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.