming apps and a pretty handy voice assistant.

Safety features, self-driving and other tech features

Like some other new Cadillac vehicles, the new EV Escalade comes with three years of Super Cruise built in, which will allow you to use self-driving features on mapped highways in Canada or the U.S. After three years, you’ll need to pick up a subscription to continue using it. That said, you can get it month-to-month if you only need it for a few long drives each year.

I tested this feature out in a GMC Acadia late in 2024 and loved it. The tech works the same here, but Cadillac did mention that’s expanding the amount of roads covered by the service in 2025.

All the Cadillac advanced safety features are also included, so you don’t need to worry about factoring those into the price later on. This includes 360-degree cameras for parking and blind spot assistance, emergency braking and lane-keeping assistance. The haptic feedback in the seat is also tied to Super Cruise I really like it for the safety warnings as well. Having the seat buzz to make sure I’m paying attention is really engaging and a lot harder to miss than a blinking light or a chime sound.

One subtle feature that I initially waved off, but became a fan of over time was the power doors. Basically, all you need to do is touch the door handle, and it will open or close for you. There are also sensors in the door to make sure they don’t open wide enough to hit anything.

At first, I was annoyed because whenever I would try to control the door manually, it wouldn’t swing as smoothly as a traditional car door, but once I got used to not touching the doors, it was pretty handy, especially when I needed to exit the car with my hands full.

The best big EV, but you have to pay for it

This new electric Escalade has a ton to offer and starts at around $160,000 in Canada. You get an awesome range and a really premium experience for this price, but those things are table stakes once you get over $100,000. For tech enthusiasts, Cadillac seems to be banking on the giant screen running Android to be enough to sway people into this vehicle. It works well and has a lot of functionality, but it would be nice to see the company work on another round of polish to help make the system feel cohesive and like it follows a cohesive design language.

I still think moving away from phone projection systems was a step in the wrong direction as well. Sure, you can set it up and use it very similarly, but in my experience, people are creatures of habit and having their car be a separate operating system from a user’s phone still feels very old-fashioned.

While I understand why none of the automakers want to give up their tech stack to Apple’s CarPlay 2, as a user, it’s all I want. Just let me plug my phone into my car so all my map waypoints, contacts, music and apps are available.

The same goes for the passenger display. It’s cool that GM has a large screen on the dashboard for the passenger to use, but if they can only use a janky web browser or watch YouTube, why would they use that over their phone?

Overall, there’s a lot of tech packed into this machine, but at the end of the day I worry that it’s only good enough, and the fact that it’s running on Android does little to differentiate it from the non-Android systems in the past.