Gadgetory

it's big and roomy drives easy and comes with a 4G data connection let's check the tech in the 2015 Buick LaCrosse if it weren't for China the Buick brand probably would not have survived GM's 2009 bankruptcy but last year GM sold 800,000 Buicks in China that compares to 200,000 in the United States so you wouldn't have the LaCrosse if it weren't for the Chinese market now the La Crosse is Buicks full-size sedan app it's got a very high roofline at a big cabin there's a lot of headroom and legroom inside it's a very comfortable car but it's not precisely a luxury car it's actually front-wheel drive which really isn't a luxury market thing so what they call it is premium or near luxury now for 2015 they've added a head-up display adaptive cruise control and they've added the active safety seat which buzzes your butt to warn you about things such as if there's traffic ahead that you're about to hit or cars in your blind spot to the center stack we have what they call Buick IntelliLink and we've got this home button here which brings up this is a basic homescreen with these icons we've got audio phone navigation a Settings icon Pandora icon whether a text messaging thing if your phone works with this system and an OnStar icon my usual audio sources here I'm actually on bluetooth streaming but I can also plug in my iPhone or a USB Drive to a USB port in the center console I can also switch to radio and that will get me FM AM and satellite radio navigation actually looks pretty good on this system in 3d perspective these these maps look really good there's a lot of nice detail and if you're in a downtown area like the middle of San Francisco you see all these buildings rendered too there's traffic for your major roads but there isn't a lot of traffic coverage this doesn't have as extensive traffic coverage as I've seen on other cars so that that's a little strike against this system I've also noticed that the system is a little bit sluggish when I push the various icons sometimes things don't happen right away and I have to push it a couple of times or it's just a little slow to work the Pandora function will work if I append all running on my phone and my phone is connected to the system for whether this actually comes through satellite radio and here it's showing me the local weather for San Francisco and hourly pattern I can also switch it to a 36-hour or a daily one which will give me a five-day forecast when I go to OnStar here actually this is the real party trick of this car this little cross is one of the first cars to come with a 4G data connection that's part of OnStar and they use that to enable a Wi-Fi hotspot so to test this Wi-Fi hotspot I've got a nexus 7 tablet here and I've got a band with the app here to tell me how fast this connection runs looks like it's actually an average speed of 12 megabits per second so that's really fast you might wonder why you'd want a Wi-Fi hotspot in your car if most of your devices are connected out of LTE anyway well it's good for tablets if you have wireless only tablets and actually the Wi-Fi connection in this car is going to be have a little stronger signal than the one on your phone because this car has a more robust antenna so you might get a connection further out then when your phone might might drop at this car watch they have a connection for a longer amount of time this IntelliLink system is pretty good a little sluggish on response and I would actually like to see more apps on here too and I would also like to see the 4G connection power more things in the system I'm pretty comfortable in the cabin of this Buick LaCrosse it's very roomy I've got a lot of elbow room and there was a passenger in the back they'd have a quite a bit of room too it's nice in here under the hood we're running a direct injection 3.6 liter v6 that does 304 horsepower 264 pound-feet of torque direct injection is a pretty efficient technology it means that it's mixing the fuel and air in the cylinder instead of in an intake manifold that leads to fuel economy of 18 miles per gallon city 28 miles per gallon highway highway number is pretty good but the city number kind of kills you my total average has been about 20 six-speed automatic transmission that's the only transmission you get with this car it's not really a driver's car it's just very comfortable this doesn't have an air suspension or anything like that like a real luxury car would have but you did a really good job of tuning the suspension for comfort now there is another engine available with this car a Buick does a 2.4 liter direct injection four-cylinder have driven that one before I like it actually and that will raise your fuel economy quite a bit fuel economy on that model is 25 City 36 highway so you'll probably average about 30 with that that's a pretty big advantage over this so we have adaptive cruise control I can set that with the buttons on the steering wheel here and a radar looking forward will slow this car down to the speed of slower traffic ahead I've got blind spot monitors too so that will flash an icon in the side mirrors that there's a car in my blind spot if I were to turn the signal on while a car was over there to give me a little warning about it the active safety seat that this car has will actually buzz my but it also uses that for the forward collision alert if I'm approaching stop traffic or slow traffic too quickly and the car thinks you know this could be a potential closing situation it'll also buzz me like that give me a warning that's price out our 2015 Buick LaCrosse the example we have here has the premium two trim level so that puts the base price at forty thousand eight hundred ninety five dollars that also comes with the direct injection v6 engine we add the driver confidence one and two packages that gets us adaptive cruise control blind spot monitoring and that active safety seat that adds three thousand three hundred seventy dollars for a total of forty four thousand two hundred sixty-five dollars for this car now personally I would actually scale up back I would start with the mild hybrid version with that 2.4 liter four-cylinder engine up the fuel economy and also save about five thousand dollars on the total price