Car Sight

The Super's cabin has leather seats with suede inserts, a heated wood steering wheel with a power tilt/telescope feature, a leather-wrapped dashboard, silver trim on the center of the dash and chrome sill plates. A Harman Kardon stereo with XM Satellite Radio is standard. The trunk holds up to 17 cubic feet of cargo.


Mr. Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, GM’s justly famous product development czar, recently announced that the GM product he most enjoys driving is the Buick Lucerne CXS. I happen to believe that Mr. Lutz is fudging the truth a little in this instance. I’m sure that a healthy dose of truth serum would reveal that– given full freedom of choice and no witnesses–Mr. Lutz would much prefer a Cadillac CTS-V or a Corvette Z06, or something hot and smokin’ from Holden in Australia.

Nonetheless, the Lucerne CXS is a very nice Buick, and if I was Tiger Woods any guilt feelings I might have had for taking Buick’s advertising money all these years without making so much as a ding in the public’s indifference toward Buick, would start to go away. This is a driver’s Buick, in the sense that the ’85 Gran Sport was a driver’s Buick. When you drive this Buick, visions of ’41 Century sedanettes and ’38 Century opera coupes whip through the curves of your frontal lobe.

This Buick is extremely good looking, and it begs to be driven great distances. It is front wheel drive, which Mr. Lutz dislikes and which Buick dealers like a lot. In this connection, there is a single sour note. Nail the throttle and the very powerful Northstar V-8 engine seems to surprise the front end. The result is a moment of disconcerting torque steer. This can happen at any speed from a standing start to fifty or sixty miles per hour. Floor the accelerator pedal and the front end goes light and seems to wonder what exactly is expected of it. This is a surprise to us, too, because GM has built enough powerful front wheel drive cars in the past thirty years to have a pretty good idea of how they’re supposed to work.

We drove a CXS to Amelia Island, Florida and back, and found it to be a really worthwhile American-style tourer. On our return trip we covered 1050 miles in just under seventeen hours, including food and fuel stops. Average fuel economy was 21.4 miles per gallon. We enjoyed every facet of the car’s performance, including a very well thought-out interior. Driving quickly in relatively heavy Interstate traffic and maneuvering among shoals of tractor-trailer rigs on pure instinct in nasty, wet, barrier-restricted construction zones was more fun than a drifting competition