AT NIGHT: 2024 Cadillac Lyriq Luxury EV | Night Lighting Performance Review

When you approach the vehicle with the key, it has a full proximity system and you don't have to get too close. You actually get a little bit close to it and it starts this animation in the front and the back. It's really cool. It's probably the best animation I've seen in any vehicle, the starting animation with the headlights, the taillights. There's also this little light right here on the dash. It's a Cadillac emblem, illuminates there on the dash. There's also approach lights here on the sides. The handles are also illuminated. There's a subtle light there on each handle. Let me hit the unlock button because it basically does the same thing, turns everything back on. And also the reverse lights are now on, giving you more exterior lights. So yeah, a really good animation. So here's the front animation and here's the back animation. Now when you hit the unlock button, there's a little projection of a Cadillac emblem on the ground behind the vehicle. It's pretty neat. The charge port does have a light. Open that up. So the headlights, we have them in automatic. Let's go ahead and turn them off. So now the exterior lights are off. If we put it in drive, we still have all the exterior lights off. So we can drive with the exterior lights off if we want to. Now let's go ahead and turn on the parking lights. Parking lights are basically these vertical lights here on the front. They also have accent lights that turn on as well. Some vehicles have these really cool accent lights, but they don't turn on until you turn on the headlights. So I'm glad to see that these really cool lights are illuminated now. Looks really cool. Badge there in the center and then all around it. They're in what would typically be the grille. Since this is an EV, this one just has a surface there with lights. And the vertical line is basically a, you know, thing that Cadillac has done for basically its starting, where it has the vertical tail lights and that's what it's trying to, you know, replicate there. There's an amber side marker here on the front. Now this light here on the sides is basically like a side marker. It's actually part of the taillight. So you have this red glow. It's red in color. It looks like slightly orange on camera, but it's nice deep red. Then it has this little spaces here looking cool. And then once again, we have the vertical red line here in the taillights. Tag lights are on as well. Turn signal here in the front is amber in color and it utilizes that upper portion right here. And it has a little bit of a swoopiness. It's full on and then swoops out looking really nice. It's fairly bright. Not super, well, it's pretty bright that back this way. You're definitely not going to miss it for sure. And then there's a turn signal indicator here on the side mirror. It's visible from the front, the side and the back. It's a little bit brighter looking from this direction. And the turn signal is basically these two red lights. So the upper portion is a little bit of a swoop, the bottom as well. So yeah, it's pretty interesting. It's not amber, but it is. And it kind of like, it kind of extends here all the way to the side. All these lights basically are flashing and swooping. Pretty neat. Very impressive. Definitely not going to miss it because it is super bright back here. Blowing out the camera a little bit. Hopefully you can see it good. There's also a third brake light at the top of the glass, as well as all the other lights that illuminate when you hit the brakes. And the reverse lights are in the very bottom. Okay. So there's the low beams. We're going to look at it going down the road. There's low and high beams here. But when I turn the turn signal, I mean the steering wheel or the turn signal, there is a cornering light here on the left side. And you can see it turns on with the right side there. So that's the right side. And I straighten it up. You can see how it goes away on that side. Now I go this side. So let me just show you what it looks like. There's dark. And then I turn the steering wheel and then it illuminates that side. All right. And also if you're reversing, it'll turn that light on as well. So let's go ahead and turn this steering wheel there and have this light on so we can see it. You can see it's the very bottom right here is the cornering light. You'll notice this side is not turned on. So it's only on that right side because I have this steering wheel turned to that side. Okay. So the headlights are a multi projector, a stack basically of projectors, as you saw in the intro or in the animation where it starts up. They come in and it looks like they're stacking up in here. Pretty cool. But you notice this upper portion is illuminated more than the lower portion because that's the low beams are up here at the top. And we still have that vertical line on the outside and all the accent lights as well. Looking really nice. But I like the way it fills in the illumination all through that entire stack. Looking really good. So when I step back here with the low beams on and six feet tall, looking at the headlights, I'm not blinded at all. They are bright, but they're not aiming in my face. So as I dip the camera down, you'll see that about around two and a half feet or so is where all the light is. They're intentionally focused down so they're not shining in the face of oncoming drivers. It's not the brightness of the headlights. It's the aim