Crossovers may be playing a bigger role these days, and Buick has been playing that game with the Encore and the Enclave, as well as the arrival of the new Envision from China, yet it is a brand that has built its names on family saloons.
The importance of sedans to the brand’s image is not about to change any time soon, so that makes the new LaCrosse a vital product for GM’s line of laid-back highway cruisers, and here we have it.
Now you may be thinking that we’ve already seen the new Buick LaCrosse, and you would be right. Buick took the wraps off the big sedan at the LA Auto Show almost a year ago, deliveries in the US began a few months ago and are just getting started in Canada.
That makes seeing one out in the open still wearing such extensive camouflage wonder what they’re up to. A sportier version, perhaps? The hybrid version that GM is launching in China, which is the only market as critical to the brand as the United States? An export to Australia to replace the Holden Commodore. Or maybe the engineers just didn’t get around to (literally) taking the wraps off this particular example?
Whatever it might be, the current generation is slated to be the one that takes LaCrosse sales up past the million-sold mark, having already passed 900,000 in its previous iteration. That may not be enough to eclipse the LeSabre, which remains Buick’s most successful nameplate, with over 6 million between 1959 and 2005. But the LaCrosse was only introduced in 2004, so we’ll give it some time to catch up.
Thanks for sharing the photos, Brett!
Photo Gallery
