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Guy Secretly Installs Blower on Wife's Escalade for 640 HP, She Still Wants the V

Having our stock, the naturally aspirated truck turned into a supercharged monster literally overnight (okay, over two nights) would probably be the dream present for most of us, but it seems like not everyone is that impressed with a +50 percent increase in power output.
Surprising the wife with supercharger install on her Escalade 7 photos
Photo: LegitStreetCars / YouTube screenshot
Surprising the wife with supercharger install on her EscaladeSurprising the wife with supercharger install on her EscaladeSurprising the wife with supercharger install on her EscaladeSurprising the wife with supercharger install on her EscaladeSurprising the wife with supercharger install on her EscaladeSurprising the wife with supercharger install on her Escalade
Left to its own devices, the Cadillac Escalade produces a more than decent 420 hp and 460 lb-ft (624 Nm) out of its venerable 6.2-liter V8 engine. However, considering it's a truck roughly the size of Lichtenstein and with a mass giving off a little gravitational field of its own, that means it's still not going to be or feel particularly fast. Luckily, that can all change simply by adding a supercharger kit.

Alex, the guy in this video, opted for the solution offered by Magnuson and, judging by the results, it's fair to say he's pretty happy about his choice. We don't know how much it cost, but it was relatively easy to install (it took two guys a couple of days), and, more importantly, the dyno runs proved it does what it says on the box.

According to Magnuson, this kit will add roughly 220 crank horsepower to the Escalade's 420, bringing the total output to a perfectly respectable 640. But since you can never take these companies' word for it, it's always a good idea to test everything using a dyno.

Before any of that, though, it first has to pass the wife test. The subject truck is actually regularly driven by Alex's wife, but she has no idea what her husband has done to the Escalade. She thinks the SUV went away for a few days for maintenance work, so when Alex tells her to stamp on the throttle (on the pretext that they're testing how well the phone holders work), she's not expecting the avalanche of horsepower her right foot is going to release.

A 50% power increase can't go unnoticed, so she instantly feels something is off. "I hear a whistle," she says, adding "your other cars whistle" ("other cars" include a 1,000 hp Trans Am). Alex tries to play it dumb for a while, but he realizes he can't keep up the charade, so he comes clean.

Most people in her situation would have either gotten mad for going behind her back and doing something she hadn't asked for or just indifferently accepted the situation ("my crazy husband, what can you do about it?") without making too big of a deal about it. A very small percentage would have gotten excited about the change and started overtaking everything in their way, from semis to Jaguars F-PACE. Luckily for the content in this clip (and for him as well), Alex's wife falls into the latter category.

After Alex talks about how he's going to benefit from the added power when he'll take the Escalade to trailer a new project car, his wife sees a little opportunity there to push her luck a little and insert the idea of buying the new Escalade V in the conversation. Naturally, Alex is a little reluctant, especially since the later dyno tests of the Magnuson-boosted Escalade show it's not very far from Caddy's V model in terms of power for a fraction of the cost. Keep an eye on Alex's channel to see if the wife wins, and a brand-new Escalade V shows up in the future.

Speaking of the dyno, the Escalade's best run yielded a wheel horsepower figure of 466. Factoring everything in, that's close to 620 crank horsepower, which falls a bit short of the 640 hp claim. However, don't put this discrepancy on the Magnuson kit because it does bring the promised 220 crank horsepower boost - the gap comes from the SUV's dyno-tested stock output of 302 wheel horsepower (about 402 crank horsepower).

The dyno graph compares it to an identical Escalade sporting a twin-turbo setup with 7 psi of boost and seeing these two side-by-side is quite interesting. If anything, it basically debunks the myth of the instant supercharger oomph showing how tiny the difference between the two systems is even at lower RPMs. Plus, there is probably room to grow for the turbo setup with higher boost and different engine mapping.

Before going home, Alex removes the air box's filter just to see how badly the stock intake setup is choking the engine's potential - and listen to that beautiful sound. This last run reveals a significant increase in output as the display reads 482 whp, which is by far the best figure of the day. Well, I may not have a clue about what I'm going to do over the next few days, but I know very well what Alex will, and it involves sporty air filters and throttle bodies.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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