Gadgetory

buick has a brand is something that you probably associate with a car that your grandmother drive they make old people cars but recently they've been making strides with vehicles like the Regal to be more youthful this 2014 Buick Enclave on the other hand isn't one of those it's still kind of a grainy wagon let's take a look at it and check the tech now it's gonna separate this Buick from something that's wearing say a Chevrolet or GMC badge it's gonna be chrome lots and lots of chrome we've got this big ol grill up here we've got optional 19 inch chrome wheels and like every other Buick model in the lineup we've got this sort of chrome porthole thing happening on the hood sort of indicating power but I mean this isn't a particularly powerful vehicle it's a big doughy 7 passenger SUV but if you want to fit people in there with plenty of space this is kind of the body style that you're stuck with now one of the nicer features of this top-tier premium model are gonna be these HID headlamps now they're gonna be underneath an LED strip that's gonna be your daytime running lamps but when you turn the steering wheel you'll see that the projectors do steer a little bit with the front wheels to help you see around corners better now the Buicks cabin has a lot of neat technology but I can't shake the feeling that it feels kind of like a 5 or 7 year old car that's got new tech tacked on to it first of all you look at the dashboard particularly at night you've still got that sort of sickly green glow to the instrument cluster in all the dashboard illumination you've also got a couple of interesting things happening here for example you've got a small LCD in the instrument cluster where you'll control a couple of vehicle settings you'll also see your trip computer information but rather than putting the controls for interacting with that up here on the steering wheel they're actually down here at the bottom of the dashboard a couple of buttons here which means that if you want to switch from your current fuel economy to your range to empty you've got to look down at the dashboard and then back up and down the dashboard and back up it's terribly distracting that's a six point five inch color touch screen which is decent size but we're living in the time we're seeing eight inch or larger screen than the dashboard and what that means is with this smaller screen you get tinier buttons the text is a little bit more difficult to read and that means that you spend more time looking at the screen and hunting for your touch points than you would with a bigger screen where you can kind of more casually point and shoot the interesting thing about this touchscreen also is this not as responsive as I'd like it to be if you're used to using a touchscreen tablet or a smartphone where you just kind of casually touch your buttons you're gonna be disappointed to find that you're gonna have to really get into it with this thing in order to get it to respond to your touches now what you're gonna get for your trouble with the IntelliLink system is hard drive based navigation system that's pretty good it's got traffic that comes down from Sirius XM divided our nav traffic system and hurlimann give you updates on upcoming traffic jams as you drive down the highway the problem with that is that it pops up every five minutes even once you've confirmed that you know the traffic is there and this is the route that you want to go down so if you get tired of a thing traffic in 30 miles traffic in 25 miles you're just gonna end up turning the system off and then you don't get any benefit at all you've also got a pretty decent suite of audio option that's gonna include a DVD player in the dashboard for this that also accepts CDs you've got mp3 playback via an iPod or a USB storage device from a USB port which is weirdly located up here at the top of the dashboard in a cubby hole instead of down here or in the center console where you can reach it easily you've also got bluetooth for hands-free calling and audio streaming and if you've got a compatible Bluetooth phone sync to it when you get a text message it will pop up on the screen and give you the option to tap one button and have that message read aloud to you and then you can fire back a canned response and if you've got a compatible smartphone paired with a Pandora app on you've also got Pandora control over the dashboard so you can access those custom stations with thumbs-up and thumbs-down controls now at our premium trim level a lot if not all of the safety checks is just gonna be rolled in so we're gonna have a Ford collision warning which is going to let you know if you're approaching a vehicle ahead too quickly and a collision imminent it will flash the little red light on the dashboard at you and let you know to get on those brakes before you run into somebody you've also got blind spot monitoring with rear cross traffic alert so if there's a car and your blind spot at highway speeds you get a little red light and if you put your turn signal on and will beep to let you know someone's there and if you're backing out of a parking spot and the cars coming across traffic it'll sound a little alert to let you know to keep your eyes up and watch for those vehicles coming it also got a standard rear view camera at this trim level that does have the trajectory lines that move with the steering wheel when you're reversing and there's a rear proximity sensor to let you know as you're approaching a vehicle or a person or pet with an audible alert now underneath the enclaves a really short hood there's not a lot to see because there's a lot of plastic cladding here and that's gonna be part of this automaker sound deadening technology which we're going to talk about in a little bit but if you just pick that off you'll find somewhere underneath all of this hosing and tubing there 3.6 liter v6 engine now this direct-injected engine is gonna get you 200 new t8 horsepower and 270 pound feet of torque it's also the only engine option available for this vehicle now 288 horsepower sounds like a lot but not for a vehicle of this size a big seven passenger vehicle this is gonna give you decent acceleration and pretty good fuel economy that power is gonna exit the engine via a single option automatic transmission with seven speeds but you do get a choice between drivetrains you can either get the enclave of a front-wheel drive vehicle or for 2,000 extra bucks you can get it at an all-wheel drive like this example with their Stabilitrak technology fuel economy is gonna be decent at about 16 miles per gallon city 22 highway I'm averaging about 20 but I'm doing a lot of highway driving during my testing now when you settle in behind the wheel of the Buick Enclave and take it for a spin you immediately realize that maybe technology and gee whiz gadget Reed isn't exactly the object of the game here what Buick is trying to do is give you a car that it's very comfortable that'll get people where they're going with minimum fuss and this car does a pretty good job of that they put a lot of technology into the suspension tuned into the wheel and tire package into the deadening in the body of the vehicle and the engine bay they've even like trip eliminated the windscreen and glass all these things kind of come together to give you a very quiet ride but then it doesn't really feel inspiring the 7-speed automatic transmission doesn't really want to give you access to all the power that it has and even if it did I'm not really sure that it would really make this vehicle feel sprightly but the engine is really smooth and the transmission is also smooth you can barely tell that the shifts are happening there is a little bit of oddness to do with the 7-speed automatic transmission and that is that it has a sort of secret kind of hidden manual shift mode in order to get into it you'll pull your shifter down into the L selection and that's normally on most cars where you'll find your low gear ratio but in this case it's your manual mode once you're there you'll use this little rocker switch a little bit you'll activate with your thumb that's on the side of the shifter to shift up and the shift down it's not really the most efficient way to do it but if you ever find yourself a net maybe once in a lifetime situation where you need to manually shift this vehicle that's where you'll find it now comes the time we figure out how much is this gonna cost you the 2014 Buick Enclave is gonna start at thirty nine thousand six hundred sixty-five dollars but that's the entry point if you want the safety check that we've talked about you're gonna want to go at the premium group with all-wheel drive and that's going to bring you to a starting point of fifty one thousand nine hundred and ninety five dollars plus about nine hundred twenty five bucks to get it to the dealership now our model has three thousand six hundred and forty bucks and text that's gonna include the IntelliLink dashboard check the rear seat entertainment sunroof and that's gonna bring us to our as tested price of fifty two thousand eight hundred eighty bucks but if you want to do it seen that style skip that rear seat entertainment that's gonna bring you down to about fifty grand even fully loaded up like this the 2014 Buick Enclave isn't a tech powerhouse but it's got pretty good safety tech and a decent amount of dashboard technology it's kind of a vehicle for people who want to get from point A to point B but aren't necessarily in a rush to get there they want to get there five to seven passengers there's comfortably and quietly as possible you