Buick: The Good and Bad

Buick Today: Affordable Luxury SUVs and What to Watch For

The episode explores how Buick has changed from its “grandpa car” image and why it can be a strong value in the used market, focusing mainly on the three-row Buick Enclave and how it stacks up against the Toyota Highlander and Honda Pilot. It highlights Buick’s “affordable luxury” positioning within GM, emphasizing attractive interiors, cushy seats, a quiet and smooth ride, and slower-to-adopt but familiar tech. Price comparisons in the Kansas City area show 8–10-year-old Enclaves with ~100,000 miles around $13,000–$18,000 versus notably higher prices for comparable Highlanders and Pilots. Reliability is discussed as above average (Consumer Reports ranks Buick #7 for 5–10-year-old vehicles), along with potential downsides like electrical quirks, alternator issues, sensor replacements, and turbo-related concerns on smaller models, plus the lack of a U.S.-sold EV.

00:00 Grandpa Car Stereotype
01:08 Meet Meredith Reynolds
01:21 Why Buick Enclave Now
02:10 Buick Brand Positioning
03:07 Interior Comfort Highlights
04:16 Quiet Ride and Value
05:04 Used Price Comparison
07:02 Reliability and Longevity
09:11 Why Buick Gets Overlooked
09:39 Modern Buick SUV Lineup
11:18 No EV and China Market
11:49 Common Buick Downsides
13:37 Final Takeaways and Outro

