This Baby Really Hauls

One of the advantages of the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid is that it can carry up to eight passengers in luxury. In the case of Sparky with the Platinum Edition it can do this with ultimate luxury. But if you as George Carlin used to speak of – have more stuff. The Escalade Hybrid is just not another pretty face.

If you need more room to carry more stuff, the third row seats can be removed. The third row seating is divided into to two seats. If you have just a little extra stuff to take along you can remove one seat. Need more room for you stuff? Remove both seats. Want to take along your favorite horse? We’ve got that covered as well.

The Escalade Hybrid with rear wheel drive has a payload capacity of 1369 pounds and can tow up to 5800 pounds. The four wheel drive version can handle a 1339 payload capacity and tow up to 5600 pounds.

That’s enough to haul your horses to your hacienda or to take the family to far away places.

Sparky's Favorite Place To Shop

One of the areas in my territory I cover is Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It is a very eclectic area with dotted with everything from t-shirt shops to Vegas style dinner shows. If you are into water slide parks and miniature golf, then Myrtle Beach is your kind of place. If full size golf is more your style, you have your pick of 76 different courses.

But what is a tourist town without a few hundred souvenir shops. It can be so confusing to the casual visitor as to where exactly to go to get the best deal on a snow glob or fudge. That’s why our favorite place to shop of course is – Sparky’s!

Sparky’s is actually located in Marion, SC on US 501 about 45 miles outside of Myrtle Beach. The best part is you pass right by if you are coming off Interstate 95. You can get your shopping done before you blow your budget in Myrtle Beach or grab that last minute trinket before heading home.

So if you are looking for boots or beads, moccasins or magnets, shark’s teeth or sand castles – then Sparky's is for you. If you don’t want a car load of kids on a sugar high for that long trip home, don’t forget the sugar free/low carb fudge.

Just be careful as you walk around inside, the floors are not real even.

How Sweet It Is!

We often hear the term "The Sweet Spot” when it comes to sports. When Arod connects on the sweet spot of the bat can send a baseball over the Green Monster in Fenway Park. You can hear when Tiger hits the sweet spot of his driver, sending that little white orb down the middle of finely manicured fairway at Pebble Beach.

After driving Sparky now for 3 months, he too has a sweet spot when it comes to saving fuel. Most of my driving is on the highway and it looks like 65-67 miles per hour is the sweet spot for getting the most out of a gallon of gasoline. Creep up close to 70 and beyond and the fuel savings begin to drop. The picture above was taken with the cruise control set driving on a level stretch of road and is typical of what I see all the time. Who would have ever imagined you could get 25 MPG from a large luxury SUV that seats eight.

So want does that extra 5 mph mean? For a 165 mile trip from Charlotte to Raleigh, it’s an extra 20 minutes. To go from Charlotte to visit Daytona Beach will take less than a full tank of gas and will add less than extra hour to your trip.

What’s the rush? Enjoy the scenery.

Anybody Here Seen a Hybrid?

For decades the area from Charlotte, NC to Greenville, SC thrived with many mills spinning cotton into everything from towels to underwear. Because of competition from abroad these companies one by one closed and shifted production overseas, taking those jobs with them. As you travel down interstate 85 just outside Spartanburg, SC you can see a sprawling manufacturing facility owned by BMW. They are celebrating their 15th year in this facility, and it has brought needed jobs to the area hard hit when the clothing industry closed shop.

BMW manufactures the Z4 sports car as well as the X5 and X6 sport utility vehicles at this facility. I was visiting our Cadillac dealers in the area this week and thought I’d stop by to take a look at the BMW X5 Hybrid, after all BMW and other European manufacturers are known for building state of the art vehicles using the latest technology.

Guess what, BMW doesn’t offer a Hybrid!

The BMW X5 is offered with a 6 Cylinder, a V8 and a diesel. I went to the BMW website to collect some information about these vehicles. The X5 48i power plant is a 4.8L V8 that puts out 350 hp. They point out on the website the vehicles gets 19 mpg on the highway. To get the rest of the story, you have to go to the EPA website. According to the www.fueleconomy.com website and what BMW doesn’t tell you on their website is that the X5 requires premium fuel. The Escalade Hybrid requires regular unleaded.

The BMW X5’s combined fuel economy rating is only 16 while the Hybrid 2WD is 20 mpg. Scroll down to another post and you will see I achieved 21.9 mpg with mixed city/highway driving. A new feature of the fuelecononmy.gov website is they list the cost to drive 25 miles. For the X5 48i it will cost you $4.41. To take that same 25 mile trip in the Escalade Hybrid would cost you $3.32.


