The recently launched Cadillac Escalade V is a high achiever, but we now know the company had originally settled for much, much more.
‘At one point, there were even talks about a sixteen-cylinder Escalade,’ a representative of the automaker told GM Authority in an interview. He refrained from any further comment, which is a shame because we can imagine many people interested in the story. How did it go? Did Cadillac abandon the project, put it on hold, or could it be still working on it slowly, hoping to circumvent the emission laws somehow?
Those are all good questions. Yet another good question is where the company could possibly source a 16-cylinder combustion engine from. Looking really far back into the past, there was a vehicle named the Sixteen Concept nearly two decades ago, which you can fin in the attached video. It never went past the concept stage, but it did have an utterly monstrous 13.6-liter V16 engine rated at 1,014 PS (1,000 hp / 746 kW).
In the meantime, the top of the line remains occupied by the Escalade-V, a vehicle that packs a 6.2-liter V8 boosted to 692 PS (682 hp / 509 kW) and 885 Nm (653 lb-ft) of torque. It needs just under 4.4 seconds to zap from standstill to 97 km/h (60 mph).