om and we're here at the 2013 LA Auto Show, looking at a name plate that should be familiar to all those Hollywood A and B listers, even the C and D listers who want to put up with a big car payment, so they seem more like the A and B listers. Anyway, this is the redesigned Cadillac Escalade, a combination of GM's K2 truck platform that brought us to Chevy Silverado, the Suburban, the Tahoe, the GMC Sierra and Yukon. This is the big daddy of them all. Let's take a look at the redesigned king of bling. Like before the Escalade has a very angular face, a very blocky kind of shape to it. LED headlights are up front, there's LED light piping there. You come around the back, there's LED light piping up and down the tail here on this extended length Escalade ESV. There's also going to be a regular length Escalade. The Escalade EXT, and the Escalade hybrid, both offered with the previous generation are now gone. Now Cadillac says it used aluminum in the tailgate. It used aluminum in the hood to save weight, but this SUV still comes in at just over 5,600 pounds in base form. Not exactly a light vehicle there. 20 inch alloy wheels are standard. If you really want to up the bling-bling factor, 22s are available. Interior recalls that of the Cadillac XTS full-sized sedan. Plenty of real wood trim. Cadillac says this isn't the fake stuff, and Cadillac's CUE system, that stands for Cadillac User Experience. It's got capacitive buttons here down the center stack of controls. It also has an eight inch touchscreen up here, CUE, a bit of a controversy among our editors. Some like it's haptic feedback, others, myself included wish they just put in real buttons, here. There is a 12.3 inch display in place of regular gauges up here. And Cadillac says that the front seats have an additional four inches of leg room and two inches of headroom. So there should be plenty of room up here. I don't really know that I buy that necessarily. I'm about six feet tall, and this is where I'd sit and the seat's all the way back here. I could even use a little bit more space. Let's check out the second and third rows, Plenty of headroom, decent leg room, and a reasonably high seating position in the second row. Unfortunately, in this car at the auto show, the second row seats don't appear to be able to move forward or backwards, although they do recline a few degrees. Materials quality in the second row appears to stay consistent with what we've seen up front, plenty of stitching along the doors, even stitching all the way down along this little area here underneath the rear climate controls. A big reason why the seats don't go forward and backward is because they tumble in this car here at the auto show. It's a power tumbling feature. It makes it pretty easy to get back to the third row, which actually has a reasonable seating position there for adults. Reasonably high off the ground. Good leg room for a third row. Cadillac says the ESV, the extended length Escalade has about 10 more inches of rear leg room in the third row versus the regular length Escalade, which we haven't been in. If that's 10 inches, it's not going to be real pretty. Beyond the third row of the ESV is about 39 cubic feet of cargo volume, down a little bit versus the nearly 46 cubic feet in the last ESV. You fold all the seats down, pretty easy with these buttons here in the cargo area that fold down both the third and the second rows. You're looking at about 120 cubic feet of maximum cargo room, about 94 cubic feet of maximum cargo room in the regular Escalade. Those numbers are down about 15 cubic feet versus the previous generation though. Although the Escalades V8 makes the same 6.2 liters as the outgoing generation. GM says it's been completely overhauled horsepower is now 420 with 460 pounds feet of torque, big increases versus last year's 402 horsepower, 417 pounds feet of torque. Still the Escalade employs a six speed automatic transmission. GM has been dabbling lately in eight speed automatics as we've seen optional in the new CTS. Fuel economy numbers are still pending. So we don't know how all of that will pan out. So stay tuned for more news, closer to the car's on sale date in spring 2014. (engine revs)
