2002 Cadillac Escalade

2002 Cadillac Escalade 2002 Cadillac Escalade
Road Test

Someday, when -- and if -- Cadillac has successfully completed its renaissance, we may look back on this vehicle as the beginning of the comeback, the vehicle that marked the restoration of America's one-time standard for the world to the first rank of prestigious transportation providers. Wow, huh?

If this comes to pass -- and the new Escalade looks like an impressive cornerstone for the rebuilding program -- it will be a chapter exceptionally rich in ironies. For openers, there's the delicious image of a long-established purveyor of luxury cars being towed back from the brink of obscurity by a truck. And the image is even more marvelous viewed against the backdrop of the first Escalade, a flabby, shameless badge job hastily rushed to market at the behest of unhappy SUV-less Cadillac dealers, who were dismayed at the astounding initial success of the Lincoln Navigator. The hurried launch followed a terse statement by General Motors president Jack Smith and then marketing czar Ron Zarrella to the effect that a sport-utility vehicle was not consistent with the image GM had mapped out for its prestige division. Therefore, there would not be a Cadillac sport-ute. No way. Ha.

The time that elapsed between those denials and the hastily cobbled 1999 Escalade, which rolled out in mid-1998, was roughly 18 months, an interval that Cadillac later cited as an example of GM's improving ability to reduce development time. Sure.

The second-generation Escalade, however, is a whole nuther story, with some traits that look to be best in class and a total package that could come to be regarded as the best of the sybaritic bigs. We'll need to round up the latest black-tie brute-utes for a show-and-tell comparison test, but here's what we know so far.

The new Escalade has more power than anything else in the large luxury class, and by a bunch. In four-wheel-drive trim, its GM 6.0-liter pushrod Vortec 6000 V-8 is rated at 345 hp and 380 pound-feet of torque. (We make the four-wheel-drive distinction because the new two-wheel-drive editions are propelled by GM's 5.3-liter V-8, worth 285 hp and 325 pound-feet.)

Lincoln's Navigator now trails in the output derby with 300 hp and 355 pound-feet from its 5.4-liter DOHC 32-valve V-8. That leaves the Navigator in third, because the new GMC Yukon Denali weighs in with 320 hp and 365 pound-feet of torque from a slightly lower-compression edition of the Escalade's 6.0-liter (a ratio of 9.4:1 vs. 10.0:1). The other jumbo luxury SUVs -- the Range Rover, the Toyota Land Cruiser, the Lexus LX470 -- don't even register on the more-than-300-hp radar screen.

Weighing in at 5662 pounds, the four-wheel-drive Escalade is among the portliest of these posh pachyderms -- 122 pounds heavier than the first-born Escalade -- but as always, adding more power works wonders. The last Escalade we tested ("Javelinas Grandes," May 1999) needed 10.2 seconds to wheeze to 60 mph, covered the quarter-mile in 17.6 seconds at 78 mph, and required 25.4 seconds to hit 90 mph. This new Escalade reached 60 mph from a standstill in 7.8, knocked 1.6 seconds off its predecessor's quarter-mile time, and registered 90 mph on the speedo in 18.1 seconds. And all those acceleration numbers best the ones posted by the Navigator.