This is your granddad’s Buick, in the best way possible. It may be difficult for young people to imagine a time when Buicks were driven by well-respected professionals instead of coffin-dodgers and anyone with $50 to spend at rent-a-wreck, but believe me, it existed. In the early ’70s, Electras were magnificent, Rivieras were beautiful, and Skylarks were snazzy. Then, everything changed. The great cheapening of General Motors started, and much of what made Buick special was sapped. Many decades later, in 2006, a ray of hope appeared with something called the Lucerne. Welcome back to GM Hit or Miss, where we
Through the late-’90s and early 2000s, Buick had two large sedans — the LeSabre and the Park Avenue. The former was geared more towards your average large sedan buyer while the latter was geared towards the same sort of people, but with money. Unfortunately, almost everyone with money had migrated to something German or Japanese at that point or died, so consolidation was a good idea. For 2006, Buick would replace both the LeSabre and Park Avenue with one model line offering a choice of V6 or V8 power. With the platform of the Cadillac DTS and a name plucked directly from a town in Switzerland, the Buick Lucerne was born.
However, the Lucerne wasn’t just another cheaply-made way to separate retirees from their pensions. It was a marked step up in fit-and-finish above just about every other GM product of the time. Buick boasted about interior trim gaps measuring less than one millimeter, going down to half a millimeter in spots. The headlamp-to-fender gap also measured less than one millimeter, and special treatment was paid throughout the car to minimize noise, vibration and harshness. According to Motor Trend:
To quiet the Lucerne, considerable engineering effort was invested in eliminating noises at their source (by revising the accessory drive, induction box, side mirrors, etc. ), keeping noises out (laminated dash panels and side glass, wheelhouse liners) and hushing the sounds that get in (carpet deadeners, larger-volume A/C ventilation system).
Yep, Buick was serious about this thing. Hop in the Lucerne and you’ll notice that all the marketing wasn’t lying. The door handles looked a bit dated and the climate controls were corporate to say the least, but everything was screwed together in an extremely pleasing manner. Soft-touch materials on the dashboard and door cards signaled Buick’s intent to credibly challenge the Lexus ES. Sure, the wood was still as fake as a bureaucrat’s smile, but the upholstered pillar trims blended well with the headliner, the sheen on the vinyl-wrapped dashboard was just right, and many black plastic parts had a pleasant satin finish. Hop in a well-kept Lucerne and you’ll find the point where GM really started to care again.
Oh, and did I mention the toys on tap? Customers could spec a 280-watt Harman/Kardon branded audio system, heated and cooled front seats, a heater for the windscreen washer fluid, four-way power lumbar, DVD navigation, and everything you’d reasonably expect from a premium sedan for 2006. You could even get an auto-dimming driver’s exterior mirror, a life-saver in nighttime driving.
Standard on most trims was a 3.8-liter V6, a 90-degree engine offering 197 eternal horsepower. Hitched to a four-speed automatic, the V6 Lucerne wouldn’t get you anywhere quickly, but it would always get you where you wanted to go. Should you have wished for a peppier Buick, you could’ve specced a 275-horsepower 4.6-liter quad-cam Northstar V8. Ticking the V8 box brought the number of fake portholes on each front fender up to four, dropped acceleration times considerably, and still came attached to a four-speed automatic. Look, this isn’t a front-wheel-drive muscle car, but instead a perfectly sensible cruiser. Slot the lever in drive, head out to the highway, set the cruise control, and enjoy the ride.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve driven a Buick Lucerne and can report that it’s quietly excellent. It goes down the road with comfort and ease, cossetting drivers over the worst frost heaves and potholes. It’s sprung and damped fairly softly, yet still features vastly better body control than any large front-wheel-drive Buick that came before it. I wouldn’t even call it nautical. Indeed, Car And Driver wrote in a road test of a V8 model:
The fact that a V-8 Lucerne is 26 percent cheaper than a Cadillac DTS abolishes any compelling reason — save image — to buy that strange-looking half-old/half-new, identically powered and similarly sized cousin. The Lucerne rides well, is comfortable, and has plenty of space and a dignified exhaust note. It’s perfectly acceptable as long as the commute doesn’t include attempts at re-creating Gran Turismo antics.
I mean come on, it’s a cut-price full-sized Cadillac that doesn’t force you into the Northstar V8 of ill repute. For the typical North American commute, that sounds absolutely divine. That being said, it’s not as if full-size shenanigans aren’t possible. As per Motor Trend, “Driving the Lucerne in an un-Buick-esque manner, we managed to slide it around our autocross course like a cop-show stunt driver, trail-braking to induce mild oversteer.” Cowabunga it is! Oh, and that magazine also called the interior “built for a librarian” thanks to extensive quieting measures, an excellent attribute for pockmarked highways and byways.
