Road Test
Love it or not, Cadillac has pretty much established its new styling shtick. The vertical headlamps and knife-slash taillamps, the outsize wreath-and-crests, and the bodylines sharp enough to cut salami are now familiar. The brand has also swept into the dustbin its legacy of being good for just hearses and blue-hair sedans. The world is now blessed with a Cadillac sport-utility, a Cadillac pickup truck, a Cadillac roadster, a Cadillac M5 eater (see "Cadillac CTS-V"), and now a Cadillac tall station wagon. For all we know, Cadillac's drawing board has backhoes and garbage disposals on it.
The one question about Cadillac still parked on everyone's mind is, "Would I enjoy owning one?" First, will you enjoy paying for one? No. Although the SRX with its new 3.6-liter V-6 starts at $38,690, our V-8 test mule with rear-wheel drive and few options ran $48,520. The SRX lands over $59,000 with four-wheel drive and all the options boxes checked. That's deep into territory patrolled by the BMW X5, Porsche Cayenne S, and other blue-chip choices.
Although the SRX may be expensive, your personal bar has to be set at a stratospheric height not to like this newest Cadillac. Our personal bars are over the moon, thanks to SRX competitors such as the Infiniti FX45, the Lexus RX330, and the X5, and yet we thoroughly dug the preproduction, rear-drive example Cadillac delivered to us, with only a few caveats.
The SRX looks like a CTS but shares not a single piece of exterior sheetmetal and needs quite a bit more street. Compared with the CTS, the SRX has an extra three inches at the wheelbase and about two inches in track width. The SRX is also substantially taller and longer than the CTS and dimensionally closer, chief engineer Jim Federico adds, to the upcoming Seville, due in 2004, which will be known only as the STS.
The upsizing does great things for the SRX's hog-hauling capacity. Thanks in part to the squared-off rear glass, there are 32 cubic feet behind the middle row and 70 with the middle row folded not flat but to a slight angle. An Acura MDX, a Lexus RX330, and a Volvo XC90 can all accept a bit more freight than can the SRX, due partly to the Cadillac's narrow wheelhouses. A few in the stylish wagonoid class are significantly tighter in back, namely, the X5 and the FX45.
The SRX's front seats are proficiently sculpted with the appropriate splashes of lateral and lower thigh support. Room is ample, and the hip height is lower than that of most body-on-frame sport-utes, so scrambling in and out isn't an adventure in mountaineering. Sorry, no lumbar adjustments, even at this price.
However, unless your legs are longer than Wilt the Stilt's, your pants will regularly brush clean the plastic rocker cladding that juts outward from the body below the doors. From the outboard edge of the SRX driver's seat down to the tip of the cladding, we measured 17.0 inches of thigh-stretching distance. A quick survey of our parking lot revealed that an FX45, with the driver's seat set to the writer's same comfort level, has just 15.2 inches between seat and sill, and a Volvo XC90 has 14.8 inches. Those scant couple inches make the difference between clean and dirty pants.
At least the Cadillac's electrically adjustable pedals and manually tilting wheel, standard on V-8 models, ensure that most body types will get comfort for their money. The dashboard, with its waffle-iron vents, is essentially a CTS transplant; the dial lettering looks as if it were pulled from an action-movie poster. When you start the car, the navigation touch screen reads, "The joy of SRX." Cheeky.
Otherwise, the nav system (it can't be ordered on base rear-drive V-8s such as ours) is fairly conventional, although like all touch screens with no tactile feel, it fogs up with fingerprints and demands that eyes divert from the road to find the switchgear. Pleasingly, you don't hit an "I accept" roadblock until you go into the navigation or car-configuration menus. Some competitors, namely, BMW, won't even allow you to tune the radio until you've heard from their lawyers.
Overhead hat area is in the 10-gallon class, and the middle row perches high off the floor with lots of space for long legs and their knees. Toes can nestle up under the front buckets. Cadillac even managed to squeeze in an optional, electrically raised third-row bench that was not in our V-8 rear-drive test mule but sampled elsewhere. Anyone over the age of 10 using that seat will feel a bit like a pretzel still in the bag, but it's nice to have the choice even if it's "no thanks."
One option you may want to spring for is the DOHC 32-valve 4.6-liter V-8. This is our old pal the Northstar, thoroughly juiced up to 320 horsepower and 315 pound-feet of torque with variable valve timing on the intake and exhaust cams and a zillion other smaller changes to modify it for rear-drive duty. If the world is chasing BMW and its ultra-refined engines, Cadillac seems to be catching it with this sweetie.
