I must finally come clean. If you were to ask me right now what my favorite luxury car brand is, I would have to say Cadillac. Of course, that pick falls only in the luxury realm, while I still find a special place in my heart for my favorite sports car brand, which is Porsche. However, in recent years, Cadillac has won me over as a luxury brand that has the cars that I want and will ultimately buy one day soon. Furthering such a notion of Cadillac being a favorite, this week I get to enjoy the new Vistiq electric vehicle (EV), a midsized modern marvel that has also won me over for the electrification arm of Caddy. However, that winning process comes with some ‘shockingly’ good surprises but also some hard sells where General Motors (GM) seemingly made a couple of mistakes along the way, but there are workarounds – more on that later.
For 2025, the 2026 Cadillac Vistiq is all-new, joining the new lineup of EVs for the brand and making a big impact with its robust powertrain, touting a dual motor all-wheel-drive setup that’s pulled directly from the new Lyriq V, a performance EV crossover, good for as much as 615 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque. Yeah, those power figures are serious, as is the real-world power of the Vistiq, where its big size seemingly feels smaller as it carries its 6,350-pound curb weight with grace and authority. In fact, that weight feels as if it’s hidden somewhere down low when you push the Vistiq midsized EV crossover hard – there’s a lot to appreciate and raise eyebrows with its respectable performance prowess that’s surefooted without much tire squealing drama on public roads. Moreover, the Vistiq runs from 0 to 60 mph in just 3.7 seconds, utilizing the Vmax (Velocity Max) mode to extract all the electrified American ponies from the dual motor drivetrain that’s surprisingly well balanced with a rear wheel power bias. Caddy isn’t messing around here, and this drivetrain is standard across the Vistiq’s four trim levels (Luxury, Sport, Premium Luxury, Platinum).
The overall driving character of the new Vistiq is delightful and nearly thoughtless, as there are no big surprises other than its handling and acceleration being better than most would think. There are other welcoming qualities of the drivetrain, such as having just the right amount of deceleration when not utilizing the one-pedal drive mode, which has three levels of regen that you can set and can come to a complete stop to enable the Auto Hold feature. There’s even a clever use of a left steering wheel paddle with a variable pressure-sensitive pull to enact different levels of braking regen on the fly for optimal cases of adding energy back to the battery when braking.
The ride quality is excellent for the Vistiq Sport, which has an adaptive damper setup but lacks the air ride adaptive setup that’s reserved for the more expensive Premium Luxury and Platinum trims. I’d imagine the ride quality only gets better from here, considering how well dialed in GM is with their suspension setups. Even with the Vistiq Sport’s coil springs, there’s a lot to appreciate in the suspension tuning, keeping the nearly 3 tons of American luxury in check.
One area that’s also surprising is the strong brakes, which are mostly seamless in their transitions for braking regen and use of the friction brakes. The Goodyear Eagle Sport All-Season 285/45R-21-inch all-season tires do well to grip the pavement and exude a smooth ride quality coupled with the well-damped suspension. Mind you, the Vistiq can be optioned with 22-inch and even 23-inch 305-section tires that still look fitting for the inherently large Vistiq’s body that rides on virtually the same platform as the two-row seating Cadillac Lyriq.
On the side of efficiency, the Cadillac Vistiq gets a 305-mile range, which is just enough to appease most for the class of vehicle. The 102-kWh battery pack, also from the Lyriq, powers the two motors and can be charged in a hurry, up to 190 kW using a DC fast charger. It adds as much as 80 to 100 miles in just 10 minutes, utilizing a DC fast charger. You can even use Tesla Supercharger stations, provided you have the Tesla NACS (North American Charging Standard) adaptor that costs about $275. Many Tesla Supercharger stations charge up at 250 kW or more for some of the newer V3 and V4 stations.
The EPA estimated 93 MPGe city, 78 MPGe highway, and 86 MPGe combined figures match that of my real-world tests and often come in as conservative figures, as I was able to easily best those numbers to walk away with a mixed driving estimate of just over 2.7 kWh. That essentially extended my range to just over 312 miles if I were to fully deplete the battery, based on my calculations of what was left after driving over 290 miles. That makes me happy if Cadillac surely under-promised and over-delivered here, at least for the Vistiq Sport trim with the 21-inch wheels that I may imagine have a slight advantage over the larger wheel options on higher trim levels. Some of that efficiency is in part thanks to the remarkable 0.29 drag coefficient, making the Vistiq a rather slippery vehicle through the wind. Some of that slipperiness is due to the power-retracting door handles, which lack a method of locking them with a touch-button from the outside. Instead, you’ll have to rely on setting the walk-away lock feature that automatically locks the vehicle as you walk away from it with the key fob in your pocket. Approach the vehicle, and you’re greeted by an enlightened animated light show that first lights up the Cadillac emblem crest and follows up with a dance of lighting elements throughout the solid grille and elongated LED daytime running and headlights area. Nice touch, Caddy!
