2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV Safety

The 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV Safety second-row captain's chairs had the only Latch anchors in this three-row SUV. The Latch anchors are easy to access. The tether anchors are at the bottom of the captain's chair seatbacks, so their accessibility isn't great but this isn't uncommon. A variety of child-safety seats fit without a problem in the 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV Safety, with the exception of the third row's center seating position.

The 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV Safety received three out of five stars in rollover crash-test ratings by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, but it hasn't undergone the agency's other crash tests. It also hasn't been crash-tested by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Standard safety features include rear-wheel drive, all-disc antilock brakes, an electronic stability system with rollover mitigation technology, traction control, a blind spot warning system, a backup camera with rear parking sensors, and six airbags, including side curtains for all three rows. Four-wheel drive is optional in the 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV Safety.

2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV

The 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV was so big it made all the other cars around it feel like an entourage of hangers-on. The high notes aren't so much new notes.

The 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV has shiny 22-inch wheels, chromed air vents, and a power liftgate and running boards.

The running boards were a source of pain early in my test drive because I kept whacking my shins on them as they automatically dropped down when I opened the door.

The 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV is 222.9 inches long. Make sure to measure your garage before bringing this beast home. Don't say you weren't warned.

The 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV has a 403-horsepower, 6.2-liter V-8. It uses regular gas or E85 ethanol, which lowers its fuel economy to 9/13 mpg.

2011 Cadillac Escalade

It's easy to consider the 2011 Cadillac Escalade a superstar because of its flash and reputation, but after my experience in the 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV, I'm convinced it's more like a diva.
This SUV is ginormous, and I was interested to see how it really worked as an everyday family hauler. However, the 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV didn't really care what I thought. It was going to do whatever it wanted.

The three-row 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV, which is 20 inches longer than the Escalade, drove like a mansion on wheels and felt like one when we were in it. With its V-8 engine, driving on the highway was awesome as long as the road was mostly straight.
Parking lots were difficult and I couldn't imagine running errands in the 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV without parking far away from the other cars so I wouldn't worry about the 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV's butt hanging out of the spot.

With a starting MSRP of $66,080, the 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV isn't for the faint of heart.
My test car, a top-of-the-line Premium Edition with four-wheel drive, cost $88,295. Let's just get the obvious out of the way: The 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV with four-wheel drive gets an EPA-estimated 13/18 mpg city/highway. Ouch. So much for the kids' college fund.

Cadillac ATS 2012 CUE System

Cadillac has lagged the industry in infotainment, but that will change next year. General Motors spent the past 30 months developing CUE, short for Cadillac User Experience.

The infotainment system's simplicity might remind users of an iPod Touch screen. You don't need to pull out a 500-page owner's manual and try to figure out how to use something. Icons are big, it's intuitive, easy to use. You will see the interface mimics a tablet computer.

Cadillac CUE will be standard on the 2013 Cadillac XTS sedan arriving next year and optional on the 2013 Cadillac ATS and SRX. The XTS replaces the DTS and STS in Cadillac's lineup. The Cadillac ATS 2012 is Cadillac's new compact car, which also arrives in 2012. Pricing was not announced.

Cadillac claims several industry firsts for its infotainment system. Here are some of the key features of Cadillac CUE:

Feedback: Buttons on the faceplate pulse when pressed to acknowledge the driver's commands.

Multi-touch gestures: Interactive motions (tap, flick, swipe and spread) popularized by smartphones and tablets are incorporated on to the 8-inch LCD screen to let the driver scroll lists and zooming in or out of a maps, for example.

Proximity sensing: When the driver's hand gets within eight inches of the screen, additional ions appear on the screen that give the driver more choices of things to control.

Speech recognition: The system lets consumers speak as they would in conversation and not with awkward commands and sequences.

Cadillac CUE will apply technology in a useful, meaningful way, that is relevant for the luxury buyer who will be able to access all of the audio data on the smartphone.

Cadillac ATS Tease

The engineers took the Cadillac ATS prototype to Nurburgring. Cadillac has already posted a blacked-out teaser shot of the car.

The Cadillac ATS is the all-new Cadillac compact luxury sport sedan with which Cadillac will battle the segment's king, the BMW 3 Series.


The Cadillac ATS is developed on the rear-wheel-drive architecture that borrows heavily from the larger Cadillac CTS and is expected to be used by other GM divisions besides Cadillac.

Eventually, the Cadillac ATS range is expected to include a Cadillac ATS coupe and a Cadillac ATS convertible, possibly a small wagon and at least one Cadillac ATS V-Series performance variant by 2015.