2016 BUICK Verano

Great Car to Own

Performance: 0 Comfort: 0 Fuel Economy: 0 Fun To Drive: 0 Interior Design: 0 Exterior Design: 0 Build Quality: 0 Reliability: 0 Comfort Rating: 5 Performance Rating: 5 Interior Rating: 5 Reliability Rating: 5 Safety Rating: 5 Technology Rating: 5 Value Rating: 5

Love the power of the turbo engine. Fuel economy if fair but a great tradeoff due to the tractability of the engine. No turbo lag. I'm okay with the quality of the trim, actually it's better than I thought it would be. Nice feature is the backup camera. The yellow lines follow the arc of the car as it travels in reverse. Have all of the driving aids and they work real well, easy to use. The navigation and touch screen work quite well. Like the use of the voice commands. Have the Onstar security package. Car looks like its carved out of a single piece. Great quality. Steering is communicative, brakes feel soft at first but have no problem with them. Rear seat leg room is tight if the front seats are all of the way back. Under normal conditions, they're okay for us. Again, nice car. Would highly recommend to others. Was looking at the Buick Encore, but would have to order it to get exactly what I wanted (I did this for the Verano), but it would take 5 to 6 months to get. It's made in S. Korea and after looking at the Verano, it was actually a better choice for us. And the Verano 2016 is made in Michigan and the engine in Tenn. That was a consideration for us as well.

Among The Best In It's Class

Performance: 0 Comfort: 0 Fuel Economy: 0 Fun To Drive: 0 Interior Design: 0 Exterior Design: 0 Build Quality: 0 Reliability: 0 Comfort Rating: 4 Performance Rating: 4 Interior Rating: 3 Reliability Rating: Safety Rating: Technology Rating: Value Rating:

The Verano is based off the same GM platform as the Chevy Cruze Limited, yet it feels like a completely different car. Driving it you feel greater power right off the bat. No, it's not sports-car-Camaro power, but I disagree with the Edmunds review that acceleration's merely adequate. The Verano feels more powerful than either the Cruze Limited or the new Cruze for 2016, possibly because the entire car feel much more solid, thus dissipating less energy in parasitic vibrations. The Verano gives you a sure, solid feeling on the road. An important contributor toward that end is the stark difference in streering and handling between any of the Cruze models and the Verano. The short of it is that the Cruze - particularly the newly redesigned 2016 Cruze - feels incredibly insecure and unstable during fast accelaration or highway speeds, while the Verano is almost the opposite of that. It's steering and handling feel stable and secure, with only a mere trace of lost of control to clue you into the fact that it's built with electronic - rather than traditional mechanical - steering. To take the point further, compared to any of the [now many] Cruzes, the Verano is rock solid. With the handling nicely under control, the suspension provides and excellent combination of road feel balanced against absorbtive comformt. In other words, it handles beautifully, without turning you into scrambled eggs while doing so. The interior is, as you'd expect, at or near luxury car levels. It's quiet and plush. Some might object to the two-tone white-on-black color scheme [Buick calls the interior grey - but it's pretty much white], but that seems to be the thing with luxury cars. The designers of the Verano did, however, make one major mistake. The steering wheel blocks your view of the instrument gauge cluster. No matter how far you tilt it up or down, you're just not going to see the speedometer, nor much else of your guages. Having taken such apparent care with the design of the car, how'd they screw that up? Good luck with speed cops on the road. A more minor issue's one of personal taste. I found the front grill to be almost aggresively tasteless, with Buick taking its vertical design a bit too far. The grill extends upwards and folds into the hood, and it's made of plastic. So, you get a lot of plastic grill in your face everytime you approach your car. Overall, I thought the Verano was very nice small vehicle, that - at least as far as driving impressions go - leaves it's stablemate Cruze well behind and makes the Corolla and the 2016 Civic almost non-competative [especially the almost shockingly crude, cheap-feeling, and sounding Corolla]. The other question is, of course, reliability, and it's only on that measure that the latter two may [or may not - who knows?] have an edge.