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Buick LaCrosse
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I had an opportunity to hear an interview with the editor of Consumer Reports on National Public Radio. He admitted to owning a Nissan Maxima, so maybe he is biased against a car (Buick) that is more reliable than his Nissan?
If there was an agenda against the vehicle, I'd imagine they would not have reported outstanding reliability.
The fact that the editor owns a Maxima is an intersting one- I doubt he's biased since many V6 sedans are rated above it.
~alpha
I'm surprised any time I happen to pick up a copy and it says any sort of nice about a GM car. After all GM, Ford, and Chrysler were all a part of the military-industrial complex that kept American cars big and consuming gas during the 70s when CR liked anything green and not US.
CR liked anything with a rubber band, clutch, and manual transmission back then, which is what the imports supplied. They had stuck with them since on the basis that they have a reliability advantage. Reading the Accord discussions and some others, that advantage has disappeared as their cars became as complex as the US brands.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
We trade the car recently. Received $2000 for 6 year old car in good condition, with 70k miles, and we consider it to be a fair price.
After upgrading to good after-market tires, the car was pleasure to drive. It was a pity to off load it. However, after warranty expired, repairs cost almost as much as payments for a new car.
With the experience, I am vary of new models - at least for the a first and second year after redesign. CR does not cover the subject: they simply will have no statistics for couple of years.
The LaCrosse is based on the 2004 Grand Prix platform, and it is a much tighter car. There is very little flex in the chassis when you go over a railroad track or round a curve. It is much quieter than a Regal. It reminds me of a 7/8 scale Park Avenue inside, and that is meant to be a compliment. The seats are very comfortable. Mrs. Rogers drove both a Lexus ES330 and RX330 for 24 hour test drives, and she says that the LaCrosse seat cushion is longer and offers better thigh support.
Fiehrer Motors in Fairfield, OH north of Cincinnati delivered the car, and they are a pleasure to deal with. If GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz ever wants to copy Lexus customer service, he should visit Fiehrer. It was raining when we picked up the car, so they had the car indoors so we could inspect it. They give you a CD to help you get acquainted with the car.
I'm considering trading in my '02 Regal LS Abboud on a LaCrosse CXS. I haven't driven the LaCrosse, nor its competition. I DID drive a Chrysler 300 and a Lexus ES300 to compare before buying the Regal. The Chrysler was inferior in every department - performance, braking, cornering, seats - you name it. The real surprise was the Lexus - grabby brakes, vague, too-light steering and a notchy gas pedal. The Regal, for all its dated design [even then], was equal or superior to the Lexus in every department, save for the lack of memory seats.
But, back to CR - What leadfoot there got only 18mpg from the 3.8 LaCrosse? I NEVER see less than 21mpg in my Regal, and 30+mpg on the road is usual. And, yes, I drive a lot faster than 55 when possible.
Makes me wonder....
Regarding rear seat room, here are the dimensions for headroo(figures are w/o sunroof):
LaCrosse/Camry/Accord
Headroom: 37.2/38.4/38.5
Thats a big difference.
I'm so tired of the argument that CR gives American vehicles negative reviews simply because they are from an American nameplate. People seem to forget that up until the Mazda 3 came along, the Ford Focus was CR's top rated small car, or that last January, the Malibu V6 scored very well, just short of its Camcord competitors. Maybe, just MAYBE... when the domestics produce good vehicles, it gets recognized. But the majority aren't, and its reflected in the ratings, people are up in arms.
~alpha
Many times with faint praise. The selection of adjectives and tone of sentences colored the preferences. If a flaw was mentioned in a foreign car, it was mitigated with something else said in the sentence or minimized by the choice of wording if the car was on the preferred list. American brand cars--never could do right. E.G., how they got 18 mpg. Did they test drive the Honda Accord v6 with 280 horsepower and get 18--bet not.
The Focus is 'alien' enough in style and position, that it's not proof that American brands can get rated by CR's foreign lovers. Focus seems to be a good car, I'm not berated it. I just want to see fair testing of all cars without bias.
I recall Motorweek having a GM car stop in 128 feet and 'that's not very good.' Later they tested some tiny British thing and it took like 140 feet to stop, and that was sort of okay because of the kind of car it was. BIAS...
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
I think CR will give the LaCrosse a luke warm review but will eventually recommend it. I find they generally are ok with Buicks.
In terms of the CR report, rightly or wrongly, when a car is evaluated by a relatively small number of people (the test panel in the case of CR, so-called professional reviewers in the case of many newspapers and magazines), specific biases will come through. These biases can come through even in such things that would seem to be purely objective, such as rear seat room. As I noted in a previous post (2018, I think), one of the primary reasons we chose the LaCrosse over the Camry was that the LaCrosse, for us, had much more interior room for us. This was also true for the driver's seat, which for me was marginal at best. The differing results likely reflect differing leg and torso lengths. Thus, the bottom line as to whether or not you like a car and if it fits your style is to drive it!
