2025 Cadillac Escalade vs. 2025 Lincoln Navigator: Money Talks

• The Cadillac Escalade is an American icon, and for 2025 it got some hefty updates.
• The Lincoln Navigator has long lived in its shadow, but can an all-new generation change that?
• We put these two American luxo barges head-to-head to find out which is best. 

What's it like to drive a barge on the road?

The Escalade has reached American icon status since its debut in 1998. For 2025, it's larger and more in charge than ever before. A refresh added more screen real estate, fiddled with the exterior design to bring it a touch more in line with the Cadillac brand's contemporary aesthetic, and rejiggered the interior a bit. 

But the 6.2-liter V8 under the hood that makes 420 horsepower and 460 lb-ft of torque remains completely unchanged, and despite the Caddy feeling more like a yacht than a Corvette, it remains the centerpiece of the driving experience. It burbles on startup and revs smoothly all the way to redline, with a nice American roar following you the entire way. It is by no means efficient — the EPA estimates just 16 mpg combined — but it is effective, easy to drive smoothly, and befitting of a big luxury truck.

Under the hood of the Lincoln, you'll find another iteration of Ford's turbocharged 3.5-liter V6 that makes 440 hp and 510 lb-ft of torque. Aside from being quicker to 60 mph than the Caddy, this motor is totally unremarkable. It's powerful enough, the torque delivery is a flat, predictable line, and the transmission shifts without much fuss. But it doesn't sound particularly luxurious, doesn't rev as freely or as smoothly as the Escalade's V8, and is just 1 mpg more efficient despite the downsizing and turbocharging.

But the Navigator's on-road issues don't stop there. The too-big 24-inch wheels feel like they actively fight the suspension as they roll over the road. The end result is something that floats around like a dinghy in a storm — the Navigator's ride just never settles down. 

To make matters worse, the steering in the Lincoln is diabolically slow, and the wheel is shaped like an oval. Around town and in parking lots, you are constantly moving the wheel about because of how reticent the front end is to respond to your inputs. It takes far too much getting used to and gets tiring (read: irritating) quickly. 

The Escalade, by contrast, is a peach on the road. The ride is well controlled, if a bit firm, due to its also too-big 24-inch rollers. But the air springs and adaptive dampers do a much better job of controlling the body's mass and isolating the cabin's occupants from their resonance. Add in its normally shaped steering wheel and much more immediate response from the front end, and you get something that drives much smaller than it is and gives both comfort and confidence. Simply put, it is the better big ol' bus to drive.

Interior delights ... and disappointments

But as a thing to be driven in? The Navigator bathes you in swaths of leather and soft-touch materials, the front seats are adjustable 30 (you read that right) ways, and there is very little in the way of hard plastic. In fact, it's hard to find much to complain about inside the Navigator. The material choice and construction are top-notch, and the design itself feels plush and modern. 

Once you start digging into the screens a bit more, things get a little less impressive. There is an expanse of screen tucked up near where the windshield meets the dashboard that goes from pillar to pillar. It's just there to display info — a touchscreen this is not. It's well done, the resolution is high, and Lincoln made good use of the space. There are configurable widgets on the right side, and all the driver information you'll need on the left (in addition to popups from things like the blind-spot camera and in-cabin warnings like the seat-belt chime).

But if you look down, there is a very clearly undersized display nestled within the dash. It's too small and it controls most of the car's functions — including the detailed adjustments for the seats and the direction of the air flow from the vents. The problem is it's all too small, too difficult to use, and cramming so much of the car's primary controls into a screen (and burying them in menu after menu) is maddening. 

Once you get it all set up, it's fine, but you're going to need the patience of a saint. 

The Escalade isn't trouble-free when it comes to tech either. It has also gone for a massive pillar-to-pillar screen, but it just hasn't made the best use of all that real estate. Most of the time, there are huge sections of nothing being displayed, and all you're looking at is something akin to an iPhone background. Plus, the text is too small and, though it's a touchscreen, it sits too far from the driver. Good thing there's a scroll knob and some shortcut buttons in the center console to make navigating it a simpler affair. 

And then there's the rest of the cabin. The interior just doesn't fit the bill of a near $130,000 luxury barge, and it starts with that scroll knob. It looks nice, but it's a bit cheap-feeling to manipulate and use and that's emblematic of the rest of the interior. The leathers are nice enough, even the front chairs aren't as comfortable or plush as what's in the Lincoln. There is a lot more hard plastic and piano black littered throughout the cabin, and even something Cadillac did well, namely the wood detailing on the dashboard, is covered by a lacquer that makes it look more like plastic.

The back seats are nowhere near as plush in the Caddy either. In fact, it feels like Cadillac ripped them straight from a Chevy Astro van, layered them up in a leather that vaguely resembles what's on the front seats, and called it done. The rear seats in the Navigator are more plush, more adjustable, and, because the Lincoln had the luxe rear seat package, came with heating, ventilation and massaging. You can get an executive rear-seat package in the Cadillac, but the car we tested didn't come with it. 

But even if the Cadillac did come with that rear-seat package, the chances it wins on interior comfort, material choice, quality, and even design are slim. It's just not as nice everywhere you look, and unless you want oodles of space, the Lincoln does a better job of being a luxury machine — even its third row is heated. If space is your biggest concern, get a Suburban and or Expedition. This is a luxury comparison, and the Navigator wins out here big time. 

Picking a winner

Thankfully, both do some things really well. Space won't be an issue in either because they're both massive, and both come with some of the most impressive driver assistance tech on sale right now. Ford's BlueCruise and GM's Super Cruise are both highly impressive hands-free, eyes-on Level 2+ autonomous systems — they're neck and neck for the lead, so we can't separate the two here. 

Both of the big SUVs we tested here cost over $120,000, and bang for your buck isn't exactly at an all-time high with either. Both cost over $90,000 to start, both get abysmal fuel economy (17 mpg combined for the Lincoln to the Escalade's 16 mpg combined), and both have places where they don't feel like they're worth as much as they cost. 

That said, the Lincoln excels in more places than the Cadillac does, and so it gets the nod. Despite its on-road quirks, the Navigator is a more sumptuous place to be, the tech is better executed, and there are more thoughtful luxury touches dotted around the interior. For now, the Lincoln has snatched the Caddy's crown, both in our heads and via the objective measure of our ratings system — the Navigator scored a 7.7; the Escalade loses out, just barely, at 7.6. 

With all that said, we don't think this battle will be over anytime soon.