2010 Cadillac SRX AWD Review

2010 Cadillac SRX AWD Review The SRX completely new with this 2010 model gear; shorter, lower, wider with more audacious lines, but no longer with a V8. Let’s see what does live under the hood and check the tech. It’s only a few inches shorter than the old SRX but the new Cadi really prints like a different class of vehicle in person. Think Lexus RX. Ours is crystal red, over a shale leather seats with these brown stone colored sort of pletheather dash accents. Let’s go to the feature of the main cabin stack and that is of course Cadillac Signature Power Whoopsie Daisy Picky Boo Display. Depending whether it’s up or down, it changes its display of information to fit the available space of course. The navigation system is the first thing we’ll look at and it’s a particularly good one, it’s in the upper echelon of look and feel. It is a touchscreen so you can get through it by hand you’ve also got this rotating menu knob down here if you prefer to use that. Now let’s get on to our media choices, quite a few on this vehicle, very Cadillac in that respect. We’ve got radio of AM/FM and satellite radio, XM in this case. I believe it’s a three-month complimentary when you get this vehicle on sat radio. I hear your presets down here. They are of course mixed pre-sets. You can put FM satellite, AM, whatever you want across there and you’ve got four banks. But getting past the radio gets more interesting. Here is our media selection. Hard drive up here is 10 gigabytes of space that is part of the hard drive based NAV system and you can rip CDs to that. This will bring you either a CD or a DVD. We have rear seat entertainment on this car and the DVD player will also slave off to that. USB, of course refers to either a USB thumb drive you can put down here in this kind of cluggy little cabin well and/or an iPod can connect there. The auxiliary jack of course is right next to it, you see that there. And finally the AV input refers to a set of AV RCA jacks, stereo, audio and video. That by the way is part of the rear seat entertainment system. All but the base model of this car includes front and rear park distance sensors and then when you get a little bit higher in the trim you also get a rearview camera. Now on this car it’s going to give you a pretty good shot out the back in terms of what you might hit, distance wise, trajectory of where you’re aimed, that plus the sensors gives you a pretty good array of input, maybe even too much but where you’re going. The lift gate on this car is kind of interesting, almost of these power lift gates, you press the button to open or press the button to close. But this guy has a three quarter mode and can also be stopped midway. So if you’re an area that has reduced height back there, you know a lot of garages have pipes hanging down and that kind of thing, you just press it again to pause it and then press it again and it comes back down and you can set it to a three quarter open. So it automatically doesn’t go all the way up and bang itself up or break its own glass. Now on the output side, two audio systems on this car, the base is Bose audio so they start at a least a branded level but it’s not surround sound, it’s just Bose audio. But then if you go to the upgraded head unit stack like we have here, you’re going to get 10 speakers, again Bose branded speakers and amplification as well as 5.1 surround ability. Now back here with this little guy is not a bad place to watch a movie. We have the optional rear seat entertainment system, a couple of I believe these are 8-inch LCDs, flip that up and you’ve got plenty of space. Not a touchscreen though, you operate that with a remote that goes AB depending which source you want to work off of. You’ve also got those AV AUX inputs down here for any kind of a potable media player. But check this out, a separate and additional yellow RCA for basic composite video. They call that a gaining port so it’s just right for piping your game player video out to this. Not sure exactly what the cable situation is but you work that out yourself. Now in all but the base units of the SRX, you get what they call this Ultra Review Power Roof. You got a fixed pane in the back and of course this big boy here in the front that moves and tilts. To the engine bay, this vehicle has a 3.0 liter direct injection V6, not the bigger 3.6 liter V6 that we’ve loved in other Cadillacs. This is kind of the baby, 265 horse power, 223 foot pounds of torque. In the biggest vehicle I think 52 -5300 pounds. 0-60 is 8.2, mpg is pretty good though, 1825. Part of that those to transmission seems programmed are really haunt top gear all the time and when you need some punch and cut And thrust driving, it’s got a drop down several cogs to deliver which isn’t a great driving experience. And their all wheel drive trim like our car, the pollution in greenhouse scores are a 7 out of ten, that’s not bad but a 4 out of ten is a little soft on the greenhouse. On the road you just have to wish for the bigger broader to this engine, the 3.6 direct injection V6 or even one of those hoary old V8s that don’t really make sense anymore but more oomp would be nice in this vehicle especially to brute force the gear box which seems to hang on to top gear too hard and for too long. Shifting it yourself does help over in the manual position but it’s not the most rewarding experience. Time for then I was led to believe. Let’s price this Cadillac SRX. The 2010 all wheel drive is about $34,000.00 base. You don’t want base that’s not CNET style. You’ve got to add two packages costing almost $12,000.00 to get this guy done up our way and that will include the hard drive NAV system, hard drive base audio as well, the Bose surround sound, the Bluetooth hands free, remote start, rearview camera, high intensely discharge adaptive front headlights. The rear seat entertainment system is ala carte about the only tech that is for $1300.00 and by the way if you want this front wheel drive you can peel off $3600.00.