#buick

The coming year isn’t just the first chapter in a new decade, it will also be the final year you’ll be able to purchase a new Buick Regal. For that matter, it’s the last year you’ll be able to buy a Buick car.

Confirmed by a brand spokesman, the 2020 model year will be the midsize Regal’s last in the North American market.

Yes, that’s the name of an old Ford engine with double the cylinder count as the subject of this piece, but it’s still a great name. As for the star of this show, Buick’s upcoming Encore GX is a tweener vehicle imported from the other side of the Pacific to fill a gap between the existing Encore and the larger Envision. It’s a gap not many people took notice of, but it’s one GM is nonetheless choosing to fill in its Buick and Chevrolet lineups.

As splashier products land at the L.A. Auto Show, the automaker has filled in a few information gaps on its first-ever three-pot Buick.

A new Buick arrives from across the Pacific early next year, and it may be priced in a manner that relegates the hot-selling Encore to the runner-up spot.

The Encore GX, which aims to split the size difference between Encore and Envision, may be larger than its subcompact sibling, but it sheds one cylinder beneath its hood. It also doesn’t add much in the way of cost, pricing guides reveal.

Riviera. The mere mention of the name brings to mind visions of luxury. Perhaps of a CRT that glowed brightly on a stormy night, as your grandmother drove you home from a 4:55 p.m. dinner at Old Country Buffet. Or perhaps of the GM 3800 V6, maybe in elite supercharged form.

Today’s Rare Ride predates either of those anecdotes, and is special for a very different reason: It’s a last-of moment.

As I look at all of the questions I’ve received via the Ask Bark inbox over the years, I find that a disproportionate number of them are on the topic of leasing. In all honesty, leasing isn’t that hard to understand. You’re paying the cost of depreciation over the time you use the car, plus interest. Of course, there are other factors involved, and one of those is what happens when a leased car is returned to the dealership. Our friend, Brian, a longtime TTAC reader, turned in his Buick Regal recently and was a little compuzzled (that’s a word my son made up, but I think it fits perfectly here) about what happened. Let’s read.Hi Bark:I had previously asked this to a certain Jalopnik car sales expert and got a bit of a glib, didn’t really read my question answer so I thought I would take another stab and reach out to an actual expert.Back in May I turned in a leased 2016 Buick Regal GS (FWD – auto – black) and I got stuck with the $495 disposition fee. I took over the lease from someone else and I got a pretty darn good deal so I really can’t complain too much.I took the car to several GM/Buick dealers toward the end of the term to see if they wanted to buy it. It was in good shape and it was almost 10k miles under the maximum. The residual was $19k and change plus taxes and fees. I knew I wasn’t going to make money on it, I really just wanted them to take it at residual and relieve me of the disposition fee obligation. The closest offer I got was $18k with most around $16k. One dealer told me they would pay the leasing company the residual themselves in order to keep it on the lot if they wanted to sell it.Is this true? The dealership I turned it in to wouldn’t buy it from me but they kept it and sold it on their used lot. Did they actually pay the leasing company the residual to keep it and if so, why not buy it from me at the same price?Can you enlighten me?Thanks,BrianCan I? You bet I can.

One of the great joys I’ve had over the last six years of writing for this site has been offering my advice (for what it’s worth) to the loyal readers of TTAC, the Best & Brightest. Nearly every person whose question I’ve answered has written to tell me that they appreciated what I’ve written in response to their advice, even if he or she didn’t follow it exactly. But today, I got an email from somebody who ended up feeling the sting from my words. Let’s hear from our friend Quincy and see if we can help him.Hi Mark,I was recently reading your article about the deals that could be had on left over inventory and I felt inspired to test the waters. My local Buick dealer in Metro Detroit had a 2018 Regal TourX Preferred in silver with a MSRP of $36k and I was happy to take it home for $23.5k before TTL. However, the honeymoon came to a screeching halt as I was introduced to the concept of lot rot. Back to the dealer for new brakes. To make a long story short, the driver’s front wheel came off during the technician’s new brake road test and moved in a generally northeast pattern towards the A-pillar. With only 444 miles, my car sits in the dealer’s back lot with a driver’s door impinged by a front fender. The only offer from the owner of the dealership is to let them repair the car in-house or they won’t cover the costs of the repairs. Do I really want the dealership that damaged the car to fix it? With no parts is sight (GM strike) and a damaged vehicle history, I’m finding the dealer’s offer leaves me less than satisfied. So what would you do in my shoes?Thanks,QuincyUgh. That sucks.

