Cadillac Lyriq Review – The Car that You Never Expected from Cadillac

Cadillac Lyriq Review – The Car that You Never Expected from Cadillac

Today we are going to review a 2023 Cadillac Lyric. This is a Husman Bros exclusive. Before we go too much further, please subscribe for more exclusive content like this. Are you a Cadillac man? No, but I am willing to learn.

Excellent. Let’s learn in everything. We should start in the beginning and I would say that this is the front of the car and therefore the beginning of our review. So tell me about the front. Yeah, it’s a good place to start.

Here the grille, obviously, an electric car has no need for a grille. But I love what Cadillac has done here. They made this grille look on the front of the car and it really just carries over that theme that you would have from a motorized vehicle.

But this is all lights, so you can see as it starts to light up. It started with the Cadillac logo here the Cadillac logo on the dash. And then it moves along here, lights up each one of these lights as it just stacks all of them.

I think it was a really cool effect and a really good touch. I think the grille kind of makes up part of the face of the car. It’s the mouth, the headlights of the eyes. And I just think that’s what makes part of the personality of a vehicle.

You know, Cadillac in the 50s was really known for its flamboyant fins, the big fins on the cars, the chrome and all that sort of thing and I would say that light are the fins of this new century and this new era of electric cars and I really think that they did a great job with that. It’s fantastic. Now, this is a completely clean sheet design for Cadillac. This started with nothing from any other car, so they were able to do a lot of things that they hadn’t done before.

This is built on the Ultium platform. It’s the same platform that the GMC EV Hummer is built on. They can lengthen it, they can shorten it as they need to, but it’s the basic roller skate that all these EV cars are going to be built on.

I think Cadillac did a really great job with this. Now, since it’s an electric car, you have to have a place to charge it. And this is one of the complaints about this car, is the way this door opens this car.

When we get inside, you’re going to be blown away at how luxurious this car is. So this is the one part of this car. That really doesn’t scream luxury is the way this door opens. That herky jerkiness is not what I would expect from a car like this.

Now we’ll get to what this cost. And what luxury really means in a bit, but it does close very well. Now, while I’m up front here, I want to talk about the wheel and the tire. So, EV wheels need a lot of air management.

To be able to be as efficient as they possibly can. This is the only option in the car. They’re 22 inch wheels as opposed to the stock 20s. These tires are interesting because they are self sealing tires.

What I think is going on inside here is that they have a bag of fix a flat, and when you puncture it, It’ll repair itself. And that’s fantastic. I, for one, welcome our new self healing tire overlords.

Aaron, do you have a knife so we can test this thing out? I don’t want to pull out my knife. And get any arguments from the aussies. That watch our channel about what a knife is. So I didn’t bring it today.

Okay. But I do want to continue on talking about this. And show a little bit of the inside. But before we do that, I’ve got to ask you a question. Is this a car or is it an SUV? Well, there’s some debate about that.

So, cadillac says this is an SUV. The EPA said it’s a car. I think the EPA has the final word. They may still be going back and forth on it. But the reason the classification is important. Is because of the tax credit.

This is too expensive to be a car and get a tax credit. It is not expensive enough to be an SUV. And get a tax credit. And so it’s up for debate right now. I think the word is that this is a car. Now, do Cadillac buyers need a tax credit?

I hate taxes. Everyone hates taxes, right? Why not get a credit if you can get one? It is income driven. So who qualifies? I don’t know. Talk to your tax man, not to the Husman Bros. We’re insurance men.

At least it’s not insurance, right? Right. So let’s check out the inside of this car. All right. With electric cars, they’re pushing the limits of the traditional way that you build a car, including even the door handles.

So, as you’ve probably seen with Tesla’s before, they don’t have door handles. It’s more of a button. And this one is just the same. So this one has the button that opens it. And then you grab this handle up here so you can open the door all the way.

This handle is one of the big gripes of the owners of this car. They just don’t understand why we have to have this wing. It really takes away from the flow and the lines of the car. So we’ve seen the 2024 catalog.

The wing is no longer there. Not sure if there’s a big difference in how the door opens, but at least we know that wing is not there. You can see on the back door there is no wing. So you push the button, and then you just grab the side of the door here and open it up.