Our experience with test driving cars and seeing how they compare to the CR report is that sometimes we agree strongly and other times wonder what they were smoking. When we were test driving cars, 3 other vehicles we looked at and that were recently tested by CR were the Chevy Malibu, Toyota Prius, and Ford 500. Our impressions of these cars vis-a-vis the CR reports were: Ford 500 - almost identical to CR; Chevy Malibu - a good car, but not as good as CR made it out to be; Toyota Prius - whatever kind of drugs the CR staff was on when they tested that car must have been pretty powerful. Other than the gas mileage, it was an especially lousy car. While the V-6 Camry has not been rated recently, we thought it was an excellent car except for the size issue - similar to CR.
A more significant issue with CR car reports, however, are their reliability reports. Methodologically, they are likely fatally flawed.
A final comment to the person who posted the CR report verbatim. While it was fun to read the report before my issue of CR actually arrives, it really is not kosher (or legal!) to post an article verbatim (copyright law, etc.). However, it is fine to keep the entire content of the article as long as you paraphrase it.
Im not sure I quite understand what the following means:
"The Focus is 'alien' enough in style and position, that it's not proof that American brands can get rated by CR's foreign lovers. Focus seems to be a good car, I'm not berated it."
The Focus is a Ford through-and-through. Berate means to "rebuke or scold angrily and at length" according to dictionary.com
~alpha
With respect to the Prius, I dont think everyone is quite ready for it. My parents hated it, and all they did was see it in the showroom when our Camry was in for servicing. This does not mean it was undeserving of the Car and Driver Ten Best award last year or CR's review.
I fail to see how CR's reliability ratings are fatally flawed, or at least, any more flawed than JD Power's, for example. And if you look at the JD Power dependability studies (3 and 5 year) against the CR ratings... they are remarkably similar. There is disconnect between the JD Power Initial Quality study and CR's ratings, but then, CR doesnt have a measure that tracks only 90 days of ownership. I dont wholly buy the argument that CRs readership dictates its scores. If that were the case, there would have never been enough data on the Chevy Cavalier, but there is. Or there would never be negative data on highly rated vehicles, such as on the Cadillac CTS, Mazda 6, Nissan Armada, etc. The bottom line is that individual consumers do not have the resources/ability to take reliability surveys on their own. It is up to the individual to weigh the information from professional sources such as CR and JD Power with respect to reliability, as these are the two sole credible sources that I know of. My preference is that I care less about reliability and more about the vehicle itself. If I wanted a Mazda 6 or hell, a Malibu for that matter, I would buy it, and find a dealer with a strong sense of customer orientation and good service.
And it was I who posted the CR article verbatim. It was a mistake that won't be repeated, and yes, Copyright law is pretty strict, but.. I never passed the work off as my own, and I provided the citation. Still it was wrong, it was removed, and I will not do that again.
~alpha
CXS La Crosse with Gold Convenience pkg, Curtain Air Bags, Stability Control, Sunroof, Monsoon 6 CD stereo, Satellite Radio, Heated seats, and Remote Start = $33400 MSRP.
2005 Acura TL $ 33,470 gives you Xenon headlights, Memory Seats/mirrors, Blue tooth, Extra cog transaxle with Manual Shift Gate, DVD based stereo , Torso Side air bags, 30 More HP, 8 more pound feet of torque, and Longer BTB warranty for only $ 70.
The only advantages the Lacrosse has are 3.5 cubic feet of trunk space, a bit more rear legs room and Ultrasonic parking assist.
Buick is not perceived at same level of prestige as Acura or Lexus. Blame 30+ years of badge engineering and Decontenting their cars down to a Chevy level.
Meanwhile import brands such as Toyota and Honda built clever little cars that were neatly assembled and thoroughly engineered. Those cars built their market esteem based on tangible quality and product advantages.
In other words while GM took the US market for granted, Toyota and Honda built better cars and won over the Baby Boomers and Generation x market with superior products.
It boils to this the near-luxury boom of the past 15 years has stolen to historic market of Buick, Oldsmobile, Chrsyler and Mercury. Buick sales for are down 60% or so from twenty years ago, even though total cars sales have varied 10% from 16 million a year. The 80% La Crosse is symbolic of GM slow decay in to Bethlehem Steel like Abyss. What is really 120% effort to match the competition and 85% of the market price.
Just a few thoughts
Car and Driver Senior Editor Csaba Csere commented in his December editorial that even after their sludge problem, Toyota still does not offer a system that tells you when to change the oil like GM does.
Concerning the issue of LaCrosse only offering a four speed transmission and Lexus offering a five speed, please drive an ES330 for 24 hours like my wife and I did. The ES330 five speed loves to upshift, but is hesitant to downshift. It is not a reliability issue, so people who think of cars the way they think of Maytags might not care. But the hesitation is there in both the ES330 and RX330. I have not driven a new Camry, but I have read that it shares the ES330 transmission.