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Transcript

0:02

If I tell you to picture an 80-year-old man driving a car, what are you envisioning? Now, my father is a little over a year away from being 80, and he drives an all-electric Ford Mustang. But I don't know that that's really the norm. Side note, his name is Norm, but that's beside the point. Are you envisioning that 80-year-old man in a big boat of a car? Maybe a Lincoln or a big Cadillac or maybe a Buick? If so, I'm here to tell you Buick is not what it used to be. I'm gonna talk all about the good and bad today on women buying cars. Welcome back to Women Buying Cars. I'm Meredith Reynolds. My husband and I run and own Reynolds Automotive in the Kansas City suburb of Merriam. So come see us if you're able to. We'd love to help you. As a used car dealer, what we have on our lot depends on what we're able to find at that particular moment in time. So for whatever reason, right now, we have a few different Buick Enclaves on our lot. This is a three-row SUV. It is a competitor to something like the Toyota Highlander or the Honda Pilot or the Chevy Traverse. And we might go six months and not find another good Buick that we feel good about putting on our lot, but right now we have a few of them. So it's gotten me thinking a lot about Buicks because they are good-looking cars at a very affordable price. So they're what I like to call affordable luxury. So Buick is made by GM. GM makes Chevy, GMC, and Cadillac. And a Buick as far as luxury goes, it's between a Chevy and a Cadillac. Probably not quite as luxurious as a Cadillac, but also not as expensive. But it is an upgrade from a Chevy, This episode is all about Buicks. Uh, I'm gonna talk a lot about the Enclave because that's the models that I have right now, but it really pertains to all Buicks. Right now, Buick, as far as 2026 goes, they are only making SUVs or what you might consider to be a crossover. They are not making any of the large sedans that they are associated with. Now, obviously you can find those in the used market, but you will not find that in any of their newer vehicles So the thing that stands out to me is when I open the door of a Buick, the interior is really good looking. Okay? They use an upgraded leather Very cushy, big, nice seats, which that always gets my attention. Some of the ones we have have this really beautiful saddle brown leather. It's not a tan, it's like a deeper, um, saddle brown is what it's often called, and it's really beautiful. I think it just ups the luxury feeling of the interior of the Buicks. Buick does not jump on bandwagons, and so for some of us, that's a great thing, okay? Because we know what we're getting with a Buick. They don't keep up with the very top technology as far as they're a little later to get touchscreens and that type of thing. Some tech enthusiasts wouldn't like that, but for people who are not tech enthusiasts, who just wanna be able to drive a car that they're comfortable in, Buick is a great choice They're also known for having a nice quiet interior as you're driving Outside noise is really buffered. Okay? They've designed them so that road noise is very minimal. So again, it's a nice luxurious ride, very smooth. You're not gonna feel every single little bump And so you can see why in the past these have appealed to the older driver. They're comfy, they're quiet, they're smooth, and the great thing about a Buick is that they are affordable. I'm specifically talking about the used car market, but even if you look at brand-new ones, they are going to come in at a price point that's a lot more tolerable than their competition. So for example, I was looking at, some Buick Enclaves, which is the three-row SUV, in the Kansas City area, and I was searching for Enclaves that are eight to 10 years old between 90 and 110,000 miles, so that we're averaging at about 100,000 miles And a variety of trim levels. Okay, what I found was that the Enclaves available were in the thirteen to eighteen thousand dollar range, depending on a lot of things, trim level, vehicle history, whether it's been in a wreck or not, the condition of the car. Okay, so you're of course gonna get quite a bit of variance, but thirteen to eighteen thousand dollars. Now, the ones we have on our lot right now are closer to that thirteen thousand dollar mark. Thirteen thousand dollars for a ten-year-old three-row SUV in great shape is a steal today in twenty twenty-six. That is a great deal. I put in those same parameters for a Toyota Highlander, okay? Another three-row SUV, same years, eight to ten years old, same miles, ninety to a hundred and ten thousand, and the range, instead of thirteen to eighteen, was nineteen to twenty-four thousand dollars. Okay? That's a huge difference. The Honda Pilot, same thing, seventeen to twenty-two thousand dollars. So the cheaper Pilots and Highlanders are around the same price as the more high-end Buick according to this limited research that I did in Kansas City. But that very much tracks with what I see on our lot, now, you might be saying, "Well, sure, Toyotas and Hondas are quite a bit more expensive because they're much more reliable and have a much longer life." Well, they are. They do rank higher for reliability and lifespan, but not that much more, okay? You can expect a Buick, if it's taken care of, and that goes for everything. Cars have to be taken care of, they have to have regular maintenance, et cetera, but with that, you can expect a Buick to last to two hundred thousand miles. A friend of mine is actually buying one of the Buicks that we have, and she is getting out of her Buick Enclave. She's getting out of a Buick Enclave into a newer, lower miles Buick Enclave. That tells you something about how much she likes the car. The Buick Enclave she's getting out of has two hundred and seventy thousand miles. I'm not saying that's typical, but it does tell you that they're very capable of lasting as long as a Honda or a Toyota According to Consumer Reports, when looking at five to 10-year-old vehicles, brands, Buick ranks number seven in reliability. Okay? So it is behind Toyota and Lexus, they're at the top, Honda and Mazda, and a few others. But number seven is nothing to sneeze at when you think about how many different brands of cars there are on the road. Side note, Tesla was at the bottom So with a Buick, are you getting the most reliable car? No. Are you getting the car that's likeliest to make it to 300,000 miles? No. But you're also not paying for that, and you're getting a car that is still considered above average in reliability and lifespan at a significantly lower price point and A potentially more comfortable, luxurious vehicle. So as you can tell, I really like Buicks. I think people just don't think about Buicks. I think when people are dreaming about what car they want, for whatever reason, Buick is just not top of mind. I don't think a lot about Buicks. They don't cross my mind very much. And then we get one, and I think, "Wow, this is really good-looking and really affordable." Why is that? I'm, I'm not sure. Maybe not enough marketing or not ef- not as effective marketing on their part. I'm not sure. They are really trying to change that image, though, of the grandpa car, which is why they're not making any large sedans right now. Like I said, only SUVs or, like, a crossover SUV. We had a Buick Envista a few months ago. Now, Envista is considered subcompact. It's quite small, two rows. It has a really rounded top, like a coupe, which appeals to me, okay? If you've listened to my show, you know I like small cars. Smallish, not like a smart car, but cars on the smaller side because they are cute and usually sporty, and they get great gas mileage, and you can zip around in them, okay? But the Envista that we had was so adorable. I just absolutely loved it. And we had it a very short amount of time, and a, a young woman actually flew in from, I believe it was Louisiana, to buy our Envista and drive it home, because she had been looking for the exact thing that we had, and it was a great price, and she was willing to do that, so the Envista is a super cute car. A little larger, but still a two-row. It's a small crossover. That is the Encore. A even bigger two-row is the Envision, and then you have the three-row Enclave. That's what they're making today in twenty twenty-six. Of course, you can find their Le Sabre and some of their other vehicles in the used car market A complaint I have is they don't, they do not make an electric car as of right now. They make one that sells in China. But they're not selling it here. They may, may be selling it in more places than China, but they're not selling it, uh, in the United States. Side note, China has a huge Buick market. It is considered a top luxury vehicle there. It is aspirational, and so Buick sells a ton of cars in China. Now, what are the downfalls of Buick? I was trying to look for problems they're known for having, and the things that I found are not necessarily huge, major issues. One issue that came up a lot was electrical issues, so maybe issues with the radio, issues with the, power windows, things like that that can get wonky. Uh, alternator issues. The alternator charges your battery, so when the alternator goes out, you're going to get dead battery, charge it, next day it's dead again, that type of thing. So, uh, the alternator can have issues. Sensors, but honestly, that's true with all modern cars because there are so many sensors on our vehicles now. Sensors tell us, the blind spot monitor warning or the tire pressure warning or crash detection warning, okay? All these things that sense things before you know it and then tell you on the dashboard, those can need replacement, but that's true with every new car. Some of the smaller Buicks have a turbo because they have a very small engine, even just a three-cylinder, and so then they add a turbo to give it more power, and turbos have issues sometimes. My husband's not a big fan of buying vehicles with turbos because they go out and they're expensive to fix, and so that's true in this case on the Buick Other than that, I couldn't find any consistent problems they're known for. Of course, there are going to be some that have a transmission go out or need an engine replaced, but I wasn't finding that as an ongoing common problem So if you're like me and you like luxury, but you don't like to pay for luxury, you should consider a Buick. They're not just for your grandfather anymore, even though some of the grandfathers aren't even driving grandfather cars anymore, my father being the perfect example. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned something about Buicks today, and I hope you keep an open mind If my show is helpful to you, it would greatly help me if you would pass it on to someone else, if you would tell someone you know in Kansas City to look me up when they're ready to buy a car, and if you haven't, I would love a five-star review. Thanks so much for listening, and happy driving