So we’ll go back to the front door and get inside. And as you can see, as I push the button, there’s a motor that pushes the door open. So really, the wing is not necessary. All right. Jumping inside the car.

Now, the thing that immediately strikes me is the luxury. This thing is just oozing luxury. This is a $62,000 car, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like $100,000 car. And really, I would expect nothing less from Cadillac.

But the thing that immediately draws my attention is the diamond cut engraving on all of these metal features around the cup holder, this dial, this knob, this little knob right here, even the switches on the dashboard.

Really, really cool. Look. I don’t think I’ve seen that in another vehicle ever. But Cadillac pulled out all the stuff. This is GM’s Halo car. They’re branching into the electric vehicles, and they’re diving in headfirst.

There were no constraints in this car from transmission, humps, engine barriers or anything like that. So it’s got a huge amount of. Face here just makes the car feel so much more open. You can pile all your garbage in here.

Your wife, I’m sure she’ll pile it up with all sorts of cups and notepads and pens and things like that. But the diamond engraving carries through to this speaker grille here. And you can see all of the diamond cuts that are in here.

Aluminum grille here, that’s just high quality. You got brushed aluminum here on the door handle to open the door. And this seat, I mean, it’s a brand new car, so you kind of expect the seats to be nice and very comfortable.

But this is a nice seat. It is leather, maybe, synthetic leather, I don’t know. But it feels awesome. And what’s even better about it, that’s my massager for the seat. I mean, this seat is so comfortable, I think I might watch the game from in here.

High quality. When is the last time you saw a car that had speakers in the headrest? You’re not going to have engine noise to have to overcome to be able to hear your stereo. And I am a guy who does like some engine noise, but I also like to hear my music as well.

So you’re going to be able to rock out in this car and hear your music not only because of the speakers and the proximity to the front, how they are really facing you, and you’ve got a lot of speakers going.

But this car has active noise canceling, just like that great set of Beats headphones or Air Pods that you’ve got that does active noise canceling. This does the same thing. You can really be in a cocoon driving this vehicle.

It’s going to sound great. All right, so that is the driver’s cockpit. So you know a little bit more about well, let’s talk about the back seat of the car. As you see, Justin’s already sitting in here.

Now, Justin, how’s the legroom back there? The legroom back here is fantastic. I’m 6ft tall. That seat is pretty far back. And as you see, I got plenty of room to move, I think Vivic should probably Uber.

The seating is just as luxurious as are everything else that’s going on in here. What really strikes me about this car and the finish out are these different textures. We’ve got. We’ve got smooth and rough in different ways.

We’ve got polish. It’s just incredible, like a fine watch. Now, the part that’s the best about this passenger experience in this car is this roof. Now, this whole roof is glass. It’s got this shade. And I love open air motoring.

I really wouldn’t particularly want an SUV, but I think I could compromise for this amazing huge roof. Now, this does open all the way, or you can open at different lengths, depending on what you’d like to get exposed to.

But just amazing. Really a neat motoring experience. I feel like I’m in an old fashioned train. Now, let’s talk about the UV part of this car. Now, you keep saying SUV, but this is not an SUV. This is a car.

So let me show you how the trunk works on this car. Really cool. You hit the bottom of the Cadillac logo, lights up, and the trunk lid opens. It’s pretty fancy. Yeah. Now, I know what you may be saying to yourself.

This trunk looks an awful lot like the back of an SUV. Maybe I wouldn’t dispute you on that. But the EPA says this is a car, so we’re going to keep calling it a car. You’ve got your storage container under here where you can store your charging cable.

Remember, no spare. So you’ve got your storage container down here, including charging cable, with true Cadillac style, the embossed Cadillac logo on it. Very G. Now, it comes standard with a 32 amp charging cable, and that’s good for charging at 21 miles per hour.

That’s what comes standard with the car. But of course, many Cadillac owners do choose to install their own wall box so that they can charge at a much higher rate. And Cadillac does give a $1500 credit to install a wall charger at your house.

Now, is there anything else we need to talk about on this car? A couple little things. When it comes to electric cars, one of the things that you notice is the different shapes that they’re coming in, not just for design’s sake, but for efficiency’s sake.

