Northstar

Would you buy a Buick with said features but not the Cruze itself or NG Astra with said features?

Cadillac should have a V12 if it ever wants to build a vehicle to compete directly with the 7er and S-Class, but right now that vehicle is probably an afterthought.

I meant exterior, not engines. I agree it can share engines with the Cruze. The Cobalt badly needs replacement. It's well outclassed by now, with almost every competitor having a newer model out... a Buick Delta II should be the 3rd small or possibly 4th small car priority behind Chevy, Saturn, and maybe Pontiac.

If there is a Buick Delta II, it should not share anything with the Cruze if it wants to be considered "premium."

I got some of it off with a knife earlier today (not a sharp knife, more of a butter/dinner knife), but there's still a lot on there. It was stuck down in the tread of the tire, and it smells like crap with it comes off. I have some bug/tar removed and thought about using it, I'll have to get some WD-40 if that doesn't work. Thanks for the suggestions.

The exterior as a whole is pretty "meh" to me... I'll take a Cruze (which aside from the front end, isn't anything special).

I just noticed I have some tar/asphalt crap on my tire, it's probably about 4 inches long and 2 inches wide. We just had the parking lot refinished at work, and I'm pretty sure that's the culprit. Anyone have any experience getting this stuff off? I assume i can sort of scrap it off, but if there's an easier way, let me know!

HHR or Outlook/Lambda

I don't know... it is sort of hard to get an overall feel because there isn't one picture of the whole car (WTF?) and the interior is good, but not great, without NAV. It has that weird dip by the mirror like the G6, too. Overall, I'd take the Cruize... both seem pretty bland after the A-pillar, but the Cruze's front end is better, and the spy shots of the interior look awesome.

This is pretty stupid to release... two years early? It looks good nonetheless, and I guess we'd see it anyways sense it's going to be in Europe. Still, it is ridiculous that we have to wait for it, even if we get the 1.4L turbo from the start as a result. It will be a case of releasing it with all the engines for once from GM, but in this case, that is the wrong choice.

Wow, that was sweet. Time to find $700 for new tires.

Happy Birthday!

This is so dumb to have on the '09 models. Why would anyone buy an '08 CTS, G5, Cobalt, or HHR now, if the '09 is going to have more or less the same deal? I wish they would put it on the '09 G8, then my dad might buy one. And to have it on the CTS, Cobalt, and HHR is dumb in the first place. The CTS is selling well without any incentives, and the Cobalt and HHR are out of stock everywhere, it is clear they don't need incentives... gas is $3.75/gal, why discount the most fuel-efficient cars? Just dumb...

It is probably smarter to just put the Solstice and Sky on Alpha, if that's possible. Still Kappa was/is not an expensive platform for GM to develop.

Looking at it again, it looks way too Korean for my tastes. I thought Buick was making a comeback with the Enclave, but with high gas prices Enclave sales are going to be limited... the LaCrosse is all that Buick will have that shouldn't have a relatively low ceiling on how many they can sell, and it doesn't appear to be near the product the Enclave is... the interior, while very nice, doesn't blow the competition out of the water, and the exterior doesn't look like a $40k any more than the Malibu does. If this fails, Buick might as well go away, with the Cadillac Lambda coming, the Enclave is really somewhat useless. Cadillac is also getting an Alpha, so I don't see much point for a Buick Alpha. Perhaps this is premature, but I really don't see this LaCrosse doin any better than the current one. I hope I am wrong, but I fear that this vehicle is not going to do very well. Might as well focus on Cadillac and Chevy and import Opels to fit between them as Saturns, kill Buick, Pontiac, Saab, GMC and Hummer and hope GM survives.

The two gas tanks were totally unnecessary, as that adds cost and weight. If someone is taking a long trip, I don't think a break for gas every 350 miles is too big of a deal. Surely they'll get hungry, have to have a bathroom break, etc., in 350 miles of driving. The range is actually more than 350 miles if someone is only driving, say, 50 miles a day, obviously.

I'll take a 3er convert any day...

Wow, that's tacky. Just kill Pontiac if this is what its future holds.

I see, thanks for the explanation. So you are saying that it uses only half of the battery before it wants to be re-charged? Surely GM is not that stupid as to have twice as much battery capacity as it will use?

Agreed. If Cadillac had already established good car lines first it would have made it much easier for the SRX to succeed in the market. GM should have dumped all the money from the SRX into the STS, and made it best-in-class instead of near the bottom. They would have a lot more credibility that way and could have intro'd an SRX later on. It wouldn't have made much difference in sales if they didn't have the SRX and the STS could actually compete in the market, since both of them were duds.

The Century and Regal were much more similar the the Altima and Maxima. Like you basically said, the Regal is a fancy Century, in other words, a higher trim level and thus more options and a more powerful engine. The Maxima and Altima, prior to the new models, looked similar in the same way the STS and CTS look similar, and BMWs look similar, but they were certainly much more different looking than the Century and Regal. The new Maxima looks much different than the Altima now, however.

Yes, but does that make the battery any better for actual driving? If you have a 20 mile drive to work and 20 mile drive home, you're using pretty much no fuel in the Volt. If the Honda battery can be recharged in an hour to say the Volt's 4 hours (this is not at all based on anything, just made up) but it can only go 20 miles without fuel, and there is no place to recharge while at work, then it certainly isn't better for someone with a 40 mile round-trip each day. If it's someone like a stay-at-home mom who runs lots of errands, I could see it being better to have shorter range and less recharge time. Go get groceries, come back, an hour later go pick up the kids, then go out to dinner a couple hours later, etc etc., whereas perhaps the Volt wouldn't have time to recharge (again, I have no idea how much time it takes either to recharge, though. Also don't have any idea of the range of the Volt vs. Honda).

Where is GXT to say that this is not possible in this time frame and it's just Honda blowing smoke? So is this battery more or less the same as the Volt's, or does it have improvements vs. the Volt's? Or do we even know?

It looks OK, but nothing great. I don't think it's ugly, though. Women will like it I think, and they'll be the main buyers.

Unless it has been moved up, the 9-5 is/was to debut about 6-8 months after the LaX. So yeah, add the 9-5, add the CTS wagon also. The 9-1 was originally supposed to be here before the 9-5 (at least in Europe) but that program was said to be stalled not long ago...