Sorry BMW, the best car wins - Cadillac Escalade Hybrid.

Have They Landed Yet?

As we have grown, we remember those teachers that inspired us, challenged us and encouraged us. They helped shape us into the person we are today. Without teachers, I’d venture to say we’d still be rubbing to rocks together in order to try and start a fire.

We probably also remember those teachers that were a little eccentric in their methods. One such teacher was my eighth grade science teacher whose name has long since been forgotten. The classroom was large with a huge cabinet/work station at the head of the class. Legend has it that one day during class while showing a science experiment he reached across the cabinet top to retrieve something. The Bunsen burner was lit and as he reached across, he lit his tie on fire. Smelling smoke he went over to the doorway and held up the tie and pounded out the flames with his fist.

One of his signature moves though was when he caught someone in the class looking out the window. He would call out the students name as he rapidly moved to the window and ask enthusiastically, “Have they landed yet”?

The Escalade Hybrid I am driving in a Platinum Edition which includes the LED headlight assembly. There is a vertical stack of five LED lights that are the headlights with two larger lights inboard that are the high beams. They produce a very white light and illuminate the road ahead better than HID lamps. The beam is well focus as no oncoming driver has flashed their lights at me to dim mine.

Last week I stopped for gas and coffee while it was still dark. After pumping the gas I backed the Hybrid away from the pumps. As I approached the vehicle and hit the unlock button the headlights came on. For the first time I saw how menacing this vehicle looks in the night. Can you image what other drivers see in their mirrors as you approach?


Escalade Hybrid Platinum – Yes it has landed!

Does Your Luxury SUV Handle Like This?

During the decades of the fifties, sixties and seventies large luxury cars would often be described as boats because of the way they floated down the highway. This could be said of cars like the one pictured along the side margin; a 1959 Cadillac I spotted at the Autofair in Charlotte this year. In order to drive one of these it seemed like you not only needed a driver's license, but also needed to get checked out by the Coast Guard.

Today, some luxury SUVs can leave you with this same feeling. The competition’s trucks provide little feedback to the driver and can dish out a harsh ride. The Cadillac Escalade Hybrid was developed with modern day technology that can also be found in today’s high performance sports cars.

First developed for the Chevrolet Corvette, the Escalade Hybrid comes standard with Magnetic Ride Control. Magnetic Ride Control uses small metal chips mixed in with the shock absorber fluid. The system is computer controlled to provide real-time suspension damping by magnetically charging the metal flakes. The front suspension uses coil over shocks while using a 5-link rear suspension. Also standard is StabiliTrak electronic stability control with rollover mitigation, all speed traction control and rack and pinion steering. All this sounds more like a sports car than a luxury sport utility vehicle.

The design of the rear suspension provides an excellent ride, but it does take up a bit of room under the rear of the vehicle. Because of this, the Escalade designers could not engineer in a fold flat third row seat system. The third row fold flat seats can be found on some of our competitors, but is done with the sacrifice of a smooth ride by using a solid rear axle and leaf springs.

The only way to travel down the highway and get the feeling you are numb, floating boat is to get the original luxury SUV the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid.

The ship at the top of the page is the battleship, USS North Carolina. The North Carolina is 728 feet long, weighs in at 44,840 tons and could carry her crew of 2300 up to 28 knots. She was commissioned in 1941 and saw action during World War II in the Pacific protecting shipping lanes. In 1961 BB55 came to Wilmington, NC where it is a museum and open to the public. The ship is open for self guided tours 8am – 8pm during the summer and until 5pm the rest of the year.

I'll Have a Small Helping of 87 Octane

Almost all of the driving I do is along our interstate highway system. It also is nice living in the south where you don’t have to dodge all of the pot-holes that you find in northern states. Although those evasive course challenges do provide addition skills that they don’t normally teach in your typical driver’s training course in high school.

The biggest savings in fuel efficiencies with the Escalade 2-Mode Hybrid is in stop and go city driving. Most think there is no measureable savings driving on the highway. On a recent trip to Raleigh, NC and back I averaged 21.9 miles per gallon.

This trip included rolling hills along I-85 between Charlotte and Greensboro. It also included traffic lights along US 421 and US 64. Before I encountered the rolling hills and the traffic lights, the Hybrid’s average fuel economy was over 24 miles per gallon.

