![]() Straight out of the gate, the original Cadillac SRX was pegged as a winner. Sure, it may have been an expensive rig with a starting price of $38,690 in 2004 dollars, but plastics aside, that money went fairly far. While a 2004 BMW X5 had a maximum cargo volume of 54.4 cu.-ft., the SRX packed a whopping 69.5 cu.-ft., perfect for moving your kids into their dorms. Speaking of practicality, the boxy form of the original Cadillac SRX paid dividends in cargo space. In a period road test, Car And Driver wrote that the SRX “flits through corners with sports-sedan stability, the roll and pogo motions thoroughly suppressed by the stiff springs and dampers and taut anti-roll bars.” and claimed that “it still thinks it’s a CTS with a garden shed on the back.” ![]() Remember, this is still a CTS-based vehicle, which means its imbued with a distinctly car-like feel that was buoyed by the engineering magic of available magnetorheological dampers. Oh, and don’t think that the family-sized Caddy falls apart in the bends. Sorry, BMW X5 4.4i, you’ll simply be seeing Cadillac taillights. Short of the bionic cheetah Infiniti FX45 and some uber-fast autobahn-bred machinery from Germany, little at time could touch the V8 SRX in a straight line thanks to a Car And Driver-clocked zero-to-60 time of 6.6 seconds. However, what the SRX lacked in material quality, it made up for with driving prowess, particularly when ordered with the 320-horsepower 4.6-liter Northstar V8 engine. Really, what is there to say about mid-aughts GM plastics that hasn’t already been said? The featureless, ludicrously cheap-feeling brain matter grey dashboard in the 2004 Chevrolet Malibu is a contributing factor in making that sedan one of the most hateful vehicles I’ve ever driven, and although Cadillac classed up the joint significantly over Chevrolet, material choice and styling at the time just couldn’t cut it against the German and Japanese competition. On the right, the interior from a 2004 (that was the first model year) SRX. On the left is the interior from a 2004 BMW X5. That being said, the SRX wasn’t quite the paragon of luxury for 2004, as I’ll now illustrate. That last row was more of a gesture than a practical addition, seeing as it was both smaller and less comfortable than one of those tiny IKEA sofas for children, but you get the gist. Plus, the SRX was available with three rows of seats. The original SRX was available with all the toys you could possibly want, from DVD navigation to rear-seat entertainment to a fantastically panoramic Ultraview moonroof at a time when massive glass roofs were far from the norm. The structure was right, and so was the options list. Regardless of engine choice or wheels driven, a five-speed automatic with manumatic functionality came standard, suitable for everyday duties. Likewise, while the base engine was GM’s 255-horsepower LY7 3.6-liter High Feature V6, shoppers looking for more gusto could pop for a 4.6-liter Northstar V8 with variable valve timing. Customers could order it as a rear-wheel-drive vehicle or as an all-wheel-drive model with a rear-biased 40:60 default front-to-rear torque split. However, unlike the original CTS, the SRX offered choice of both drive and engines. After years of platform-sharing dreck, Cadillac was going back to a primarily rear-wheel-drive lineup to run with the big boys in the luxury segment. Not content with dressing up a Chevrolet Trailblazer or some other mass-market GM SUV, Cadillac decided to create its own rear-wheel-drive crossover on the same Sigma platform as the original CTS at great expense. You had the BMW X5, the Lexus RX, the Acura MDX, and the Infiniti FX, to name but a few. ![]() Flash back to the early aughts and it felt like everyone was launching midsized high-riders, many of which were car-based.
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