Boy, was this vehicle a welcome addition to the weekend. We had planned a road trip. Well, maybe we could have planned better: The idea was for three adults and four kids to pile into the ol' SUV and head from New York to Washington, D.C., for a weekend of sightseeing. Oh, we saw some sights, all right. In between the squabbling. And the complaints about the food. And the spilled soda. And the inevitable "are-we-there-yets?" And the … Well, suffice to say that every luxury in this Glammobile soothed a frayed nerve at one point or another.

The '07 Escalade, freshly redesigned, is Cadillac's second version of an ultraluxe SUV. It faces some monster competition from the likes of the Lexus GX470 and the BMW X5, and on the whole the Escalade is not as thoroughly refined or as sublime as other SUVs in the over-$50,000 niche. The cabin is comfortable, but it feels as if you're sitting in an easy chair, surrounded by a bunch of upscale gizmos, rather than piloting a machine form-fitted to your own personal specifications. (Hey, I said the competition was tough; check out the Mercedes R Class, for example.) But those numerous gizmos have their value. The remote start, which lets you turn on the locked vehicle from a block away, helped get the A/C roaring before we ever got to the car. We actually used the three-zone climate control—which includes settings for the front, middle, and third-row seats—since there were various personal thermostats among the seven of us. The middle and third-row seats can be stowed and folded in a variety of ways, to accommodate a mix of kids and cargo, which was quite handy during various parts of the trip. And for once, a honkingly huge SUV pulled its weight: Had the Escalade been any smaller, we would have had to drive an extra vehicle the whole 500-mile round trip.

The Escalade is based on the same platform as General Motors's other new full-size SUVs—the Chevrolet Tahoe and the GMC Yukon—and it's a surprisingly nimble ride for such a big truck. In fact, unlike many SUVs, it doesn't really feel like a truck at all, as one of the moms on the trip observed during a stint at the wheel. "It's so easy to drive," she said. Cadillac goes a bit further than Chevy and GMC, with huge 18-inch wheels to absorb bumps in the road, a 403-horsepower V-8 engine that will help tow a boat, and a six-speed transmission that makes shifting smoother. One complaint from my passengers (the adults, this time): The mid-row bucket seats weren't terribly comfortable, and even though they reclined about 45 degrees, napping was difficult. On the other hand, who ever said the Great American Road Trip was supposed to be restful?