It’s just the news you needed to perk up a boring Monday. Buick’s Regal, which carries a variety of badges overseas, could see a facelift in the near future, leaked images reveal. Dutch website Autoweek.nl (via Motor Authority) has the pictures, with the decidedly brown model depicted therein bound for the Chinese market.

China, as you well know, loves Buicks like the NBA loves revenue.

While the China-bound Regal’s design alterations will no doubt carry over, in some form, to vehicles found in other markets, just how long buyers in America will have access to the model remains an open question.

Arguably the most interesting — or at least atypical ⁠— Buick in the brand’s lineup, the Cascada was a European creation that wore many badges. And now it’s truly, definitively dead.

Unlike the recent deep-sixing of the Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Cruze, the last Cascada to roll off Opel’s Polish assembly line did so with little fanfare. Perhaps a few autoworkers raised a tallboy of Tatra after work, we don’t know. For Opel parent PSA Groupe, the ceasing of Cascada production is akin to sweeping old cobwebs away in preparation for new wallpaper.

But what a life it had.

Like its Chevrolet division mate, Buick plans to spend the 2020 model year filling white space in its lineup, hauling the tweener Encore GX from overseas to plug the gap between the existing subcompact Encore and the larger Envision. Beneath its hood, however, the Encore GX is anything but larger — at least when displacement is concerned.

Once the Encore GX arrives, the Ford EcoSport won’t be the only domestic crossover available with a three-cylinder engine. In fact, the Encore GX will be the only crossover offered in America with a choice of triples. No four-bangers invited to this party at all.

Encore, not Regal. Regal TourX if you please, not the Cascada. No to the LaCrosse, yes to the Enclave. Regal Sportback shunned, Envision approved.

This isn’t an elementary analysis of the pro-crossover/anti-car trends of the marketplace or GM’s China-centric Buick brand. Rather, it’s the message Buick seems to be sending in its own advertising.

Of course, that’s not the official line from Buick PR. But the more you watch the six-month-old “Mistaken Identity” commercial, the more you wonder what Buick must think of its own cars.

Around these digital pages, Buick gets a bad rap. Some have negative connotations of Buick as an old person’s car (disclaimer, my paternal grandfather was a Buick man) or hold grudges simply because the brand was continued while Oldsmobile and Pontiac were killed off during the Great Recession (disclaimer, my father was an Oldsmobile man), seems few have good things to say about the division from Flint.

Disclaimer: I hate the theme music from Buick’s TV commercials.

Let’s make a deal, then. Let’s try and ignore the badges on this 2019 Buick Envision for a few minutes. Let’s evaluate this entry-level luxury crossover against the competition, rather than against whatever demons lurk within our collective subconscious.

After our most recent Rare Rides post, your author perused The Big List of BDB Ideas and discovered a suggestion commenter Sgeffe made many moons ago. He suggested the most basic coupe A-bodies on offer in 1979. Feeling cheap? Let’s get weird.

Pity the poor Buick Envision. As one of the few Chinese-built vehicles sold in America, it earned an unpatriotic stigma upon its arrival. There’s no word on how many UAW workers own one. Meanwhile, the compact crossover launched partway through the 2016 model year with only high-end trims in tow, saddling it with a steep starting price. The entry price has since declined to saner levels.

Just when Buick thought it had righted the Envision ship, the U.S. hiked tariffs on a slew of Chinese goods to 25 percent last July, suddenly making the Envision a less profitable endeavor for the doctor’s car brand. As we learned today, General Motors’ appeal for mercy apparently fell on deaf ears.

Contrary to previous reports, the Buick Encore will not be replaced by a slightly larger, China-sourced crossover. Instead, Buick plans to supplement the subcompact Encore’s healthy sales by slotting a new model alongside it: the Encore GX.

Appearing early next year for the 2020 model year, the Buick Encore GX fills the space between the Encore and the compact Envision. Expect its price to bridge the gap, too.

Buick’s smallest model might not be what most TTAC readers want to see in their driveway, but it’s nonetheless popular with the American buying public. The subcompact Encore is by far the brand’s best-selling vehicle, making up nearly half of Buick’s sales volume. We’ll probably see a next-generation model debut later this year or early next.

What buyers won’t find when they check the coming year’s offering is the availability of an uplevel engine, however. For 2020, the hotter of the two turbo 1.4-liter four-cylinders vanishes from the Encore line, and it probably won’t be missed.