Cadillac's XT5 is new for 2017 and is more luxurious than the vehicle it replaces, the SRX. Its posh, classy-looking interior and quiet, composed ride impress. However, it's not without quirks that really take away from the SUV's premium feel.
Transcript
(car starts) Cadillac XT5 is new for 2017, and it's a very luxurious SUV, but I found from my time driving it that it has two major quirks. So the first quirk is back here. There's just no headroom at all.
Cadillac says, you know, it's got a reclining (indistinct) sort of slide back and you don't have the headroom issue. But I don't really sold on it. First of all, some people were just more comfortable sitting upright. And the second thing is other competitors like the Lexus RX350 and the Mercedes-Benz GLE class just offer more room back here. The second quirk is the XT5's all wheel drive system. It's not automatic. And by that I mean a lot of all wheel drive systems out there, as soon as they detect that there's some road slip or anything like that, they engage all wheels. With the XT5, you actually have to press this button to tell it to switch to that mode. First of all, that's just kind of weird if everything else is automatic, secondly, it takes a while for the XT5 to actually make that switch. And that's not really what you want. The one saving grace is once you tell it that you want it to be an all wheel drive it doesn't forget. You can turn the car off. When you come back out and turn it back on again it'll still be in all wheel drive until you tell it to change. So despite those two quirks though, I still think competitors should be worried. Why? For starters, there's this interior. Now our test model has this nice mix of aluminum, wood and leather, and pretty much every editor on staff thought it looked really good. Also there's a nice variety of materials across the XT5. There's two types of aluminum, three types of wood, and even carbon fiber that you can get. I saw most of these on a press drive out in California, and I thought they all looked very nice. Another standout positive is the XT5 knows what it wants to be. A luxury SUV. There's not a lot of wind noise. There's not a lot of road noise. And the ride is very composed. Overall, it's just a very comfortable SUV to drive and ride around in. While it's certainly not perfect, the XT5 still does a lot to distinguish itself in the luxury SUV class.