These cars are all about miles per gigawatt, and all these little wings and dams were formed in the air not formed in the air tunnel, but from the testing in the wind tunnel. And one of the parts that I like best is this little body color piece here.

On most cars, that would be glass, but on this, it’s this body color, and it flows with those lights really, really well. Now, the last thing I want to talk about on the outside of this car are the windows.

So these come factory tinted. This shade the windows, though Aaron talked about the isolation from the noise in this car, part of the reason for that is because these are acoustically insulated windows.

If you look down at them, they’ve got kind of a layer in between them. To isolate you even more with the sound. Are you done talking yet? Yeah, I read a bunch of articles about this thing in preparation for today.

All right, well, I drove over here in preparation for today. Because my favorite part of the review is coming. Let’s get on the road. Let’s do it. All right, so, we are inside the car now, and this is the owner, meet Vivic, and he’s going to show us how this car performs.

All right, are we ready to just go out on a drive? Let’s get going. All right. Fire it up. Electric cars are weird for me because you can’t tell if they’re on or not, but it’s on. All right. I like wireless Android auto.

I know a lot of cars have that now, but that’s been pretty cool. And you hear it making that kind of sound outside, you hear it outside a little bit more, but I guess they’re not allowed to have the cars be completely silent, and so they chose this, like, sun, moon, NASA sound.

And so it’s different than just a standard beeping. Now, this is interesting. Your rear view mirror is actually just an led display. So it’s actually showing the image from the backup camera. Yeah, it’s actually a camera.

Check this out. You can actually, like, zoom in and, like, zoom out and stuff. So I haven’t figured out exactly where I want that to be, but, yeah, that takes some getting used to. When I first got in it, I was like, okay, you know, can I just have my mirror back?

And you can you can just do this. And then now I’ve got a mirror, right? But it’s got that. And so but my salesman told me, he goes, Just try it for a week. He goes, you will never switch back and turns out he’s right.

Now, one thing I love about this in a Tesla, you’ve got this giant infotainment center. Looks like a big iPad in the middle of it here, you’ve got a nice display, but it does not have this big distracting screen right in the middle of the car.

Yeah, actually, that’s one of the things I like about this, is it doesn’t feel like I’m having to drive an appliance. It just feels like I got a car. And so that was a big deal to me. It feeling like a regular car was important to me.

And so check this out. I have buttons for my air conditioning. I’m too hot. I’m too cold. Yeah, there. And I want to turn on my heated seats. Then I can just do that right here. Yeah, it’s pretty neat.

The massaging seats is just a button here. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of cars that have a ton of massaging seats, but I don’t know how. I really feel about the massaging seats. It feels like it’s a little bit easier to fall asleep.

Yeah. You know what? So I’ve had multiple cars with massaging seats, and it’s different than, say, like, the massaging seats in an S class. It is not exactly the same. So it’s, like, kind of a milder version, but I like it.

It’s perfect. Heated massage seats. And then you have the heated steering wheel right here. On the steering wheel, I have another car where you actually have to go through all these menus, and that’s just super annoying to me.

And actually, this is an Android Automotive based screen, and so I actually have Google Maps here, so I can just straight up use Google Maps. And is it all voice? Yeah, I can read whatever I want. I can go tell it to take me home, to take me to the garage, take me to my mom’s house, things like that.

I use Android Auto. It’s just a familiar interface. And so that’s what I use on everything. And it’s been working great. I really enjoy it. And one thing that got me, the materials in this car are nice.

It’s not what I expected from General Motors and from Cadillac. Admittedly, I had, I guess, lower expectations. But when you get in this car, just like you guys pointed out earlier, it’s all premium materials.

This is all metal, like metals. And it’s just very limited to no use of plastics, which is great because I really hate that in newer cars and so this just feels like I got in a premium car.

It didn’t feel like I’m driving an iPad. It just feels like I’m driving a regular car. No, I can’t play video games on it, but just as you pointed on the outside, it looks like a regular car. My daughter and I always talk because both of us hate the way Teslas look.

