Posts Tagged ‘Malibu’

New Rule: If Buick wants younger customers, it can’t put these cars in front.

Posted: March 24, 2011 in Buick, Chevrolet
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Buick has been on an evangelical mission to find younger buyers as it’s older ones die off or abandon the brand. The new Lacrosse and Regal are pretty nice entries into the crowded compact/mid-size sedan field — it’s just hard to stand out.

2011 Buick Regal CXL

2011 Buick Regal interior

The upcoming Verano, a rebadged and gussied-up Chevy Cruze, should be interesting too.  However, Buick’s long-tarnished image as a car only for your grandparents presents an almost insurmountable barrier for younger buyers and a difficult challenge for even the most talented marketing team.

2012 Buick Verano

2012 Buick Verano interior

Buick recently dropped its long-time sponsorship of the Pro Golf tournaments (old folks) in favor of the NCAA basketball March Madness hoop-a-thon (young folks).   Buick is also sponsoring “Quest for the Keys” in various cities across the country.  The ultimate prize is a Buick.  It’s a scavenger hunt with clues on Facebook and Twitter – you know, where the young, hip customers lurk.

All the marketing muscle is showing some progress as the average age of a  Buick buyer has dropped from 70+ to 60.  However, this is still too high for GM.

Finding a Buick dealer in metro LA is harder than the Quest for the Keys scavenger hunt.  The Chevy/Buick store at Centinela and Santa Monica Blvd in Santa Monica is now an Infiniti dealer and while Buick’s website still shows them there (or nearby) I drive by it frequently and can’t find the store to save my life.  There are two dealers in the Valley (Woodland Hills and Sherman Oaks); but after that, you have to go to Penske Cadillac Buick GMC South Bay in Torrance.   If you live in Metro LA,  you aren’t going to Torrance to get service and you may not want to drive to the Valley either.

So aside from the challenge of finding a dealer, this New Rule must apply: When you drive into a Buick dealership, the first car you see can’t have a Landau roof, gold package and Vogue tires.

Jessup Auto Plaza (Cadillac, Buick, Chevrolet and GMC) in Cathedral City, California probably has lots of older customers – and that’s a good thing. But this is what you see as you drive onto their lot:

2011 Buick Regal - All dressed up and ready for ??

This Regal was laden with all the relics of times long past.  The “custom top” in canvas just looks wrong.

Vogue tires, chrome wheels... ugh.

Someone spent a lot of time to do this roof. Note the special chrome-like trim that "tricks" you into thinking it's a convertible. How about those two-tone pin stripes?

This custom coach even gets a special grill. It screams bad taste.

Note the "gold package" Buick crest and model designations - a theme carried out anywhere they could stick one. Fake gold veneer everywhere.

I don’t know how much this package cost, but it wasn’t cheap.

I had gone to Jessup to test drive the Chevy Cruze with a friend.  The pimped-out Regal was astonishing, but more treats awaited us on the Chevy side of the dealership.  There was a Malibu and an Impala with this special package of “upgrades.”

The Chevy Malibu, an all-star in the rental fleets, gets the special canvas top, gold applique, Vogue tires and chrome wheels.

Here’s the window sticker of the Malibu:

Let me translate. MSRP of the Malibu - $28,385; Custom top, gold package, Vogue tyres, mesh grill - $4,480; Pin stripes - $249. Total add-ons: $4,729. Wow.

If this package cost this much for the Malibu, it must have been at least that much on the Buick Regal.

But wait, there’s more!  I can’t believe anyone buys a Chevy Impala, the top star of rental fleets. It’s about as boring and anonymous as it gets.  It makes a Toyota Camry look glamorous.  Here is the Impala with the same grotesque package:

My, what a fetching face for this Impala. Not. It's destined for someone's garage.

Rental car no longer. This car says something about its owner: Bad taste.

The Impala's butt - either you're asleep by now or wide-eyed with amazement that these kinds of packages still find an customers.

Bottom line: If Buick wants younger customers, they can’t put these laughable relics on full display in front of the dealership.  Keep them in the back or in a special spot off to the side.  If a customer was wavering on the Buick brand and was concerned about its image as an “old person’s car” then this kind of display will kill the deal and send they to another brand.

Dealers are the all-important point-of-contact with customers.  Buick dealers must sync with regional and national marketing efforts. If they’re not, Buick will fail to find the younger buyers it so desperately covets.

The ‘Bu and Back Up Cameras

Posted: December 15, 2010 in Chevrolet, Safety
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It was just a couple weeks ago that I was cursing my rental Chevrolet Malibu because it’s hind quarters was too high for me to see the car I was backing into trying to parallel park. Since you rarely parallel park on a test drive, this is one of those nasty unexpected annoyances that pop up during your ownership of any given car. I was also profoundly annoyed by the blind spot created by the large B pillar every time I tried to check my left blind spot.

The Malibu's rear looks "normal" but it's too high when you look backwards.

It’s really hard to review an appliance like the 2010 Malibu LS. The styling is anonymous – neither exciting nor displeasing. It starts right up (as any car should) and stops with some level of assurance. The steering wheel is connected to the rack with a strand of al dente spaghetti, although in slow-speed parking tangos, the steering feel is more like freshly-poured cement. Only when pressed does the Malibu exhibit torque steer.

The anonymous styling of the 2010 Chevrolet Malibu. Better than the past, but that bar is so low almost anything would have been an improvement.

The Malibu has plenty of room for four passengers. It will be very tight with five adults. The picture makes it look even more like a rental car. Thanks, Chevrolet!

Most people would be hard-pressed to identify this as a Chevrolet Malibu, particularly if you get rid of the Chevy Bow Tie in the front.

The ‘Bu (an internal GM nickname, so the story goes) was an adequate rental appliance for our four days touring Richmond, Virginia and Washington DC. The trunk swallowed all the luggage with plenty of room to spare. The driver’s seat was relatively comfortable for the slog from Richmond to DC.

The base Malibu interior is well-designed and fairly straight forward. It didn't take long to find and master all the controls.

(Richmond is a lovely city, but I’m not sure they’ve been informed that the Civil War, uh I mean War for Southern Independence or War of Northern Aggression, ended 145 years ago.)

For most of the trip, the 6-speed automatic shifted unobtrusively, with a tendency to upshift to save fuel. When prodded, the silicon chips think for a moment, the transmission kicks down and the standard 2.4 liter, 169 hp Ecotec I-4 engine wails in misery. When I had to do some fast shifting from reverse to drive shoehorning the Malibu into rare and illusive DC parking spaces, the transmission actually clunked a couple times between gears.

The upgraded interior with leather in the top-of-the-line Malibu LTZ shows off the double dash design and is much more pleasing to the eyes.

As a daily transportation appliance, the Malibu rates a C+ or B-. It’s a solid effort from the “old GM” and in 2008, it was the best Chevrolet passenger car (damning with faint praise, I’m afraid). The switchgear, steering column stalks and center console displays are familiar parts bin stuff. The turn signal click clack is so annoying that anything longer than a couple seconds causes migraines.

On the plus side, we got an around 26 mpg during the trip, which is above average for this segment.

(more…)

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