Buick LaCrosse CXS 2010 is an American Lexus Sedan Car

Fighter pilots call it “target fixation” when you become so focused on a single adversary that you lose situational awareness and fly into something large and obvious, like the ground. Buick’s 2010 LaCrosse—a near-luxury, mid-size-to-large sedan—was built to put the cross-hairs on a single bo-
gie, the Lexus ES350, and I’ll tell you right now, it blows the Lexus out of the sky. Pow. Parachute. Smoking crater. Oh, you can quibble over one detail or another. The LaCrosse’s roof A-pillars are huge and make it hard to look through a corner on a tight, two-lane road (it’s also possible to lose sight of pedestrians in crosswalks).

There are moments that the cabin, with its Aqua Velva-blue ambient lighting, thick chrome instrument bezels, luminous LCD screens and spread of glow- ing buttons, looks like the flight deck of some drug-addled dirigible. But no fair appraisal of this car can conclude anything but that the Buick is as good as or better than the Lexus in every way: It’s as dead quiet, as thoughtfully designed, as this-minute in its technology. My top-of- the-line CXS had a 3.6-liter direct-injection V-6 under the scalloped hood, a six-speed Aisin automatic transmission, continu-ously variable suspension damping with Sport mode, Harman/Kardon sound sys- tem, touch-screen navigation and adaptive
headlamps.

Out the door at $39,195. And yet with all of the semiconduc- tor circuitry, servos, gadgets and displays, the LaCrosse feels deeply, foundationally sound. All is hushed and serene. Everything is damped. The whole car feels packed in ermine. It is an American Lexus. But is that enough? In other words, has bench-marking the ES350—Lexus’ best-seller. How does the Buick stack up against, say, the Hyundai Genesis or the Infiniti G37 sedan, both finely tailored, tech-sodden sedans with rear-wheel drive? What about the brilliantly executed Acura TL, with its torque-vectoring all-wheel drive? The competition among near-luxury, mid-size sedans makes a Cuban cockfight look tame.

Born in a blizzard of pink slips and a tsunami of tears, the Buick LaCrosse— the first new car launched by GM since it emerged from bankruptcy—has to be more than on par with some middling Lexus. It has to be fantastic This is a brand in a hole the size of AIG’s. Not only is Buick synonymous with “Matlock”-watching crapulence (the average age of a Buick buyer is 68); the parent company, GM, is feeling the unaccustomed disdain of Red State America on account of the Obama administration’s $83.5 billion auto-industry bailout.

I have not gotten a single e-mail from anyone saying, “You know, I love and support my country, so I’m going to buy a GM car.” But I’ve gotten maybe 100 e-mails that say, in effect, “I’ll never buy a GM car until the government gets out of the car business.”

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