2026 Cadillac Escalade IQ Yearlong Update: Our Complicated Relationship With the IQ’s Power Doors

If you’ve seen a Hallmark movie made in the last decade, you know there are only a couple of plot lines. The male and female leads may or may not know each other. They either fall for each other immediately or antagonize each other until they fall in love anyway. There’s a misunderstanding that drives them to break up for, at most, 30 seconds of screen time. Finally, some outside force intervenes to show them the breakup was unwarranted, and it ends with a dramatic kiss. Our relationship with our long-term 2026 Cadillac Escalade IQ’s power doors over the past six months has been kind of like that.

In fact, it’s been so Hallmark that the outside intervention came right before we published this update. It was basically ready to go when Cadillac pushed an over-the-air (OTA) software update that substantially improved the software controlling the doors and made us fall in love with them again (for now, at least). Getting there, though, was an emotional roller-coaster.

Initial Ambivalence

Powered doors are hardly a new trick. Rolls-Royce, Bentley, and Maybach cars have had them for years. I generally regarded them as a gimmick, a toy for the rich. The Escalade IQ’s power doors felt like the same thing at first blush, the only notable difference being all four passenger doors were powered, not just the driver’s or just the rear-seat passengers’. A nice trick for impressing your friends, but nothing outrageous. Even so, we enjoyed the party trick enough as a judging panel to give the doors a Best Tech Award in General Excellence.

Falling in Love

The thing about convenience features is, when they’re done right, they’re really convenient. After a few weeks of not having to reach out and pull my door closed, I got spoiled. I walk up to the driver door, give it a gentle tug, and it opens fully. I get in and step on the brake and while I’m setting my tea in the cupholder and my bag in the front seat, the door closes for me. When I want to get out, I lightly pull up on the interior door handle and it does the rest. Once I’m out, another gentle tug on either the interior or exterior door handle, or just a gentle push on the door, and it closes automatically and locks when I walk away.

Do it long enough, and you start to get disappointed when you get in a different car and the door doesn’t close itself. The most rich-person problem of rich-person problems, to be sure, but there’s nothing the American in me doesn’t love more than an unnecessary convenience.

Months later, it’s still a fun gimmick to show my friends and family. I’ve yet to show it to anyone who wasn’t surprised and delighted the first time. Even the folks who think it’s silly also feel a little fancy (even if ironically) using the power doors rather than opening and closing them manually.

It’s even occasionally useful. Every so often, I can get the door for my wife or other passenger without leaving my seat. This is especially helpful when I want to get the door, but I’m in the dreaded Los Angeles International Airport pickup and dropoff horseshoe, or if I’m double-parked in a busy area. It’s also helpful when someone doesn’t close the door all the way manually. In that way, it’s at least as useful as being able to open and close the rear hatch and the front trunk from the driver’s seat.

The Conflict

As much as I liked my new toy, the doors weren’t perfect. You’d think they’d be hard to mess up since they just open and close, but it’s more complicated than that.

To prevent the doors slamming into adjacent cars, walls, people, or other objects, they’re each fitted with sensors looking for obstacles. If they detect one, they’ll only open partially and hold, usually not far enough to squeeze out. You can push them open farther, but that’s a double-edged sword, because then they basically acted like they’d never detected an obstacle in the first place. Push too hard, and the power motors stopped resisting and allowed the doors to swing freely into that neighboring car and potentially ding the door. The amount of force required to break them loose and send them flying was just too low, so just trying to squeeze out could end up in a door ding.

Similarly, the feature that allows you to give an open door a little push and send it on its way closed also accepted too light of a touch. So little effort was needed that, if you parked facing uphill, the force of gravity and the weight of the door alone could be enough to start the door closing. More than a few people have had a door automatically close on them unexpectedly thanks to gravity. My left leg is particularly aware of the issue after being crunched a few times because I have a steep driveway.

Because the doors don’t have internal sensors-only external-there’s nothing to tell them a person is in the way and nothing to stop them but you. Thankfully, they don’t close hard or fast, so you mostly get a little pinched or pushed but not hurt before the door motor recognizes something or someone is resisting and stops trying to close. It’s mostly just annoying, but in the moment it’s enough to make you curse the existence of power doors.

The Intervention

This update was done and ready to be turned in, but then, fate intervened. Well, Cadillac did, to be specific. I had a closing paragraph all written up talking about how I still liked the doors but that they needed some more software development to iron out the kinks.

Then Cadillac sent out an OTA update. The release notes don’t say anything about the doors, but I’ve verified with a Cadillac engineer that updated power door software was in there. And what do you know-it fixed most of the issues I was just complaining about.

Now, it takes a lot more effort to push the door farther open once it has automatically stopped short. Cadillac seems to have found an agreeable middle ground between strong enough the doors don’t easily swing into other cars anymore but not too heavy as to be a safety concern if you need to get out of the car quickly. What’s more, even when you push hard enough, the doors don’t just swing freely anymore but still push back gently, so it’s easier to open them exactly as much as you need to in order to squeeze out.

Along the same lines, the combination of door weight and gravity is no longer enough to confuse them into closing on you. Park facing uphill wherever you want, the doors stay open until you tell them to close. This does mean you have to push a little harder when you want them to close, but you can also just pull on either interior or exterior door handle, and that’ll signal them to close automatically.

The Big Kiss

Sappy and predictable as Hallmark movies might be, the scriptwriters occasionally have the good sense to not pretend like every conflict was resolved despite the happy ending. In this case, the doors can still unintentionally close on someone if a person inside swipes the control or a person outside pushes hard enough on the door. Without adding sensors to the insides of the doors-which won’t happen on a car that’s already been built and sold-this problem won’t be resolved by Cadillac. It’ll simply be on me and my passengers to be careful about checking everyone’s fully in or out of the vehicle before initiating an automatic door closure. A little personal responsibility never hurt anyone. After all, it’s not automated.

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