I mean, it feels like it needs a grill. It looks like a frog. That’s not all the way there. I don’t know. I’m not a Tesla person. And so I wasn’t actually excited to get an electric car and then when this one came in, I was surprised.

I thought it was just going to be like kind of a toy or a parlor trick. And I quickly made it my daily driver. Yeah, it’s just a nice place to be. It feels like a nice place to be. And it doesn’t feel like I got an electric car.

The only thing is being my first electric car. So I haven’t used the brake yet, ever? No, I haven’t yet. So, like so and I’m not on one pedal driving. So you can set it on one pedal driving where you where you apply the gas and then you let off and it’s braking right and slowing down.

But there’s this regen paddle on the steering wheel, and it’s pressure sensitive. Watch. If I push it harder, it’s going to slow us down a little bit harder. It’s not all the pressure of a brake, but it was enough to stop, I mean, the way you’re driving.

And so I’m not exactly sure. I know that that’s not using the brake brake, but I’m wondering if when I use the brake pedal, is it actually a combination of what the regen paddle and regular brakes are, or what are we doing here?

But I did notice that when I use the regen paddle, it does trigger the brake light. But see, that’s plenty. I and that was light. I was it’s pressure sensitive. I was only doing it a little bit. Yeah, you probably see me from the backseat leaning forward because of the pressure and then muscle slowing down, muscle memory.

And I hopped in. Manual transmission, car at home. And then I got in and I started hitting this to slow down. I was like, okay. I was like, I need to pay attention for a second. But yeah, no, it’s been pretty nice.

It’s a simple car, and it’s a nice place to be. And I feel like for what it cost, we got really great value. And so it exceeded my expectations. I wasn’t even sure I was going to like it, and I didn’t even know what it was because we did that whole website reservation thing and we ended up with two of them.

And I’m really glad we did because I really like it. And, I mean, I feel like there’s not a better value out here. And I always tell people, okay, so it’s not as fast as I thought it would be because it’s an electric car and you read all these things, but it’s still got plenty of power, it still moves and every time I’ve given someone a ride, they’re like, yeah, that’s plenty fast.

And so, I mean, it is very peppy and so and I’ve driven it at excessive speeds for a while and it was just fine. It performed well. So how many pounds does this car weigh? So, on the title, it actually says 5900.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, it’s almost 6000lbs. That’s that’s a really crazy heavy car. And maybe that’s why it’s so smooth. Like, if we get on the highway, it’s a lot smoother than on these roads because here, it’s throwing a lot of weight around.

But when you’re on really smooth road, it feels like you are just gliding. And so that’s been pretty neat. Whereas if I get in, like, a Model X or something like that, it feels like I’m driving something rickety, like, it just the ride quality is very rough.

And so that was that’s what I was pleasantly surprised at, is it didn’t feel like I had to make all these compromises to drive an electric car, and it doesn’t feel like I’m driving something very strange or anything like that.

All right, let’s see this thing take off. All right, so here and it’s quiet, it’s not very eventful, but I mean, it moves pretty fast. 60 miles an hour there. Yeah. 75. Yeah. So it moves pretty quick.

And now that I’m sitting in the back seat a little bit longer, a couple of things that I’m noticing are we’ve got the quick charging ports here instead of USBs and then we also have we’ve got a full 110 plug back here.

So whichever charger you brought with you, you’ll be able to plug in back here. When I told one of my friends that I got this car, she goes, oh, you’re Cadillac years old now. And I was like, well, yeah.

So this is definitely not the exciting Cadillac. It’s a very luxurious and comfortable place to be enjoying that aspect of it. All right, so Vivic is kind enough to let me drive this car. And I’ll be honest, I have not driven many electric cars.

I drove my friend’s Tesla once, and he put it on the autopilot mode and it nearly crashed itself into a curb. So I’m hoping we can do a lot better than that this time. Otherwise you’re going to get real fun video.

I’m going to go ahead and put my phone in the Charger. And this is really nice. It slides right in there. Nice and nice and tight. Really good quality there, of course and we’ll go ahead and put it into drive.

All right. I’m gonna see how fast I can get up to 150 miles an hour in this thing. Really quiet. That’s kind of disturbing. I’m not used to driving a car that is so quiet. Now, I did watch Vivic so you could show me how to use the paddle shifter or the Regen braking.