of the headlights that has to be taken into consideration. Just because somebody has LED headlights doesn't mean it's going to go around blinding people. They have to be aimed properly. Okay. So let's go ahead and switch to high beams here. And the high beams are going to be the full illumination of all those LEDs on that stack. So before it was mostly the upper portion. Now it's the entire stack now illuminated. So we'll see how it performs on the road. But basically having all those vertical like that, I'm curious to see is how they're going to overlap on the road with that vertical shape instead of horizontal. Since the road is horizontal and we have two vertical lines, how it's going to overlap and see how patchy it is on the road. But yeah, it should be good. I mean, it looks good from here. So we'll see what it looks like on the road. Okay. So let's look at the cargo lights. Now the cargo lights have three lights. There's one here, one here, and there's another one that's underneath the lift gate, which is kind of supposed to be an over the shoulder light. But the only issue with it is it being in the very center. As you walk up, if you're standing in the center, it makes a shadow. Your head basically blocks the lights. You have to stand on one side of the other to get the benefit of this over the shoulder light. Now it does help out in this area because these lights, although they're fairly bright, they're not really shining down. So you can see there's like a dark area right in here. This whole area here is dark, close to the light's dark. When you have things in here, they start casting shadows, even though you have two lights. Typically the over the shoulder light would help out with that. But since there's only one, there's not two, one on each side, it easily casts shadows and gets in the way. So it's a little bit aggravating and it's okay. I mean, the cargo light is okay, but it could be a little bit better. And I do like the way the shade, when the shade is pulled, these lights are still underneath it. So that's one big miss other vehicles have, is they'll have a light to where when the shade is pulled out, then it just blocks all the light. So it just wasted time. So at least they thought of that, but yeah, if it had two over the shoulder lights, maybe the aim of these lights could be a little bit better. Maybe another one up here. I don't know, but it seems like it's just not feeling right. There's three lights, but it's just, there's so many dark areas that, you know, it could be implemented better. I think the inside of the rear door has a puddle light, which is excellent. So you can see what you're stepping in when you get out of the vehicle. Now you notice this pocket has a fairly bright light. Now that's part of the ambient lights, which you can customize the color. When you open the door though, it just turns white. So that way you can see better. So some of the interior lights, like the floorboard and stuff like that, will turn white light instead of the ambient light that you have the color set. Now these lines here, the blue, I have it set to blue and red. Basically this one will be red when you shut the door, but the blue stays blue because it's just an accent light. So yeah, we have that pocket light. We have some buttons here that are illuminated as well. The interior lights here on the back are, I don't know if you can tell, but we're talking seriously dark here. We have basically a light on each side of the sunroof, but very localized, very to the center, and especially with the black interior, it's pretty much inadequate I would say. Now there is some backlit USB ports there and a power inverter as well. They're in the back of the console, and then you have the climate control, you know, buttons and stuff there. But yeah, a little bit dim back here, especially when you have black interior. The front door does have, once again, a puddle light, and it works well. And then that pocket light, once again, that's going to turn red when we shut the door. And then we have a backlit button here for the power liftgate, power switches here, and the seat controls as well. I don't know if you can tell, but there's a little light here on the handle as well. And floorboard is now white because I have the door open, but you can see that there's red and blue throughout. Now the interior lights here on the front are coming from these little map lights, basically. And once again, they're okay, a little bit better actually than the back, but could be a little bit better, I think, the interior lights. Okay, so I have the interior lights on to give you an idea of what it looks like here. Let's go ahead and turn it off with the button in the sub, sub, sub menu. All right, so there we go. So now we have the red floorboard illumination instead of the white, and then you see the blue there. So yeah, I have it set to red for the light, the surfaces, and then the lines are set to blue, basically. All right, you can see the steering wheel, backlit, looking nice. The screens are excellent, day or night, they do a really good job. They kind of, it's like basically two screens, but they're blended together, kind of make it look like one big screen, basically. All the climate control buttons there. There's a backlit USB port there in this compartment, which this compartment probably be really good for putting like a handbag or something, some kind of bag when you get in the vehicle. That would be awesome. Looks good. And you have