How General Motors turned the Chevy Tahoe into a luxury icon.
At its core, the story of Cadillac is one of large, powerful, imposing luxury cars. Seville, Deville, Eldorado, Fleetwood — the names of the brand’s land yachts are legendary, having graced generation after generation of enormous, sybaritic sedans, coupes, and convertibles across the span of the 20th Century..
The second generation also marked the expansion of the Escalade brand to three body styles. The regular, Tahoe-sized version launched first, followed shortly by the Escalade EXT — Cadillac’s version of the Chevy Avalanche, which was, in effect, a Suburban with a pickup truck bed replacing everything after the C-pillars. Come 2003, Cadillac rolled out the extended-length Escalade ESV, which applied Caddy design and luxury to the Suburban body itself.
The extended-length ESV and pickup truck EXT variants both returned for the third-generation Escalade, as did the usual assortment of standard interior luxuries: heated leather seats for first and second rows, a Bose stereo, a rear parking assist and the inevitable wood paneling, all wrapped together in an interior that ditched much of the patched-together appearance of previous Escalades for a more cohesive, premium feel.
The thorough update worked: after a dip at the end of the third-gen’s life, Escalade sales trended upwards again once the new model hit showrooms. Small but meaningful updates along the way — an eight-speed gearbox for 2015, a 10-speed one for 2019, a splash of added tech like lane departure prevention — helped keep sales on the rise all the way until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic took the wind out of the entire industry’s sails.
On the flip side of the efficiency coin, 2022 saw Cadillac give the Escalade the V-Series treatment for the very first time. The Escalade-V used a version of the supercharged 6.2-liter V-8 of the CT5-V Blackwing, turned up to deliver a whopping 682 hp and 653 lb-ft of torque. With the help of its 10-speed auto and standard all-wheel-drive, this three-ton-plus beast could hop from 0-60 mph in 4.
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