Arguably the best year of the Lucerne came in 2008, when the old 3.8-liter V6 came paired with a whole host of upgrades. We’re talking about mod-cons like an available heated steering wheel, optional lane departure warning, and an available blind spot alert system. Throw a CarPlay deck in one of these, and you basically have a modern car. Oh, and for those craving more power, a high-output Super model came available with a 292-horsepower version of the Northstar V8. For 2009, the venerable 3.8-liter V6 was swapped out for a 3.9-liter V6 making more power but occasionally developing the odd head gasket failure. A little facelift downloading the top-trim Super’s revised styling onto regular Lucernes came in 2010, and then that’s all she wrote.
For 2010, the little LaCrosse moved up into the Lucerne’s size class, eventually ending the Lucerne’s run in 2011. However, the LaCrosse was based on the more mainstream Epsilon II platform that also underpinned the Chevrolet Malibu, received GM’s failure-prone 3.6-liter V6 as an up-level engine, and you couldn’t get the LaCrosse with a bench front seat.
I’d unquestionably call the Buick Lucerne a hit. It marked a turnaround point for the Buick brand, and, to an extent, GM as a whole. With a fantastic feature mix, fair value, and at least one proven powertrain under the hood, it blended old guard comfort with new GM finesse in a comforting way. These days, the Buick Lucerne makes for an awesome dirt-cheap daily driver. It’s not fast or exciting, but it’s comfortable, costs virtually nothing to keep on the road, simply works, and feels like a proper step up from an Impala or LeSabre. Plus, where else are you getting this mix of features and reliability for this little money? If you’re shopping for a winter beater, keep this Buick on your radar. You’ll love it.
(Photo credits: Buick)
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I’ve never owned a car remotely like this Thomas, but I always find your articles fascinating, and this one was no exception. I remember when the Lucerne came out, and though I was generally obsessed with VWs at the time, I recall thinking it didn’t look half bad at all for what it was.
BTW, I watched Doug DeMuro’s new Youtube video reviewing the original gen Oldsmobile Aurora earlier today, and can recommend it to anyone interested in that car, which is roughly contemporary to the Lucerne, and another case of GM taking some risks (with mixed results in the Aurora’s case). I remember all the hype and reviews about how modern the Aurora was at the time, and even went and sat in one at a dealership despite being 20 years too young for its target demo. Overall, I was a bit underwhelmed with the Aurora (though the exterior was clean and semi-pretty, and has aged fairly well IMO) and was put off by especially by some significant distortion in the windshield. I don’t think I test drove it (though I DID test drive a BMW 540i around the same time and was even more impressed with it than I expected to be).
Anyway, sorry to digress. I’ve added the Lucerne to my keep-an-eye-out-for list per your suggestion, though I expect the odds of finding a nice one left in LA to be somewhere between slim and none. Thanks again! 🙂
Buicks are retiree cars, so look where they live. There are five listed on Phoenix Craigslist ranging from $3000 to $11,500. PHX to LA isn’t that bad a drive, especially in a big comfy Buick.
https://phoenix.craigslist.org/search/cta?query=buick%20lucerne#search=1~gallery~0~0
Id argue when they shoved the northstar in the Pontiac Bonneville GXP is when they started to care again. That or GM was being desperate.
My mother-in-law has owned two of these – a 2006 with the 3.8L that died an ignominious death via semi truck, and a 2010 that was traded in when that 3.9L started becoming a reliability nightmare. They were comfy cars, but boy was that 3.9L a turd.
Now here’s an article that REALLY hits close to home for me; because my daily is a 2006 CXL in Platinum Metallic with a little bit over 66,000 miles! A few of things that weren’t mentioned in the “toys” section is that the Lucerne had RainSense Automatic wipers, ultrasonic parking sensors
, 2 person memory front seats, and SiriusXM satellite radio as a part of a few different options packages as well as factory installed remote start. The unfortunate reality is that a lot of parts are starting to get hard to find new (as I found out the hard way when an 18 year old kid rear ended me in April; a lot of the collision parts I needed were discontinued by GM with the biggest part being the trunk lid!) but for a well equipped comfortable (and reliable if you were blessed with the 3800 V6!) highway cruiser, the Lucerne can’t be beat!