Escalade Hybrid – it’s just not for city driving.

I Go Where I'm Towed

One of the benefits of living in the Carolinas is the diversity of locations to explore. You can enjoy the beauty of the mountains of western North Carolina one day then pack up and enjoy the charm of Charleston the next day. The best part of traveling with a Recreational Vehicle is you can travel at your own pace. When you’re ready to move on, you can simply pull up and go to another location. The best part is you travel with your own bathroom.

I’m sure you’ve seen motorhomes traveling down the highway often pulling another vehicle behind. These cars or trucks are known as a Dingy or a Toad. One of the more popular dingy has been a Saturn since it was one of the first vehicles with an automatic transmission that could be towed with all four wheels down.

Occasionally you may see a luxury motorhome traveling down the road pulling a large pick-up or sport utility. Until now there hasn’t been a Cadillac model that could be dingy towed without additional modification to the drive line. By simply placing the transfer case in neutral of the Hybrid’s drivetrain, you can take your luxury with you.

Now you can take it with you. Because not only is the Escalade Hybrid the only luxury Hybrid SUV on the market, it’s the only true luxury SUV that can be dingy “toad” without major modifications.

The Coolest Thing Ever

One of the coolest standard features on all new Cadillac models has to be OnStar’s turn by turn navigation. If you have a new Escalade, CTS or the all new 2010 SRX eNav takes the driving experience way beyond what you can’t get on any other brand.

You can have your destination downloaded to your navigation system in two different ways. Using Mapquest from any computer, just click on the “Send to OnStar” link once it has found your address, give it a name tag and save the location. Once you are inside the car, push the blue OnStar button and say “Virtual Advisor” when the OnStar system says – Ready. You tell the system the name of the location you want and it downloads it to the car.

Another way is to push the blue button and speak to an advisor. Tell them the address or the place you are trying to find and they will send the directions to the vehicle. With XM Navtraffic service, the navigation system will alert you to trouble ahead in over 80 major markets.

If your car is stolen, OnStar will disable the ignition so it can’t be started. If your car becomes the breaking news story of a police chase on the six o’clock news, OnStar can help with Stolen Vehicle Slowdown. This feature keeps the engine running at an idle allowing the driver to maintain control of the steering and brakes.

So beyond Sparky’s Hybrid technology it also has the conveience and safety of OnStar with eNav, Navtraffic, Stolen Vehicle Recovery, Remote Ignition Block, Stolen Vehicle Slowdown. Then there is Automatic Crash Response which allows an OnStar advisor to send critical crash data to emergency room doctors if you are involved in a crash. The list of OnStar features just goes on and on and on. Visit OnStar’s website at www.onstar.com for complete details of what this system offers.

The only place to see, test drive and buy a full size, eight passenger, luxury sport utility Hybrid with all that OnStar offers is your nearest Cadillac dealer. You won’t find it at BMW, Lexus, Mercedes or that other German car - Audi.

M-m-m-m-m. Doughnuts

When you live in the south, you learn that the two main culinary staples in life are the Waffle House and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Not to mention Barney Fife’s favorite snack of a Moon Pie and RC Cola. I visited our Cadillac dealer in Winston-Salem, NC today, which is just down the street from the world headquarters for Krispy Kreme.

There is something mesmerizing about watching those light, airy, pastry delights drifting along in a sea of hot grease as they move onto a moving rack to deliver this sweet treat to its shower of liquid sugar icing that makes your mouth water. Nothing tastes better than a classic Krispy Kreme or French cruller that is freshly picked off the conveyer belt.

As I drive this new Escalade Hybrid I find it requires less fuel than any other large sport utility. With a new lower octane consumption diet for my driving, I guess I should put myself on a similar calorie intake as well.

Well, maybe just one doughnut. It’s all about moderation, right?

The Sounds of Silence

The two biggest improvements to the automobile since the electric starter has to be power steering and air conditioning. One of the features of the Escalade Hybrid is the Auto Stop feature, allowing the engine to shut down in order to save gasoline when the vehicle is stopped. This can create a bit of a problem if temperatures outside are high, since the air conditioner compressor normally operate from a drive belt as the engine runs. To be able to supply cool air to the passengers when the engine is not running or if you’re trying to navigate a parking lot when the Hybrid is running from the electric motor, this can be a problem.

