Overview & Reviews

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  Among The Best In Its Class - 2016 Buick Verano
  By Neward Thelman - September 18 - 11:08 am

  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, its not sports-car-Camaro power, but I disagree with the Edmunds review that accelerations 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. Its steering and handling feel stable and secure, with only a mere trace of lost of control to clue you into the fact that its 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 youd expect, at or near luxury car levels. Its quiet and plush. Some might object to the two-tone white-on-black color scheme [Buick calls the interior grey - but its 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, youre just not going to see the speedometer, nor much else of your guages. Having taken such apparent care with the design of the car, howd they screw that up? Good luck with speed cops on the road. A more minor issues 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 its 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 its 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 its only on that measure that the latter two may [or may not - who knows?] have an edge.