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The 9,000-pound monster I don’t want to give back Connie Loizos 2:59 AM PST · February 22, 2026 Before heading on a trip to Tahoe last weekend, GM offered me the use of the company’s 9,000-pound monument to excess – the new 2026 electric Escalade IQL (starting at $130,405) – for a week to test-drive. Before you continue, note that I’m not a professional car reviewer. TechCrunch has excellent transportation writers; I am not one of them. I do, however, drive an electric car .
I was immediately game. I’d first glimpsed one last summer at a car show, where some regional car dealers had stationed themselves at the end of a long field dotted with exquisite vintage automobiles. My immediate reaction was “Jesus, that’s enormous,” followed by a surprising admiration for its design, which, despite its enormous scale, shows restraint. For lack of a better word, I’m going to say it’s “strapping.” Its proportions just work.
My excitement waned pretty quickly when the car was dropped off at my house a day before our departure time. This thing is a monstrosity — at 228.5 inches long and 94.1 inches wide, it made our own cars look like toys. My first apartment in San Francisco was smaller. Trying to drive it up my driveway was a little harrowing, too; it’s so big, and its hood is so high, that if you’re ascending a road at a certain slope – we live midway down a hill; our mailbox is at the top of it – you can’t see whatever is directly in front of the car.
I thought about just leaving it in the driveway for the duration of the trip. The other alternative was doing what I could to grow more comfortable with the prospect of driving it 200 miles to Tahoe City, so I tooled around in it that night and the next day, picking up dinner, heading to an exercise class — just basic stuff around town. When I ran into a friend on the street, I volunteered as quickly as possible that this was not my new car, that I was going to possibly review it, and wasn’t its size ridiculous? It felt like a tank. I thought: other than hotels that use SUVs like the Escalade to ferry guests around, what kind of monster chooses a car like this?
Five days later, it turns out that I am that kind of monster.
Look, I don’t know how or when I fell for this car. If I’d written this review after two days, it would read very differently. Even now, I’m not so blind that I don’t see its shortcomings.
It was the Escalade’s performance in a terrible snowstorm that really won my heart, but let me walk you through the steps between “Ugh, this car is a tank” and “Yes! This car is a tank .”
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Inside is where digital maximalism does its work. The dashboard opens with a 55-inch curved LED screen with 8K resolution that reads less like a car display and more like a situation room. Front passengers get their own screens. Second-row passengers also get 12.6-inch personal screens along with stowable tray tables, dual wireless chargers, and — with the most lavish version of the car — massage seats that will make them forget they’re in a vehicle at all. Google Maps handles navigation. And the polarized screen technology deserves its own praise: while one of my kids binge-watched Hulu in the front seat, not a frame of it leaked into my sightline from behind the wheel.
The cabin itself is built around the premise that no one inside should feel crowded, and it delivers. Front legroom stretches to 45.2 inches; the second row offers 41.3; even the third row manages 32.3 inches. Seven adults could share this machine for a long while without fraying each other’s nerves. Heated and ventilated leather seats with 14-way power adjustment come standard in the first two rows, and the whole operation runs on 5G Wi-Fi.
The car also comes standard with Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free driving system, which I’m not sure I quite figured out. True car reviewers seem to love it; when I tried it, the car felt like it was drifting to an alarming degree between the outer boundaries of the highway lane, and when that happens, it unleashes an escalating sequence of warnings. First, a red steering wheel icon materializes on-screen. Then your seat pulses haptic warnings against your rump. Ignore those and a chime — both reminder and reproach — fills the cabin. GM calls this impolite series a “driver takeover request.”
Did I mention the 38-speaker AKG Studio sound system? So good.
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