Buick's redesigned luxury sedan takes some of its design cues from the Avenir concept, and the 2017 LaCrosse wears that styling well. We got up close with the new sedan at 2015 Los Angeles Auto Show. Watch the video for more.
Transcript
(car engine turns on) The new face of Buick now shows up on the redesigned LaCrosse which takes a lot of concept car cues, from the Buick Avenir. Check out this grill here.
It's got this broad kind of wing design, with a color logo here, front and center. There's a lot more to talk about. Let's get at it. New LaCrosse looks a lot bigger than its predecessor, but it actually isn't. Overall length and width, they're roughly similar to the outgoing car, but actual height here is down about an inch and a half. So it does seem kind of more low slung, a little more spread out here, wheelbase distance between the front and the rear axles up nearly three inches overall. You get around back here, check out these new tail lights. There's a little bit of a C shape going on here. That's something we're seeing increasingly across the industry in cars, all the way down to the Honda Civic. Now, one issue with the prior generation LaCrosse was it was pretty hard to see out of with very bulky A-Pillars and a small rear window. Buick seems to have dealt a little bit with the A-Pillars. They seem to be a little bit narrower here in this redesign, but still a very low roof line, very small rear window. Make it pretty hard to see out your back side. Materials fairly be fitting of a premium car here. A mixture of kind of molded and stitching with real leatherette that's kind of splashed along certain sections of the dashboard, real chrome here along the door panels according to Buick. Overall, a pretty inviting interior. This transmission here is an electronic gearshift that drives the front wheels standard or optional all-wheel drive. Because it's an electronic gear shifter versus a mechanical one, it clears up space underneath it, which gives you some room here to throw things down there, but it sits on this massive center tunnel here, pretty wide. If you've got bigger knees, you're going to be not so happy that, you know, you can't really spread out that much. Now the backseat is actually pretty wide here in the redesigned LaCrosse. This might be a car where you could actually fit three adults across, workably for short trips. Lots and lots of leg room there. I'm six feet tall and that's where I would sit to drive. Head room's okay, but the seat continues to sit a little bit low to the ground, especially if you have longer legs. That's something that was kind of the situation in the old LaCrosse. Doesn't really seem like it's changed here. Buick does say interior packaging overall remains about the same. Now, Buick didn't have a spec immediately for us on trunk volume but they did say that this truck can now accommodate four bags of golf clubs. That's up one bag from the last LaCrosse which wasn't quite in the four bag territory. So if you need to go golfing with a bunch of people, have at it. Even in the base trim, the LaCrosse won't offer cloth seats. Vinyl will be standard with leather optional. There'll be one engine across the board at 3.6-liter V6, good for 305 horsepower. Stay tuned for our driving impressions closer to the new LaCrosse on sale date in summer of 2016. (car trunk shuts)