My grandparents had the exact same Lucerne in the photos in that Maroon-y red color. It was the last car they bought and it was a huge step up from the ‘94 LeSabre and 2000 Park Avenue they had previously. I drove them around in it a lot when they couldn’t anymore, and it was surprisingly pleasant and powerful with the 3800. It did seem very well put together and they had very few issues with it. I still kick myself 10 years later for not taking it after they passed.
Only odd thing about it, it was a big car on the outside, but I felt it was somewhat cramped on the inside. Like a reverse TARDIS. I remember commenting at the time that the ‘08 Charger I had was way more roomy on the inside, even with similar outside dimensions.
I miss that Maroon Buick. Great article
Buick called that color Crimson Pearl Tintcoat according to the brochure I bought off of eBay just a little bit after I bought my Lucerne.
This article is a great example of what I love about Autopian and the type of stories you write. Really interesting
I had many of these as rental cars in my business travel road warrior days. I recall National Rental car would pitch these as a premium car from about 2007-2011. Occasionally a loaded one would show up in the luxury category (usually Northstar model). Since I had my National Executive Elite status I’d reserve a premium but pay for a full size – which travel policy allowed for most trips.
Anyhow, I used to do Chicago to St. Louis trips in these and they were great, comfortable seats, quiet, I’d rather sit in this when in traffic or looking at the flat and monotonous landscape of I-55 while I was in en route. The V6 version wasn’t terrible on fuel on the highway, stereo had an aux jack or USB, Bluetooth for phone – good for the time. Handling while certainly not sporty, good enough to not put you to sleep and make any curves not sketchy. Less float than it’s DTS cousin (had those are rentals on occasion as well). The Magnetic Ride options Lucernes had a decent mix of handling / ride. That Harmon Kardon unit I preferred over the Bose stereos gm had in the DTS and others.
Torch would be happy also – standard cornering lights! If you got a loaded one they had HID headlights, cornering lights and fog lights – pretty decent for night driving. They also had heated seats that allowed just the back to heat, which I like because too much butt heat and I feel like Taco Tuesday went wrong :-\
They had some cheap GM parts bin stuff, but they really weren’t a bad place to be overall. I never had issues with stuff not working or warning lights, etc. and these were rentals so who knows what they went thru.
Not sure how they age, but I still see a decent amount of these running around, albeit usually pretty abused or run down. It’s too bad no one really makes a large luxury ish sedan anymore that isn’t $$$, but I guess no one wants those, or not enough for car companies to care…
I must be the only person alive that reads a car story about the poor quality of American cars back in the days hears a loud voice in my head screaming yes poor due to UAW self protecting cant build a decent car union. The unions were building crap always build crap want a raise to continue to build crap. I say give the union what they ask for but with full authority to fire eternally for low quality work. The union would be gone in one production cycle.
Why Grandpa Simpson, I never expected to meet you here!
As yes, it was entirely due to the assembly line that GM cars were bad. Not due to excessively cheapening out on interior materials, not due to baked-in design flaws such as those in the Northstar or original X-body, not due to many of the blandest visual design of any car on the road, not due to a historical dealer model of putting so much cash on the hood that the average consumer would never pay full price for their cars, not due to having so many brands fighting for the same sales space and cutting into one another, not due to lazy badge engineering between these many brands, not due to certain unrelated models being almost indistinguishable from one another (see the 1980s FWD A-body for the prime example, but there were plenty of others such as the 1998 Malibu and Cadillac Catera), not due to having large chunks of their market being fleets, not due to exceedingly long model cycles that enforced a lack of competitiveness outside of price in the consumer space (such as the Cavalier), not due to dumping excessive amounts of money into products that took decades to be profitable if they ever were (the original W-body, the Saturn brand), not due to a generally poor public image of the company as a whole leading consumers to stay away… Nope, GM’s history of cars being terrible was entirely the union’s fault, with no blame attributable to the parent company whatsoever.
I’m going to respectfully disagree with the comment about the union. Working with them for over 20 years, I found out that most of the problems came from above. From engineers who thought that “good enough” would make the product great to the bean counters that Lutz lamented ran the vehicle launches. I worked as a manufacturing engineer from headquarters and saw firsthand the garbage we gave them to build with. The union would put up with it because they’ll be out of a job if we didn’t give them a product to build. They’ll build what we gave them to build with. A good number of the problems came from “over the wall” attitude (that was Lutz’s observation) from the engineers. Once they thought they were done or out of budget dollars, it was the next group of engineers problem. I worked a lot on the plant installation side where there was little budget and time to fix the problems the preceding engineers created.
