Who wouldn’t salivate at the prospect of spending a week or so prying into both the refreshed 2012 edition of Buick’s curvy two-year-old entry-luxury sedan and Wisconsin’s mostly rectilinear brick-and-mortar, 161-year-old, 12th-largest metropolis? No wonder this unlikely pair of name-alikes posed an intriguing and irresistible challenge for C/D’s test team.
Let’s admit upfront that there are significant basic differences—the Buick LaCrosse’s 13 cubic feet of storage space, for instance, loses lopsidedly to the Wisconsin competitor’s estimated 34,000,000 cubic feet (not counting attics, cellars, or barns). Plus, the Badger-state candidate’s options extend to running water, Chinese takeout, and Swedish massage, while the far-from-spartan Buick can counter only with the usual extras like a sunroof and a rear-seat entertainment system. And the Wisconsin version offers an option unavailable to the Buick customer: You can call the movers and vamoose.
The proud product of Kansas City, Kansas, is big but is edged by its nomenclatural Wisconsin counterpart at 22.2 square miles. That’s big. Yet consider: Both are products of the same U.S. Midwestern ethic, both have plentiful doors and seating room, and no one on the coasts has ever heard of either of them. So LaCrosse versus La Crosse, here we come.
Performance is a clear Buick strong point in any meaningful comparison, hardly a shocking state of affairs when you glance at the specs: Even though the Buick LaCrosse is powered by a modest 2.4-liter, inline four-cylinder (with the mildest of hybrid systems) pumping out 182 horsepower (the 303-hp, 3.6-liter V-6 costs extra), its roughly two-ton mass makes for a power-to-weight ratio for either version that leaves La Crosse—tipping the scales at an estimated 3.45 billion tons (and that’s not even including suburbs)—at something of a disadvantage. Even the mayor candidly admits, “It’s hard to get this place moving forward.”
The Buick LaCrosse should yield respectable, though less than neck-snapping, 0-to-60 times of 6.4 to 8.9 seconds, depending on the engine; meanwhile, the Wisconsin entity, geologists report, moves about 0.00001 inch per millennium. Sounds glacially slow, sure, but that turns out in fact to be about average for every city and town in its geographical category. And no disgrace for a heavyweight toting so many billions of tons of avoirdupois that it makes even the pudgy Buick seem like a flyweight. Happily, the wet-weather braking performance of the Buick is consistent and efficient. Our testers found that La Crosse comes to a screeching halt at midnight sharp every Saturday—rain or shine.
The edge for operating economy goes to the Buick, and by a country mile, not to mention a city block. That hardworking four-cylinder’s gasoline consumption is 25 mpg in the city (its V-6 stablemate’s is 17), not exactly econocar country. But consider the competition: It doesn’t help its cause that the Wisconsin entry runs on an unruly combination of electricity, fuel oil, gasoline, diesel, wind power, coal, steam, natural gas, propane, methane, lighter fluid, charcoal starter,and cooking oil, out of which our testing crew figured a projected average net cost of $5600 per year. Mind you, that’s for a raised ranch with few extras; it would get better in a house trailer, worse in a McMansion.
As for reliability, the Buick LaCrosse starts every time in freezing cold, whereas our testers found that its Wisconsin sibling doesn’t even begin to get going until 9 a.m. and not at all on Sundays, summer or winter. The Buick never overheated, but an August heat wave can leave La Crosse all but prostrate. The local La Crosse AAA reports dealing with an average 45 car breakdowns per week within its area, while hospital intake of heatstroke victims in August averages 46. Advantage, Buick.
Interior space: Plushly outfitted as it is, the Buick still accommodates only five people. No fewer than 51,000 people can fit into La Crosse. Granted, not all of them will be as awash in creature comforts as they would be within the leather- and wood-lined Buick; we found La Crosse guilty here and there of worn carpets or peeling linoleum flooring, more than the occasional rundown Barcalounger and shapeless beanbag chair, and for every ornate carved-oak Victorian sideboard, all too many cardboard shoeboxes overstuffed with odds and ends. C/D’s test team found the Wisconsin La Crosse chockablock with hatboxes and breadboxes and strongboxes and box kites—none, frankly, as useful as the Buick LaCrosse’s simple, handy, and capacious glove box.
Comfort-wise, one of C/D’s veteran testers puts it succinctly: “No question those Wisconsinites do a great job of ensuring a relaxing environment (a Beautyrest mattress is standard even in cheap motels), but at least the Buick LaCrosse doesn’t make you feel like you’re just sitting there, letting the world go by—which comes through loud and clear when you’re stranded on the main drag of La Crosse on a Saturday night.” This, even with the Cheesehead stater’s virtually unlimited choice of HDTV, internet, Wi-Fi, Viewmaster reels, phonographs, jukeboxes, amateur Music Man stage performances, parlor pianos, family photo albums, and drive-in movies, ad infinitum, which beggar Buick’s admittedly admirable array of entertainment and information conveniences—and most at little or no extra cost.
A low roofline and thick side pillars hamper visibility in the Buick. In the Wisconsinite, everything depends on your vantage point: It’s a virtual open vista in all directions from Houska Park down by the Mississippi, our test team reports. But one tester who found himself in the city hoosegow overnight encountered solid cinder block in every direction: “Claustrophobic. Get me out of here!” goes his notebook entry.
The Buick LaCrosse beats the Wisconsin La Crosse by a wide margin in tight-spot parking—in all parking, in fact; as one perceptive C/D staffer queried, “How do you find a parking spot downtown in a city when you are the downtown?” The Buick flat loses on other fronts. It boasts four cup holders, for example—handy indeed, until you realize that every horizontal surface in La Crosse itself is a cup holder, i.e., several thousand acres of flat space, much of it countertops and tables. Climate control: The Buick’s comprehensive system summons cooling or heated air, and it conditions and directs and filters it, in a trice. The Wisconsin system makes “climate control” an oxymoron: The clumsy expedient of a licensed meteorologist sitting alongside the driver and delivering hourly bulletins fails in any way to actually control the climate.
Sunday morning in La Crosse dramatically underscores the fact that this is by far the more sedentary of our two subjects. Not that the Buick is a barrelful of monkeys, fun-wise; truth to tell, driving the LaCrosse down the main street of La Crosse on the Sabbath, as our C/D test team summarizes, “combines to bring human life as we know it to a standstill and create the perfect experiential vacuum.” Yet, as both our ad manager and the La Crosse Area Chamber of Commerce swiftly interject, “What’s wrong with that?”