Charging up at home with my 40-amp Level 2 charger with a rate bouncing between 9.6 and 9.7-kW takes about 10 hours for a nearly depleted battery. Cadillac offers up the ability to utilize an optional 19.2-kW charging setup to cut charging time down to just over 6 hours.
In true Cadillac tradition and expectation, the interior of the new Vistiq keeps true to the modern luxury theme of GM’s prided luxury brand. The cabin is plush with just the right amount of soft-touch surfaces mixed in with accented stitching. There’s the natural focus of the 33-inch curved OLED screen that has a floating look to encase the touchscreen area and digital gauge cluster that’s configurable for a myriad of features, such as the Google-based mapping display. Having a new Google-based setup, there’s a lot to appreciate in the features, which is the beginning of my disdain for GM no longer offering Apple CarPlay or Android Auto integration. Such an omission for GM’s new EVs is still a major sore spot for me, considering how, like me, most who own somewhat modernized automobiles are accustomed to those integrations and expect such in a new vehicle, especially a luxury vehicle that costs north of 70 grand. Here, GM still misses the boat for many and could very well cannibalize some sales even if the Google-based setup allows for installation of a plethora of apps, like my favorite nav app, Waze. Still, I like my iPhone and enjoy integrating it in any other new vehicle that’s not a new GM EV. Here, interacting with your iPhone is unfortunately a cumbersome situation that feels like you’ve time-warped back to 2014 or earlier, and you’re connecting your old iPod to navigate your music using plain-Jane folders and basic phone controls. GM, what are you thinking here when the majority of the public has become accustomed to the ‘new’ integrations? Maybe you can soften the blow with a nice smartphone mount so the driver can still interact with their phone instead of having the dual actively cooled wireless smartphone charging pads mostly out of sight.
Apart from my repeated frowning face for the lack of Apple CarPlay, I do enjoy the latest infotainment system and the mostly simplistic interaction with the vehicle controls, even with many common controls being buried in menus, such as the headlight controls. I get it, some of these controls, like the headlights that default to their Auto setting, will hardly ever be touched – so it all makes some sense. For someone who owns the Vistiq and most of GM’s new lineup of vehicles, the infotainment-embedded controls eventually become a second-nature action to find them, but it does take some time to learn where everything is located in the menus.
Cadillac’s luxury application finds a home inside the Vistiq with ample space for the seating positions, which are primarily controlled by toggles on the door. The front seats, with heating, ventilation, and back-area-only massage functions, are comfy but could use a softer headrest that incorporates a pair of speakers. The second row captain’s chairs have good room as well, with rather easy manual adjustments for forward and aft sliding. The third row has good headroom but is short on legroom. The odd access to the third row seems to be a challenge, where it is initially thought that the one-button second-row slide and tilt function has more to it, but it doesn’t. Another odd aspect of the third row is that its power-folding function does not collapse the headrests in time to clear the second-row seats and tends to hang up on folding.
It’s not until you fold the second row that the third row can go all the way down – such an odd thing that I thought was a defect in my test vehicle. When the seats do go down, you open up the cargo area from its all-seats-in-place 15 cubic feet to as much as 80 cubic feet of space. One last surprising aspect, which is not a good one, is that there is no frunk (front trunk). Open up the aluminum hood, and you’ll only see a lot of power cables and part of the front motor, which looks like there could have been a sliver of space to make way for a plastic casing to form a usable frunk.
In terms of safety, Cadillac brings all the expected active safety features to the table but adds on the bonus of having the remarkable, and what I think is class-leading, their Super Cruise hands-free driving assistant system. The latest iteration of Super Cruise never ceases to amaze me as it just works and doesn’t let me down for its adaptation of ‘navigating’ a plethora of pre-mapped roads, where it feels at home on our vast highways and interstates in America. Even turning on the automatic lane change function offers a new level of sophistication to pass by slow traffic.
Considered to me as a baby Cadillac Escalade IQ or an EV version of the XT6 that’s simply better in almost every way, the new Vistiq is well-positioned to play nicely with a very short list of three-row EV crossover competitors like the new Lucid Gravity, Rivian R1S, Volvo EX90, and even the Hyundai Ioniq 9. Even though the EV movement has slowed a bit, Cadillac has certainly played its cards well when buyers are ready to make the EV move for a midsized three-row crossover EV. The only bluff here with a well-delt hand in my view continues to be the omission of Apple CarPlay – yes, I just can’t get over it, as many others balk at the decision as well when you fork over the base price of $79,090, and just about every other new vehicle on the market has such. My Vistiq Sport test vehicle with the eye-popping Radiant Red Tintcoat exterior paint option, black roof rails, and a 6-passenger setup, comes to a price of $81,915.
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Malcolm Hogan is the founder and editor of Automotive Addicts, a trusted voice in the automotive media world for over two decades. With 20+ years of hands-on experience covering the industry, Malcolm has built a reputation for delivering honest reviews, sharp insights, and in-depth coverage of everything from new car debuts to high-performance test drives. Passionate about the evolving car culture and staying ahead of the curve, Malcolm continues to lead Automotive Addicts as a go-to destination for enthusiasts and industry insiders alike.
