The seats, too, are Navigator-sourced. The rear two straddle their own center console boasting a seemingly bottomless storage bin and can be folded flat to accommodate extra-large packages from the likes of Neiman-Marcus or Best Buy.

The cooling system in the front seats worked refreshingly well in Santa Barbara, California. Offering five settings, it promises to have the seats cooled in two minutes. It did.

Storage bins large enough for a handbag or small package hide behind the foldable rear seats.

In addition to the auxiliary power point in the base of dash beneath the climate control panel, there's another in the rear of the front center console, in the door jamb on the right-side rear door and inside the tailgate.

All of this is fine and good and impressive, as long as the Blackwood is the only luxury, sport-utility truck on the market. While not much more than a gussied-up, re-badged Chevrolet Avalanche, the Cadillac Escalade EXT could offer a significant challenge.

The Blackwood does not offer the interior roominess of the Cadillac EXT, though the Blackwood does offer slightly more rear passenger headroom.

In a ying/yang sort of sense, the same holds for the cargo area. Yes, the Blackwood's trunk holds less than 27 cubic feet, but it does so in a luxurious, pampering sort of way.

The EXT's cargo area, on the other hand, is more utilitarian. The trick is the patented Midgate, a foldable wall between the passenger compartment and the pickup bed. With the midgate up, the EXT is a four-door, crew cab-like luxury pickup. Down, the suburbia-standard 4X8-foot sheet of plywood will lay flat on the floor, which extends into the cab to just behind the front seats. In that mode, the EXT's cargo capacity reaches 41.1 cubic feet. And with the tri-fold, semi-rigid bed cover removed, the EXT becomes a short-bed pickup, with all the flexibility that provides.