this little dial with the buttons there. Cup holders are not illuminated, kind of surprised. So the center armrest console here, it has the tiniest little light in there. It's not really doing anything. So I have, you can't even see, I don't think. It actually does have a light, but man, is it doing nothing? I actually have my business cards in there. See? Put them in there, you can't see them anymore. So yeah, that's pretty much a waste of time, that light. Let me turn on an interior light here, because, so you can see what I'm talking about. Even with the inside lights on, it's hard to see in this, not super easy anyway to see in this compartment, especially with the black felt lining in there. It's just dark. So yeah, this little light is just, I don't know what's going on with that, what they, what their intention with that was. But anyways, that is a big mess, I think. All right, so let's open the glove compartment. And you have to get in the sub menu here to get to the button. Here we go. Press that button. Opens up and has a nice bright light. Excellent. Okay. I was kind of getting worried there for a second. Yeah, really good. Man, why isn't the interior lights like this? This is great. And the glove compartment light is one of the best lights. Now the rear view camera is pretty good. It's a little bit bright during the day, but at nighttime, it gives you good visibility in the darker areas. Now the on-star buttons up here. It has this little, this little moonlight, little ambient light, whatever you want to call it. It's supposed to shine in this little area right here. It does a decent job, but only when it's super dark out is when you can see it. And then it has these little tap lights here, here and here, which is basically the, just the light, interior lights that just turn on. And they do okay right here. Like if you need to read something, that's basically what they're for. Like you, you know, you grab something and you have to read it. And these don't shine in your face. So that's really good. Now the visor has nice soft lights here. So yeah, if you happen to look in the visor mirror, uh, these aren't overly powered where it's going to mess up your night vision as much. So yeah, that's pretty good. And these, like some vehicles, these, these type of lights will shine right in the driver's face. Uh, so this one's good. The aim is good and everything. So yeah, as, as, as far as like a, a reading light, those are well done. Now you can press and hold it and then, yeah, it basically just goes full brightness. Uh, yeah, some vehicles, if you press and hold it, it'll vary in brightness, but this one, it just slowly fades in. So let's go ahead and turn on the camera because even at nighttime, the camera, the top down camera and the front rear cameras, uh, work really well. So that's the front view. You can see the lights shining when I hit the brakes there. Uh, let's go ahead and put it in reverse. You can see the rear view camera. So yeah, that's all working good at nighttime. You should be able to see no problem. The camera increases the brightness, but you also have decent lights around the vehicle as well. And then we have the, let me put it, drive and then turn the camera on. And then you can see the, now right in here, you can see the cornering lights eliminate. You see the right one, left one turns off. Hopefully you see that, but yeah, it's pretty cool. I don't know if you can tell, but the rear climate control is kind of loud. Um, so I turned it off. It's much quieter. So I turned that on. It's like, you've got to really adjust it because it wants you to turn it on. If it's like, it just makes everything so much louder in here. So turn that off. And then front, I have it on low. So yeah, the front is quiet and that the fans, if they're too high, they're too loud in front or back. So I try to keep them really, really low. Like I put it on one, but I put it on automatic. Sometimes the fans just, it's just like really loud. I think part of it is just a, such a quiet vehicles that just that the climate control stands out because everything else is so quiet otherwise. So let's go into the settings here and then you have the vehicle lighting and the exterior choreography, which we saw as the pattern, you can turn that off, or you can just have a statically turn on. I like the pattern. I think that's awesome. But if you want to adjust the ambient lights, you can do it here. You can also turn them off. If you want, you can customize them with different colors, link to drive mode or link to a theme. You can also put it in demo mode. Uh, so let's go ahead and put it in demo mode like this. The auto guide lighting can be activated by moving your hand near a storage space. So let's put our hand in this storage space and see if there's any going to be any lights here or it's going to change. It seems like it's just kind of cycling through different colors. Um, see if it'll do anything, but yeah, it's just kind of like changes. It's kind of just cycling through colors on demo mode. Uh, let's go back to custom and then we have accent and then we have glow. So accent, I have a blue. All right. So let's change that to green, change it to red. And there's like tons of colors. There's purple. That looks pretty cool. All right. So we've got the purple there. Let's change the bottom, which is the glow. Let's change that to green. So we have like a green floorboard here and we've got, well, we already had red. Let's just see what it