Inside, the latest Escalade is well-assembled and uses quality materials, including lashings of leather, tasteful suede inserts and real woodgrain trim. Stylistically it’s clean and modern, and the first two rows are unreservedly comfortable, with supportive bolstering, plenty of space to stretch out, and heated seats all around (the driver and front passenger get seat cooling as well for those hot summer days). As my wife noted during a Whistler ski trip, “It’s a big beast, but it’s certainly comfortable.”

Nice touches in my test vehicle included a heads-up display and Cadillac’s excellent haptic-feedback Safety Alert Seat, which vibrates on the appropriate side to warn you if you’re drifting out of your lane on the highway, approaching obstacles when parking, and so on. It’s attention-getting without being intrusive, and helps maintain the cabin as an oasis of calm, rather than the usual video-arcade cacophony of beeping you get with most driver assistance systems.

Standard features include such things as tri-zone automatic climate control, configurable digital instrument display, active noise cancellation, power adjustable pedals, heated tilt-and-telescoping steering wheel, surround-view backup camera, keyless entry with pushbutton start, and a brilliant sounding 16-speaker Bose audio system with Bluetooth connectivity, voice-activated navigation, satellite radio, auxiliary input, five USB inputs, and a nifty hidden storage bin behind the touchscreen for your electronic devices. A big console bin and lots of other smaller cubbies round out the plentiful storage.

Not everything is perfect inside the Escalade, however: There’s not a lot of cargo room when the third-row seats are in place (only 430 L, which expands to 1,461 L with the seats stowed), and the third-row seats themselves are no more than adequate (although the power-actuated seat operators are very convenient). You can fit adults back there but legroom is tight, so those who’ll be using the rearmost seats on a frequent basis may want to check out the long-wheelbase Escalade ESV. Up front, the touch-sensitive centre-stack and infotainment controls are slick in concept but somewhat finicky in practice – the haptic feedback for the controls isn’t all that effective or immediate, and the screen can be laggy when responding to commands. As well, Cadillac’s CUE infotainment interface is complicated and less-than-intuitive, so I often found my attention sorely divided between trying to drive and trying to figure out the menu structure. That said, the system is richly featured, and a couple weeks of familiarization will likely go a long way towards figuring out most of the basic day-to-day commands.

I’m less inclined to forgive a few of the Escalade’s niggling hardware details. These include the oversize 1990s-style column shifter and the fiddly twist-to-operate wiper control on the turn-signal stalk (I prefer a right-hand stalk that I can easily flip to activate the wipers, but of course there’s a shifter on that side). I was also unimpressed by the somewhat flimsy cupholder lid on the console, and the rather brutal blind spots imposed by the substantial A-pillars and large mirror-mounts.

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