To overcome this, the Cadillac engineers created a power steering pump and an air conditioning compressor that operate electrically. I was reminded of how they work earlier this week. We had a bit of a cold snap and day time temperatures barely climbed into the seventies. This may sound a little silly combining cold snap and seventy degrees in the same sentence, but in August in South Carolina it has been the topic of many conversations.

While sitting at a traffic light I noticed something I hadn’t heard before, silence. I had just finished a phone call and had not turned the radio back up. The only sound you could hear was the blower fan from the climate control. The silence was very noticeable. No engine noise, no outside noise, just the blower fan. As the light turned green and as I pulled away the sound of the electric motor could be heard before the engine started back up again.

It’s astonishing to watch all of these systems all working in harmony is that it goes unnoticed. If you don’t look at the display screen that shows the interaction between the engine and the electric motor, you’d never notice one shutting down or powering up.

Getting to Know You

I wanted to start this blog to let people know of my experiences driving Cadillac’s new Escalade Hybrid. I am a District Sales Manager for Cadillac and my territory is North and South Carolina. Along the way I’ll point out some of the interesting sites to see in my travels as well as educate you on how well this luxury vehicle operates.

I grew up in Northeast Ohio and remember the logo for Ohio Edison. It was a caricature of a man with lightning bolts for arms and legs with light bulbs for facial features. His name was Sparky. Given that this advanced Hybrid can operate up to 25 mph from a 300 volt electrical system, it only seemed fitting that I nickname it Sparky as well.

I’ve wanted to drive a Hybrid for some time, but the timing never seemed right. I must admit it is a little out of character for me wanting to drive a Hybrid. I’m a 25 year member of Sports Car Club of America and still volunteer to work both professional and amateur road racing. A CTS-V is more my style. However, the technology is what draws me to this version of the Escalade. You can see for yourself by going to the Cadillac website.
http://www.cadillac.com/cadillacjsp/model/landing.jsp?model=hybrid&year=2009

As a company car driver, I was hoping to grab a two wheel drive in order to maximize the fuel economy, but only had 4 wheel drives to pick from. The 4 wheel drive system can be put into a two wheel drive mode and the transfer case can be placed into a neutral position so it can be “dingy” towed behind a motorhome. I was however, drawn to this Platinum series. I wanted it for the LED headlight assembly. This just sets this truck apart from anything else on the road today.

So why a Hybrid, why now? Back when gasoline was going for $4 a gallon, there was a great deal of interest in the Hybrid. It is a full size luxury sport utility that offers exceptional fuel economy for its size. Back then the story was very compelling. Even today with gasoline selling at $2.50 a gallon the added cost of a Hybrid over a regular Escalade you can recoup the price difference in fuel savings in as little as 8 months.

This is based on comparing the two wheel drive versions of the Escalade and the Escalade Hybrid. The base price of a Hybrid includes the Premium Luxury Package available on the Escalade as well as Tri-coat Paint such as White Diamond. There is a $2200 tax credit for buying the two-wheel drive Hybrid (consult a tax professional) which leaves a price difference of $405. At 15,000 miles a year the annual fuel savings between the two Escalades at $2.50 a gallon would be $590.

The brand of gasoline you buy can also make a big difference. I try and buy Shell gasoline whenever I can. I’ve been using Shell for decades and have never had a gasoline related problem. Sparky only has about 1500 miles and at 65 mph the 6.0L engine will run on 4 cylinders and get about 25 miles per gallon. This week I was running along the coast and had to fill up in Myrtle Beach, SC and couldn’t find a Shell gas station, so I filled up with Mobil.

I was leaving Conway, SC going to Charleston. I use US 701 to Georgetown and then US 17 to Charleston. Sparky was in need of a bath so I stopped at the TLC Carwash in Georgetown. This place didn’t look like much, but I’ve never had a car look as good as it did when they were done. When they were done it looked better than it did the day I picked it up. I’ll be using them again.

Anyway, you can’t find a flatter road than US 701 & US 17 this side of the Mississippi. I set the cruise at 60 and watched to see how high the fuel savings would be. To my surprise, the engine never shifted out of the V8 mode. The only time I noticed it shift to running on 4 cylinders was when I was going downhill on the back side of a bridge over the many waterways. The next day after leaving Charleston and having used a third of a tank of gas, I stopped and topped it off with Shell. After a few moments of running down the road, the four cylinder running was back. I’m sure Mobil refines a fine product and I may have just got a bad load of fuel that day, but it sure made a difference.

I forgot to bring my camera this trip, but my next posting will have some of the different and interesting sites along the way.