Trying to shoehorn a lame political point in here (because I’m sure that’s the impetus more so than a valid critique of union overprotection of incompetent workers) only serves to illustrate how little you know about manufacturing in general or the history of GM in particular.
Interior gaps of less than 1 millimeter? Pfft. It should be less then 10 microns.
Ha. It really says something when current Tesla can’t meet mid-aughts GM build quality though.
I don’t know, did mid-aughts GM products have their roof fly off in the first few hundred miles of ownership?
> coffin dodgers
Excellent
“Welcome back to GM Hit, or Miss where we”
[ picture]
Im sure that’s unintentional, but I find it quite amusing as it underscores GM’s ethos of the time
I don’t think there’s any correlation to the Lucerne and Rendezvous sales. Rendezvous was several years old, about to be replaced itself and had other crossovers showing up in B-P-G showrooms.
If you wanted a cheap GM crossover with an OHV V6 the Pontiac Torrent showed up in 2005 for MY06, for a few grand less. And had standard ABS (which was cost-cut to optional on the MY03 Rendezvous) and available curtain airbags vs. Rendezvous front side only.
The Acadia followed in ’06 as a MY07 for the same coin as the Rendezvous was – was, because the 2007 Rendezvous lineup scaled back so it was just the base High Feature 3500 and FWD. And had more airbags plus stability control.
The near-production Enclave was shown as a concept in January 2006, production version shown by year’s end, and went on sale in ’07 as a MY08, and Buick heavily pushed that in their marketing – so if you were loyal to the tri-shield only, there’s no way you didn’t know that was coming either. And even though the Enclave was more expensive, it was equipped more like mid-spec Rendezvous.
These were very good at doing what they were supposed to do – be a big, comfy highway cruiser. I remember when the Lucerne came out – park one next to a same year Toyota Avalon and the distance between the two was thinner than you might think, in materials, fit and finish, paint, etc, GM actually built a car right for the first time in ages, and with the base 3800, it was durable, reliable, and pretty fuel efficient for its size.
I think the failing was in the generic, safe styling – if this was supposed to be a statement of intent, to get people who hadn’t taken Buick seriously before to give the brand a second look, it wasn’t interesting enough to do that. Bland and safe is fine if you’re the incumbent with an entrenched market position, it doesn’t work if you need conquest sales.
Exactly — when GM engineers finally learned how to build a quality car again, GM stylists were AWOL.
Can you still get cars in the US with a bench seat? It’s not been a thing for 50 years in Europe that I can think of.
And at 37, I’m on the ‘am I old enough for an automatic yet?’…. I Currently have a 6spd manual Vauxhall Mokka which is a diesel Buick Encore..
No, the last car with a bench seat option was the 2013 Chevy Impala. Which is weird, what with 98+% of cars sold here being automatics, there’s really no practical need for a center console at all.
I’m sorry, but that first gen Lucerne is so unapologetically generic that it seems like a joke/parody car.
The second gen 2010-16 LaCrosse, however, was a bit of a tastefully sculpted looker; that dipping body crease would make Kojak and his bown ’73 Century police special proud:
https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/amv-prod-cad-assets/images/media/51/2015-buick-lacrosse-inline1-photo-660536-s-original.jpg?resize=980:*
LaCrosse He he, French Canadian chuckle.
That’s why GM named it “Allure” for Canada. They found about late in the rollout.
I remember someone asking Lutz about this during the launch for the Lacrosse, and he cracked that having spent some of his formative years in Canada, he thought he’d heard every euphemism for “self-abuse.”
It was more like “self gratification.”
Around this time my dad was getting close to aging out of driving. He was shopping for his ‘last car’. I don’t recall what models he cross shopped, but Buick, Lincoln and Lexus were on his list. After some test drives I asked him what he was going to go with. His answer was that he was just going to give up driving. He didn’t really need to and there was no fun left in it anyway.
I’m not sure which brand brought him to this conclusion, but despite this article, I still taint them with it. Oh, and he had briefly owned an Oldsmopeople that he depised, so maybe that was a factor too.
I call that time the Beige Era. Gosh, I hated the Beige Era. Everything just became bland as hell for a while. I don’t blame your dad at all if midsizers were what he was looking at. Just a horrible era for midsize cars in particular.
My favorite quote from the referenced C&D article is: “To shift manually you have to pull the lever through what feels like a box of rocks.”
Great imagery.
It also had a service interval and you had to top up the rocks.
