Susan and I have spent the past week cruising in luxury. This car is fancy, expensive, and totally not ours.
It’s been a rough month for cars in the O’Hara driveway. Morgan’s car has been in the shop four times in the past four weeks. Her 2023 Chevy Equinox is still under warranty and over the past month our local Chevy dealership has replaced a solenoid, multiple sensors, and eventually the entire ECU (computer). Each time her car goes to the shop, Morgan ends up borrowing Susan’s car, who ends up borrowing my car. If I need to go anywhere I can drive the van.
In the middle of all of this, Susan’s Cadillac died as well. Same problem — the ECU died, and hers was not under warranty which meant a longer repair (and more money). The dealership asked if she wanted a loaner car and she said no. The minute I heard that i said “OH YES WE DO!” and a few days later we ended up with this: a 2025 Cadillac Lyriq.
First and foremost, the Cadillac Lyriq is an EV, something we’ve never driven. It also has 500+ HP amd every option you can imagine. If you get exhausted by having to use both an accelerator and brake pedal, the car has a “single-pedal” driving mode (it applies the brakes automatically when you let off the accelerator). And if you can’t be bothered with that, just press the “Super Cruise” button and the car will drive itself, freeing up your hands to adjust the back massage buttons.
There are three ways (as far as I know) to charge electric vehicles — a normal home 110v outlet, a 220v charger that needs to be wired into your home, and a remote charging station. I looked it up and to charge the Cadillac Lyriq using a 110v charger takes 70-75 hours, adding “approximately 3-4 miles per hour.” We don’t have a 220v charger and so the first thing we had to learn is how to use one of those remote charging stations.
The first challenge was finding the charging port, which is hidden behind a motorized panel that is activated by pressing a touch-sensitive emblem. If either of those two things go out, I don’t think you can charge the car.
Because the nearest charging station is near our friends Jeff and Heather’s home, we picked them up to show them the car and go charge it. Neither they nor we knew they were goung to be in for an hour long adventure!
Our first stop was at OnCue, which has a set of two or three chargers. After figuring out how to access the charging port we discovered that all the chargers said “OUT OF ORDER” on the screen. Built into the car’s dash is Google Maps which will show you the location of every charger near you. The next one we saw was just a few miles away at Crest, so we went there next.
Although Jeff was able to get the adapter connected, the chargers there would not charge the Cadillac. After swiping her credit card, the charger began the charging process before displaying an error, “CHARGING CANCELLED BY VEHICLE.” We were sure we were doing something wrong until another EV owner pulled up next to us and we asked for help. After multiple tries he couldn’t get it to work either. He said some chargers require an app, some banks block charges from chargers because they use a third-party company to process the transactions, and sometimes “they just don’t work.” He suggested we try OnCue. :(
We then remembered there was another OnCue just a few miles away, so we drove there. I should mention that the car let us know we had 170 miles left until we ran out of charge, so this was more of an exercise in “how to do it” than “we gonna die.”
When we arrived at the next OnCue we discovered they didn’t have chargers at all. Whoops. Using the map, the next place we found was one of the truck stops near I-40 and Morgan road… so off we went.
As they say, “fourth time’s a charm!” We were able to charge the car from 45% to 80% in about 15 minutes. Because there’s no gasoline involved, you can leave the car on and run the A/C while you wait.
At night, the car lights up both inside and out and looks like something from Tron.
Later that evening we decided to take the car out on the interstate and try out the self-driving feature. Super Cruise only works on pre-mapped roads and you have to be going a certain speed (50? 55?) before it can be enabled. We hopped on I-40 in Yukon headed west and once we had merged, turned on Super Cruise. With cruise set to 75pm, the car… drove itself. It stayed in its lane, slowing down when approaching slower semi-trucks from the rear, and changing lanes to go around other vehicles, letting us know it was “checking for traffic” on the screen before signaling and moving over. The only hiccup was when our car passed a Jeep which was only going a couple of miles slower than we were and then changed back into his lane a little too close. The Jeep driver flashed his lights at us and passed us back. Hey man, don’t get mad at us, we weren’t driving!
The best thing about the hands-free driving is that it frees Cadillac owners up to do other classy things like eat Funyuns in an expensive loaner car.
Last night the dealership called Susan to let her know her car was finished and ready to be picked up. I suspect they started working more quickly when they figured out how many miles were putting on this thing. As I told my friend Justin, “I can see why people like luxury cars.” I don’t know that I’ve ever driven a car with leather seats that also did 0-60 in 4 1/2 seconds (the sport model does it in 3.3). By the time we got back to the dealership I discovered Susan had already looked up prices on one of these and what we car would be worth on a trade in. And as they say, “that’s how they gitcha!”
