Lu’s neighbor is leasing an HR-V for $349 a month, and he jealously eyes the Encore and its $200 price tag every day (and also Lu). Plus, let’s be honest - the fact that Buick is giving the things away on leases didn’t hurt. For Luisa’s purpose, that’s not a problem, but anybody with two kids in child seats would have issues. A rear-facing child seat fits, if not entirely easily, in the middle seat, but you can’t fit anybody else back there when the seat is installed, so it’s a one-child solution. The other requirement that she had was being able to transport children. So the Encore was the winner, thanks to its more pleasing styling (beauty is in the eye of the beholder here), upscale-feeling interior, Apple CarPlay, and more responsive motor/transmission combo. Plus, Luisa couldn’t get past the bizarre visuals of the Hyundai’s exterior. While I’ve read a lot of glowing reviews about how the 1.6 turbo worked on the roads of Hawaii, the base 2.0 four-banger felt sluggish. The suspension was brutally rough, which is critically important on the less-than-stellar surface streets of Miami-Dade. The interior was cobbled together from a variety of unattractive plastics, and the motor/CVT combo was painfully lacking in power or torque. We drove the Honda and found it lacking in many ways - even though we tested an EX-L model that was likely above her desired price point, the HR-V felt cheap. Since she had never owned a car and had only recently acquired a license, she wasn’t able to draw any real comparisons between the Encore and the other competing models, which is why she invited me to come along for test drives.Īs I mentioned in our last Death Watch installment, we checked out the Honda HR-V and the Hyundai Kona before looking at the Encore. Encore wasn’t on her original list, but it’s Mokka stablemate, the Chevy trax, was - she hadn’t even gone to the Buick display in New York, since it wasn’t a brand she was familiar with. Lu had checked out all of the models in the segment at the New York Auto Show earlier in the year and put together a list of the cars she liked. Luisa’s requirements for her first car were pretty simple: she wanted to sit up higher for (perceived) safety, she wanted to be able to get good gas mileage, and she needed to be able to transport small children in the back seat, as she works in the pre-K education space. In fact, for the price, it’s downright good. So I decided to put a few hundred miles behind the wheel of the Opel Mokka Encore and give you guys the lowdown. It’s a shame, because there’s not necessarily a correlation between the quality of the cars that bear the “Buick” logo and the failure of the Buick business model in the United States (to recap, move Encore and Enclave to GMC, kill the rest of the brand with fire).īut no matter - we have access to our own Buick, thanks to the lovely Luisa and the Encore Preferred she recently leased. As you might imagine, nobody at Buick is keen for me to review their cars lately.

2018 buick encore premium