But you had to use the right rocks or you had problems – none of them dex-cooled rocks…
My mom had a Northstar Lucerne for a few years, and it was probably the most fun car anyone in my family has ever owned.
Definitely had some get-up that I didn’t expect.
Those with the heated windshield wiper fluid reservoirs tended to catch on fire, also the reason why the ride was supple yet composed was because of MagneRide.
Yeah, heated reservoirs are great when they work but terrible when they don’t. The GM recall was particularly amusing, and even the heat-exchange systems don’t always last. In a past life, I had a W204 C-Class come in with a hole in its coolant-to-washer fluid heat exchanger that contaminated both systems. That was a big bill.
The MagneRide was awesome, but even models without magnetorheological dampers were pretty good. The last one I drove was just a CXL and it just glided over frost heaves.
I wonder if one could heat the reservoir enough to deter rats from chewing through it to get to the liquid, but not enough to burn down the car…
Actually, the reservoir itself wasn’t heated; it was a standalone heater unit that was mounted to the firewall.
I spent some time in one back around 2010 or so. Honestly, it was one of GMs best efforts. It was super dull, but seemed genuinely well put together. It was a nice place to be, which you couldn’t say for practically any other GM product around that time.
In a strange twist, the Series III 3800 actually isn’t as good as the Series II. In an effort to squeeze just a little more life out of it, GM detuned it considerably, leading to a loss of both horsepower and torque. They replaced the Series II’s old-fashioned throttle cable with a glitchy electronic throttle. It also got some structure upgrades, but the things they did to make it cleaner resulted in a less-drivable engine.
Counterpoint – the return to a metal intake manifold removed the biggest problem with the Series II NA, which was suddenly hydrolocking the engine when the plastic gave up and started spewing coolant into the intake.
How do you figure they detuned it?
Down on power is a dead giveaway- how many engines go down with a new generation? I know it was emissions that killed the 3800, and Series III was a last-ditch effort to save it. But you just can’t meet modern standards without 4-valve heads and (ugh) interference design.
You pulled the ’06+ HP figure of 197HP which if you recall is the year that SAE J1349 went into affect so not full apples v. apples comparison. Series 3 was rated at 200HP prior to ’06 and I’d say re-tuned not de-tuned given it’s torque stayed the same with at most a 5HP drop for…reasons. You can’t tell me you notice this difference in 5HP at this power level…
Achilles heel is that intake manifold in the S2 equipped models, but they are otherwise bulletproof. Late S3 3800s also had forged con rods which is an interesting upgrade on the NA models (helped increase power in the S/C ones). Interestingly that 2V OHV engine was the first to be rated as SULEV.
Regarding interference engines, I’ve never understood the hatred for timing belts, particularly now given intervals are typically 100k miles. Even timing chains are designed well in the designed well vehicles. Scheduled maintenance is a thing I’ve known for my 26 years of car ownership and even I was shocked my Honda Fit had a chain not belt (200k+ miles now).
Yeah chains are better. But most timing chain failures are the result of timing chain GUIDE failure, ‘cuz those are made out of plastic.
“But you just can’t meet modern standards without 4-valve heads and (ugh) interference design.”
The Corvette proves otherwise.
Ah, but that’s a niche product that doesn’t meaningfully impact GM’s corporate numbers. Especially when they can buy “credits” from Hank Scorpio.
The Camaro offers the same engine with the same MPG and emissions ratings as does various 5.7 pushrod hemi car offerings from Chrysler and Dodge all the same or better as a V8 Mustang, Lexus RC-F and other DOHC peers.
I’ve had 3800s in both 2 and 3 flavor, never could tell the difference other than the elimination of the problematic plastic intake.
True, but it’s the gasket, not the intake itself. Mine has 270k, but the gasket was replaced during the Dubya administration.
You are thinking of the 3.1, 60 degree engine family. Dexcool destroyed the plastic intake gaskets on those. The series 2, 3.8 had a metal egr tube that would literally melt the coolant tube that wrapped around it. Only repair was to replace the entire plastic upper plenum and fit a smaller diameter egr. Last forever after that.
Honestly 197hp is just fine for a daily driver. My van has the same amount of horsepower and it gets around just fine, even with 600 extra pounds.
The restyled version makes the headlights look less massive. And I concur, that interior is clean and tight.
Im confused by your premise…GM cares?
Had a 2008 some years back that was a fantastic commuter car.
Bench seat, column shifter and 3800 paired with blind spot monitoring and dual zone climate control was quite the old/new school contrast.