^M00:00:01 >> The SRX completely new with this 2010 model year, shorter, lower, wider with more audacious lines but no longer with a V-8, let's see what does live under the hood and check the tech. ^M00:00:16 [ Music ] ^M00:00:21 It's only a few inches shorter than the old SRX but the new Caddy really prints like a different class of vehicle in person, think Lexus RX. Ours is crystal red over shale leather seats with these brownstone colored, sort of pletheather dash accents. Let's go to the feature of the main cabin stack and that is of course Cadillac's signature power whoopsie daisy, peekie boo display. Depending on whether it's up or down it changes it's display of information to 50 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 touch screen so you can get to 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 Cadillacesque in that respect. We've got radio in 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. Here are your presets down here, they are of course mixed presets, 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 CD's to that. This will bring you either CD or 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 [assumed spelling] little cabin well and/or an Ipod can connect there. Auxiliary jack of course is right next to it and you see that there and finally the AV input refers to a set of AV RCA jacks, it's 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 trend you also get a rear view camera and 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 of where you're going. Now on the output side two audio systems on this car. The base is Bose audio so they start at 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 ten speakers again Bose branded speakers and amplification as well as 5.1 surround ability. Now back here 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 LCD's, flip that up and you've got plenty of space, not a touch screen though, you operate that with a remote that goes AV depending on which source you want to work off of. You've also got those AV aux inputs down here for any kind of portable media player but check this out a separate and additional yellow RCA for basic composite video, they call that a game 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 on all but the base units of the SRX you get what you call this ultra view power roof. You've got a fixed pane in the back and of course this big boy here in the front that moves and tilts. Okay to the engine bay, this vehicle has a 3.0 liter, direct injection V-6, not the bigger 3.6 liter V-6 that we've loved in other Cadillacs this is kind of the baby, 265 horse power, 223 foot pounds of torque in a biggish vehicle. I think 52-5,300 pounds, 0-60 is 8.2, mpg is pretty good though, 18-25. Part of that though is the transmission...seems programed to really hunt top gear all the time and when you need some punch in cut and thrust driving it's got a drop down several cogs to deliver it which isn't a great driving experience. And an all wheel drive train like our car the pollution and green house scores are...um...a 7 out of 10, that's not bad but a 4 out of 10 is a little soft on the green house. ^M00:04:18 [ Music ] ^M00:04:22 On the road you just have to wish for the bigger brother to this engine, the 3.6 direct injection V-6 or even one of those hoary old V-8's that don't really make sense any more but more oomph 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 when were in the manual position but it's not the most rewarding experience. [Bang, bang, bang] tougher than I was led to believe, let's price this Cadillac SRX, a 20-10 all wheel drive is about $34,000 base, you don't want base, that's not cnet style, you've got to add two packages costing almost $12,000 to get this guy done up our way and that will include the hard drive NAV system, hard drive based audio as well, the Bose surround sound, the Blu-tooth hands free, remote start, rear view camera, high intensity discharge, adaptive front headlights. The rear seat entertainment system is ala carte, about the only tech that is for $1,300 and by the way if you want just front wheel drive you can peel off 3,600 bucks. ^M00:05:28 [ Music ] ^M00:05:30