Not sure I’m gonna drive this long enough to get used to that, but we’re gonna give it a try. Eerily quiet. Eerily quiet. I got the massage seats on. This is quite an experience. I got the Maheated seat going.

I got the massage going. I may not actually ever stop driving this car. We’ll see how long the battery runs. It may not actually stop. It’s just too comfortable and so that paddle on the left of the steering wheel, that’s the regen paddle.

Okay. And so if you try, like, try it now before you actually have to brake, you see, and it’s pressure sensitive. So if you press it hard, it’ll break harder and obviously the foot brake will break a lot harder and braking as you need it to.

Yeah, but I’m still figuring out how that whole system works. Like you said, I haven’t spent a lot of time in electric cars. Really. This is it. I didn’t want to like electric cars, and I really like this one.

And so I’ve probably used the brake pedal only two, three times the whole time. I’ve had this car in almost 1000 miles. And so that’ll save you brake pad wear? I’m not exactly sure, but, yeah, I believe that’ll save brake wear.

But I’m wondering if the brake pedal actually uses that system first and then it’s brakes. So I still have some learning to do there. Yeah, with the panoramic roof. It feels very open in here. I like a convertible.

I like a car with a sunroof to be able to see the sky. It’s nice to have and so that helps us feel really open. A lot of light in here. Really nice. I’m sure this is great. Even driving around at night, being able to see the sky above you.

Love the big map here just to tell me where I’m going. And I can switch this front display. Right now it’s showing me a gauge. So it looks like a traditional car. but I can get very electric and very new age by putting my map right in front of me.

And that doesn’t eliminate the speedometer. You still have your speedometer right in front of you as well at the bottom of your map. But at least if I don’t want to have to look over to the side to want to continue looking straightforward, I’ve got that available to me.

And when you set a destination, it’ll actually show the overall route on the right side and read your turn by turn over the steering wheel, which is actually kind of nice. All of the features they’ve built in, they’ve done a lot to make it very comfortable in here.

I can see taking this car on a road trip. It would be a lot of fun. I know electric cars get a lot of hate for not being able to go far enough on a road trip. I personally can’t get behind the idea of having to stop somewhere for an extended period of time to be able to charge a vehicle up, as opposed to just gassing up and continuing to go.

But if I had just a few hundred mile trip to take, this might be the car I’d want to take. Really smooth. Really smooth ride. Steering wheel very smooth, too. It’s got the leather all around the back of the steering wheel, so it just really slides nicely through your hands.

And it’s heated, too. If you haven’t driven a vehicle with a heated steering wheel, you really haven’t lived on a cold day when you got to get in a car and you got a leather steering wheel that is freezing as well.

It is nice to be able to have a heated steering wheel. That is something I have experienced before and would recommend ten out of ten. I know I’ve got the paddle shifter, but it’s hard for me to get out of my natural habit of using brake.

Brake pedal. Yeah, I know. I was thinking I’m going to try and remember it as I make my last turn here. All right, I’m going to do a little jump to hyperspace here. Whoa. Nice. And brakes. Wow. Gets up and goes and then slows real fast, too.

All right, well, I could probably drive this thing all day, but I know Vivic has things to do and we should probably go ahead and pull over so we can wrap this video up. So that’s the Lyric. What do you think?

I like it. I might have to get my name on the list and get one of these. I think that’s going to be a long list. Now, we didn’t talk about it a whole lot in this video, but this is the Launch edition, and it is the two wheel drive, 340 HP version.

There is an all wheel drive or four wheel drive version. It’s going to be 540. Think that option is maybe $3,000 more. So if there’s a list, that’s the one I would get on. Yeah, I would say so, because I don’t believe these cars are going to be 60,000 for too much longer.

This is a lot of car and a lot of luxury for $60,000. I mean, it’ll run laughs around your Tesla. This is night and day. Better build quality than a Tesla. All right, if you want to argue with that, leave a comment down below.

And if you have any specific questions about this car, vivic is a good friend of ours and we would love to answer those questions for you. So leave those comments as well. Thanks so much for watching.

Will see you next time, our channel.