looks like with blue. That looks cool. Purple and blue. And let's go to a deeper purple, deep purple in that one and light. Let's go all purple and see what it looks like. You can have white too. There's green, there's blue, different shades of blue, different shades of red and purple and a pink. There's even a pink in here. Uh, but let's go to, let's just go to blue and purple and see what that looks like. All blue always looks good, but since we have two different colors, we have to, we have to pick a separate color here. We can't just go. All right, let's go with green and blue. That looks pretty cool. Here's what the color wheels look like. You can also adjust the brightness as well on the accent or the glow independently. You can do that. Here's what the map looks like. Um, it's basically Google Maps, but this is the dark mode for nighttime. Let's see what it looks like. There's some water out there. Apparently the ocean is black over here. We'll recenter it. So yeah, it looks pretty good. It looks really nice. These screens are great. So now I'm in a darker environment, so you can kind of appreciate this light right here, the center light right here that shines and gets in this area right here. It does a decent job at when it's super dark and you can see the ambient lights fill in the floorboard nicely. They're not overly bright. They're not going to like blind you or anything. Um, but yeah, I think it looks really good at nighttime. So yeah, this is one screen all the across. Even though it separates it, uh, for different screens when you're actually using it, it's actually one screen. It looks really good. So yeah, this is kind of what it looks like before you start it up. Just has this, uh, cool looking screen here. This image goes away if you don't mess with the vehicle. Let's go ahead and start it up. It has a little light that goes on the steering wheel. That's part of the SuperCruise system. I don't know if you can tell, but on the either side of this green light on the steering wheel, there are infrared illuminators that illuminate your face at night. So that way the camera down here on the steering column can see if you're paying attention to the road. These are auto leveling headlights. So when you start up the vehicle, it will kind of go through the main range of motion. There goes up and down just to kind of test the range of motion of the headlights. Now they're not the type of headlights that will, you know, stay super balanced. I mean, they're not going to stay super balanced, but if you floor the vehicle and you lift the front end up, it helps to push those down. So they're not blinding other drivers because that cutoff, you can see that cutoff right there. I'm kind of, the vehicle's kind of going uphill. So the cutoff is a little bit higher than normal, but you'll notice right in here, there is a little dip and that that's supposed to be for the oncoming lane. And we'll see how it works because when it's raining, there's a glare that could reflect into other people's eyes and, and also the variations in the road. So there's a little bit of a shadow on the oncoming lane. That's what they're supposed to be. And we'll see how it works. When we put it in reverse, the cornering lights turn on automatically, both of them in addition to the reverse lights as well. Yeah, I really like cornering lights because actually come in handy close to the vehicle. So as I turn the steering wheel, you can see that cornering light is right in that spot where I'm turning into, uh, like the headlights that have motion, they're not able to turn and get to that angle right where we are close to the vehicle. So I like cornering lights instead of the motion headlights basically. Okay. So far, uh, low beams are looking good. I can see on the sides of the road and everything and the, yeah, that shadow does line up perfectly on the oncoming lane. So let's put it back to low beams here. So the automatic high beams are turning on. Okay. So this road is fairly dark and we'll go with the high beams. There's low beams. So yeah, both the low beams and the high beams seem to work well. The low beams aren't fantastic. I mean, they're okay. High beams to me, they're good. Uh, they're good. They're adequate headlights. They're not super impressive though. Like I thought with all those projectors stacked up, I mean, they're good. Okay. They're okay. So I could see the trees in the distance. There's not significant patchiness on the road. There's no real shadows. Okay. They're above average. They're, they're, they're decent. They're pretty good actually. The more I look at them here in the dark, uh, they are doing yeah. Yeah. Low beams, high beams. Yeah. I mean, really it's hard to find fault with these headlights. They're not like super wowing headlights though, but they're good. They're, they're evenly lit with all those little projectors are able to illuminate all, pretty much everywhere properly. Um, yeah. Some, some, some headlights are just like really impressive, you know, and these at first I was like disappointed because I wasn't blown out of the water. Right. But, uh, but yeah, I mean, they're definitely good headlights above average and to you, they're probably like brighter because of the camera brightness turned up a little bit, but I try not to have it too overly bright. Yeah. Cause you can see the screen is slightly brighter. It's quite a bit brighter actually than what it really is, but, um, that way you can see the pattern, you know?