Whatever the high-powered at high revs engine puts out. I didn't look it up. Sorry.
>I wasnt (sic) talking about Motorweek,
I mentioned Motorweek (the PBS program) in my discussion.
>Focus is 'alien' enough
The Focus is much different from a Crown Vic, Taurus, Windstar. It's more like a foreign car.
>Berate means to "rebuke or scold angrily and at length" according to dictionary.com
Thank you for the dictionary check.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Anyway, back to my comment on the CR reliability reports and the statistical issues I have with it. You are correct, that in many ways the CR and JDPower reports track each other well, although there are a number of glaring exceptions. For example, average 3 year reliability of all Buick nameplates is higher than 3 year reliability of all Toyota nameplates (this does not include Lexus, which was higher than Buick) in the JDPower report. In the CR reliability, this is not the case. Also, while many individual cars track similarly in the two systems, there are often very large differences.
There are 2 nontrivial issues regarding the CR data in terms of validity. First, the CR data contain a confounding variable - all of the respondents subscribe to CR. Normally, in doing a survey one wants to eliminate confounding variables since it can skew the data. For example, if I wanted to find out about car reliability and I did a survey of only people who went to NASCAR races, I would bet that I would get a very different and equally "valid" result than CR. My data might have been skewed, however, by the confounding variable of all my samples being NASCAR fans. As I understand it, the JDPower survey is a random survey of car owners.
The second issue also relates to the respondents to the CR report all being CR subscribers. A substantial fraction of CR subscribers subscribe to CR in order to find out/be told what vehicle (or other product) to buy. Importantly, subscribers make a financial commitment to the magazine when they subscribe. This raises the issue of what happens if/when the car they buy turns out to be less than CR indicated. Will they be honest in their responses, or will they not want to be percieve themselves as a rube since they paid money for this advice, and pretend the problems don't exist?
I do agree with you that CRs car ratings in terms of how much they like a vehicle do appear independent of reliability ratings. A couple things I would find useful would be if CR would include the cost of ownership in reliability, as they used to do. It would also be nice if CR gave numerical data with standard deviations on the repair incidence, rather than just their circles - I would like to judge for myself how different the values are. Finally, it would be a really neat experiment if CR or some other organization were to repeat the CR study of car reliability one year except instead of including just CR subscribers, include a random sample of car owners. My hunch is that many of the trends between the CR reports and this study would be similar, but there would also be many glaring exceptions. Anyone have a couple hundred K for such a study!
Robchemist
I suggested the sample problem in other discussions here on Edmunds about CR's bias and inaccuracy in reporting. I was summarily pooh-poohed by some posters in that other discussion.
The fact that only subscribers get the questionnaires and then some of those return them and some don't skews the information.
CR never tells how many reports it has about a particular car. That lack of information is a concern in itself for me to understand their results.
I've always sensed that the results are oriented to keep the subscribers happy: their subscribers tend to be green IMHO. That's whom they want to feel that CR has rated their car high or helped them with their other purchases.
Does anyone have info about their subscriber demographics?
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
What counts is the resulting performance/cost.
From what I can tell, the average LaCrosse is fast, smooth, quiet, comfortable, good-looking, well-made [we hope - new model], reasonably well-equipped, good on [regular] gas and probably doomed to poor resale values. Of course, there's the Made in USA [assembled in Canada but by UAW people] factor, too.
3.8 LaCrosses are selling for way under MSRP, depending on the dealer, GM Card $$$, rebates, cheap financing and various other incentives. The truly competitive CSX is too costly for now. The foreign cars offer much less in the way of incentives, although $22K Camrys are going for $17K these days.
The aura of bullet-proof quality surronding Toyota, et. al. should one day be earned by GM, too.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
There are lots of other discussions where many of these recent comments and questions would be most appropriate. If the search features on the left side of the page do not help you find an appropriate venue for your thoughts drop me an email and I'll dig something up for you.
Meanwhile, back to the LaCrosse in this discussion ...
Because consumer ate it?
Depending on trim. OnStar is not optional with CXS.
OnStar [...] costs $695 - roughly $500 for the hardware and $200 for the first year's subscription fee, said OnStar spokesman Terry Sullivan.
Source:
http://www.xposed.com/rides/onstar_feature_continues_to_grow.aspx
I heard they will soon be bundling XM and OnStar for $15 / month which would be ideal and I suspect a lot more people would bite.
GM discounts are almost always available, even on a car as new as the LaCrosse. And the residuals aka trade in values show it.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
http://www.buick.com/lacrosse/specialoffers/northeast.html
Typical dealer discount is only $1000 according to Edmunds (TVM). $1500 purchase / $750 lease loyalty rebates, if they are still available. And only $1000 GM card rebates during year 2005.
In short, discounts are fair to good, but definitely not as great as wat was available, for example, with the last year Regal.
The curbweight for a 4 cylinder Altima is exactly one pound over 3000 pounds.