A luxury car should have a big V-8 engine, rear-wheel-drive, an air suspension and a cabin showing off fine wood and metal craftsmanship. The 2015 Buick LaCrosse checks off none of these boxes.
Yet it still feels a cut above cars from its sibling brand, Chevrolet. The large cabin offers plenty of head and legroom in front and back. Front seats can be had with integrated heating and cooling. Driver assistance features like a head-up display and adaptive cruise control take the edge off long trips. The ride quality is very comfortable and the car is very, very quiet.
For Buick, and similar brands, the auto industry came up with the term "premium," or even "near-luxury." Reflecting this segment, the LaCrosse base price starts at $34,560, but the model Buick loaned me featured the top Premium 2 trim and options that brought the total to a lofty $46,240.
The LaCrosse, Buick's largest sedan, features a high roofline, making for very easy access to front or rear seats. The rear seat area is particularly spacious, offering excellent legroom even with the front seats pushed back. All but the most base level LaCrosse comes with leather-covered seats, and Buick even offers an Ultra Luxury package that adds real wood trim in the cabin.
The LaCrosse I drove came with a direct injection 3.6-liter V-6 engine, a reasonably efficient mill producing 304 horsepower and 264 pound-feet of torque. With its six-speed automatic, the EPA ratings come in at 18 mpg city and 28 mpg highway. I would really have preferred Buick's eAssist hybrid power-train, which combines a 2.4-liter four-cylinder engine with a 15-kilowatt electric motor, turning in 25 mpg city and 36 mpg highway.
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Despite that power plant, with notoriously noisy direct injection, the LaCrosse ran very, very quiet. The six speed automatic transmission was geared and programmed to let the engine run below 2,000 rpm while the car was cruising at steady speed. Excellent sound deadening for the cabin meant the air conditioning generally drowned out any engine noise. At one point I parked the car and walked away, forgetting to push the engine stop button, not noticing it was still running. It is that quiet.
Dead easy driving
As for the LaCrosse's driving character, I found it boring, but I don't mean that in a bad way. The car rode well and proved responsive, driving so easily that I really didn't have any issues with it.
The V-6 engine allowed for good acceleration, enough power for confident merging and passing. However, it didn't snap my head back or tear off the front wheels when I floored it, instead picking up speed in a less threatening manner.
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The steering wheel turned easily, but didn't suffer from too much play. The wheel response was good and immediate. Likewise, the suspension reacted well when I made sudden lane changes, damping out any excessive motion and settling back quickly once I had completed the maneuver. Over rough pavement, the suspension more than competently damped out bumps, leading to the best level of comfort short of having an air suspension.
Although the LaCrosse is definitely meant for comfortable cruising instead of thrashing around mountain corners for drag racing for pink slips, it does feature a Sport mode. When I pulled the shifter back to Sport, the transmission program became more aggressive and adjustable valves on the suspension dampers increased stiffness. The LCD instrument cluster even ditched the digital speed read-out for virtual analog speedometer.
However, none of these changes were particularly aggressive, or even very noticeably affected the LaCrosse's driving character. I very much doubt the typical LaCrosse driver will explore Sport mode more than once. The shifter's sport position also allows for manual gear selection, which might come in handy for engine braking on grades.
Optional Driver Confidence packages on this LaCrosse fitted it out with a camera, radar, and sensors for a blind spot monitoring system. The forward-looking radar enabled an adaptive cruise control system, which made driving even easier on the freeway. I was able to set the speed, and let the car handle braking for slower traffic ahead, not touching the pedals for many miles of travel.
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A forward-collision alert system flashed a warning on the windshield when I approached slow or stopped traffic too quickly, and also buzzed my butt with what GM calls its Safety Alert Seat. The seat also buzzed when I drifted across lane lines. This type of warning may seem bizarre and a little too intrusive, but it certainly got my attention better than any audio or visual alert I've seen in a car.
Exhaust ports are nicely integrated in the trailing edge of the LaCrosse. Wayne Cunningham/CNET The steering wheel
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