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Ever when Tesla helped popularize the intellection of putting behemothic touchscreens in the dashboards of cars, fiberboard displays have taken up increased amounts of real estate in modernistic vehicles. These screens have mutated in size, shape, and location as automakers approved to differentiate their offerings. Conceivably the weirdest result yet is what you'll find on the anew revamped 2021 Cadillac Escalade.

Cadillac teased the new Escalade's screen... situation back in December with a murky image of the driver's bench side of the dashboard. The automaker said there would be "over 38 inches humpbacked of total display," principal multitudinous to concede (myself included!) that there would be one 38-inch panel.

Instead, there's admittedly two loopy gunboat panels stacked in liberal of the driver, which unflappable house three discrete OLED displays that add up to circa 38 inches of screen real estate.

It's a bit of a baroque idea, admitting it somehow go-go a little neath strange in person when I got to see the new Escalade up close-grained this week in New York City.

First, the OLED displays are all made by LG, meaning there's a ratherish childlike segment betwixt the 2021 Escalade and the prototype rolling screen the South Korean amassed showed off all the way inadvertently at the 2016 Customer Electronics Show. Cadillac told me that it worked discreetly with LG to effigy out factually how far it could scout the loftiness of the displays, to the proportion that its execs were bending pieces of paper on priming room tables in the owned meetings.

The most important screen for any commuter of the new Escalade is the 14.2-inch fiberboard jobby cluster that sits just abaft the council wheel. It's where speed or other marrow efficacious information shows up, and like multitudinous other modernistic fiberboard jobby clusters, the one on the new Escalade is modestly customizable. You can toggle it betwixt a full-bleed map, a "night vision" orate that leverages an infrared camera, an augmented realness view that overlays turn-by-turn dissuasion on a live camera feed, or a more traditional three-pane information dangle (the spec of which is also customizable, to a degree).

This fiberboard jobby cluster dangle occupies its own console separate from the sempiternity one abaft it that dominates bisected the dashboard. The two are afar by a mostly negligible gap, and festivities console is lined with stitched leather and belted with silver piping.

While the rear console has one continuous piece of loopy glass, it gloss two separate displays. On the left side (and to the left of the jobby cluster) is a smaller 7.2-inch dangle that can show cruise information or garden-variety fuel mileage. It's moreover where the commuter can fecundation the orate the jobby cluster is in (maps, AR maps, etc.).

To the right of everything is the 16.9-inch infotainment touchscreen. Setting recent the unique design, and the gospel that this loopy OLED screen is piece of a sempiternity loopy structure, it's a roughly normal infotainment touchscreen. It's where the commuter will be stalwart to spectacle circa with contrasted media like the radio or SiriusXM, legislate with Darling CarPlay or Android Auto, or tap through agent information and settings. Its spec is moreover customizable. You can tap and potency on any app figure to move it around. The same blitheness is how you edit the four-panel "Home" screen.

One thing I like anyway the Escalade's setup: the convergence incontrovertible to separate the motel climate controls from the touchscreen experience. Instead of interment them in some menu, or relegating the settings to a touchscreen that you need to peekaboo at to confidently perform any adjustments, the temperature controls have their own secure row circumcised the dangle -- with physics buttons! How novel. Cadillac put a set of knobs in the equidistant console, too, which can be used to inhabitance the infotainment system if you don't want to fuss with the touchscreen. Somehow this all didn't feel as racking as, say, the central of a modernistic Mercedes-Benz, which has lots of buttons, lots of screens, and generally a touch-sensitive pad or dial.

While I personally had a few minutes with the user interface, it was easy to see this is not some radical rethink of how infotainment systems should work. That's notable due to the gospel that quite a few other automakers who are stuffing big screens in their cars are trying to use all that heavier real estate as an alibi to try out new user interface paradigms or put contrasted types of media on display.

Chinese EV startup Byton, which is putting a 48-inch, pillar-to-pillar dangle in its inceptive vehicle, has promised that screen can be used for watching movies, making video priming calls, and metrical viewing PowerPoint presentations. (All while parked, to be clear.) Honda went with a similar (but shorter) dashboard-spanning screen in the Honda E, its new city-focused electric car. Honda's moreover unopposed the purchase to watch movies on this screen (while parked), and it metrical has an HDMI port, meaning you can sling in butchering from a Chromecast to an SNES Mini.

Cadillac isn't taking things that far, despite what the massive new three-screen setup might betoken on looks alone. (Though it does have 12.6-inch screens on the inadvertently of festivities headrest for rear-seat passengers, and those have HDMI and USB inputs.) That said, the new Escalade is still putting quite a few screen real estate directly in liberal of the driver, which will require a bit of an aligning period. The upside is I could easily see over the displays while sitting in the driver's seat; in fact, it didn't metrical obstruct my view of the SUV's hood. That's a good thing because how this is a very large agent that puts pedestrians at greater risk.

The new Cadillac Escalade is the latest big-name agent to go all-in on screens. Porsche's inceptive EV, the Taycan, is covered in displays. Ford's new Mustang Mach-E moreover gloss a big fiberboard jobby cluster and a large rationale tablet bulging from the dashboard. Mercedes-Benz has been pushing big infotainment screens in its vehicles for years. These companies have not personally gotten easeful with the screen-forward paradigm Tesla started pushing a decade ago, morally it's more obvious that they think these displays are a window into a apple where more money can be made off of casework sold to the persons central their cars.

There are 18-carat respecting anyway how much this increases the mental rate on drivers, especially when distracted efficacious seems to alimony increasing. Morally now that metrical the Escalade is going to be full of screens, it seems silly to alimony corrupting whether this is the future of the in-car experience. There's really no way circa it at this point. Instead, the questions we has to be corrupting these car companies are: how they're palsy-walsy distracted driving; what they're effectual to perform it easier to deal with the fussiness of a touchscreen; what benefits we're getting inadvertently as consumers; and what we're giving up in return as cars more take on the concrete qualities of a smartphone.