2025 Buick Enclave Avenir AWD First Test: Honesty Is Indeed the Best Policy
The Enclave is everything it promises up front—stylish, comfortable, and quiet—and nothing less.
Pros
- Supremely comfortable
- Whisper quiet
- Delightfully stylish
Cons
- Coarse powertrain
- Small backup camera display
- Unsecured carpeting
In a world where every automaker is rolling out an off-road or high-performance trim level for their front-wheel-drive-based unibody crossover SUVs, Buick stands alone. Instead of making hard-to-keep promises about capabilities you’ll probably never use, GM’s premium brand instead offers style, comfort, and quiet. It’s refreshingly honest, even more so because the 2025 Buick Enclave Avenir AWD delivers.
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Straight Shooter
We don’t have to parse Buick’s marketing and dig for truth at the test track, because for once, an automaker isn’t trying to sell you a fantasy here. The 2025 Buick Enclave Avenir makes no pretentions about being sporty or off-road capable. It’s a big, spacious people-mover, and the optional all-wheel drive is there for bad weather.
In fact, the Enclave is so unsporty, it’s slower accelerating to 60 mph than the front-wheel-drive model we tested a few months ago. Any traction advantage afforded by the manually engaged all-wheel-drive system is seemingly negated by the 170-pound weight gain, extending the 0–60 time from 7.4 seconds to 7.9. The extra poundage also lengthened the stopping distance from 60 mph to 126 feet from 109. Maybe the front-driver we tested was a bit of a factory hot rod.
Regardless, a sub-eight-second run to 60 mph is plenty good for a seven- to eight-passenger SUV. There are certainly quicker competitors out there if you’re intent on winning stoplight drags, but if you are, why are you looking at a Buick SUV? No, the Enclave oozes away from a stop like a limousine, shuffling its gears smoothly and suppressing the urge to surge ahead as engine rpms rise. Put your foot down, and it’ll get on the interstate fine, but it won’t set anyone’s hair on fire.
If there’s any complaint about the engine, it’s that it isn’t as refined as befits the Enclave Avenir. The elevated cold-idle speed makes the whole car vibrate when you start it up, and when you accelerate hard, the turbocharged four-cylinder under the hood sounds like a dirt bike with a good muffler. The transmission will occasionally get confused in slow-and-go situations and drop a rough downshift. GM has said it’ll bring hybrids and plug-in hybrids back to its U.S. lineup in the future, and we think the Enclave Avenir would be the perfect place to put one. Maybe offer a full EV model, while you’re at it.
We’ll take this opportunity again to complain about the manually engaged all-wheel-drive system. Stuck in snow or mud is not when you want to try to remember where the button is to activate it. There’s no reason the computer, which will display a message suggesting you enable all-wheel drive when things go wrong, can’t just do it for you like every other automaker does.
It’s not like defaulting to front-wheel drive does wonders for the fuel economy, either. Compared to the two-wheel-drive model, fuel economy drops only slightly across the board to 19 mpg city, 24 highway, and 21 combined (from 20 city, 27 highway, and 23 combined).
Presence, Not Performance
Similarly, the Enclave Avenir makes no boasts about being a corner-carver. Its skidpad performance is perfectly adequate at 0.77 average lateral g. That’s lower than the front-drive model managed, but combine acceleration, braking, and handling into our singular figure-eight test, and the all-wheel-drive version gets on slightly quicker than the two-wheel-drive model, with a 27.6-second lap at 0.63 g average.
To dwell on the test results, though, misses the point. The 2025 Buick Enclave Avenir handles perfectly fine in the curves for a big, cushy, family SUV. Should you for some reason need to hustle it around a corner, it’ll do well enough, but Buick engineers clearly prioritized comfort as they should’ve. This is absolutely meant to be a boulevard cruiser, and it’s very, very good at that.
Heavy, 22-inch, Avenir-exclusive wheels be damned, the Enclave rides beautifully. Bumps big and small are managed neatly by the adaptive dampers also exclusive to the Avenir trim. As a result, passengers waft about on the automotive equivalent of their favorite couch. You might consider this a dig when we say something like this, but on a vehicle so committed to comfort and not performance, it’s the highest compliment we can give. Again, this car does exactly what it promises.
The Good Life
Many a surreal moment is to be had when new passengers board the Enclave for the first time and exclaim, without a hint of irony, “This is a Buick?!” GM’s marketers may have been a little ahead of the curve on that one, but they were right. Particularly in this delightful blue-over-cream Avenir colorway, it feels far richer and more luxurious than its $66,675 as-tested price.
For that scratch, you get heated, cooled, and massaging front seats along with heated second-row captain’s chairs. The latter easily fold and slide forward for third-row access, or you can simply walk around and between them. Expansive passenger space in all three rows allowed us to drive five adults for a full day of activities without any complaints. Even with all three rows occupied, there was room for multiple carry-on bags in the cargo area. Conversing with passengers in the third row from up front was made easy by the whisper quiet interior (when you’re not hard on the throttle, anyway).
The only gripe our passengers had was with the second- and third-row floormats, which aren’t secured down well enough. They get caught easily on your shoes if you don’t pick up your feet, then turn upward and become tripping hazards as you climb in and out of the rear seats.
Talk Tech to Me
Up front, Buick’s take on the free-standing megascreen is charmingly midcentury, a trapezoidal shape like some kind of 1950s design-forward TV. Its single, unbroken display does a pretty good job of not hiding things behind the steering wheel and takes advantage of its edge-to-edge pixels to fit things like the built-in Google Maps to the screen shape.
That said, it would be nice if that were true across the board. Buicks still get Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which remain rectangles floating in the screen. That’s the responsibility of those third-party apps and not Buick, but the oddly small rearview camera image is inexcusable and should be stretched to at least use as much space as possible, if not fill the right side of the screen entirely.
Better than the screen is the MotorTrend Tech Award-winning Super Cruise system available on all models. An actual hands-free system with real driver-monitoring for safety, it’s the best Level 2-plus system on the market today, edging out Ford’s Blue Cruise and Tesla’s overhyped FSD (Supervised). As with those systems, though, it works slightly differently on every car. In this case, we found it tended to accelerate a bit too aggressively, often running up on a car ahead and having to hit the brakes rather than simply getting off the throttle sooner. Similarly, it tended to wait a bit longer than we’d like to apply the brakes when traffic ahead slowed abruptly. When it came to the computer’s steering, though, we had no complaints.
What’s Not to Like?
If you haven’t looked at three-row SUV prices lately, they’re not great, especially for ones with third rows big enough for adults. Consider premium and luxury options, and the numbers get big real quick. This Enclave Avenir is pretty much fully loaded at $66,675, and it’s a hell of a value at that price. A Lincoln Aviator Black Label is way more money and smaller. An Acura MDX A-Spec is more expensive and not as nice. An Infiniti QX60 is at least price competitive but smaller and less nice. Don’t even look at the Germans if you care about cost. Consider the GMC Acadia Denali and Chevrolet Traverse High Country if you like but remember they’re both the same car underneath as the Enclave—and the Buick is the most luxurious of the bunch for only slightly more money.
If your goal is to get your family from A to B in quiet comfort and you’re not trying to fool anyone about being a track rat or a dirt head, you can’t do better than the Enclave Avenir for the money.
Were you one of those kids who taught themselves to identify cars at night by their headlights and taillights? I was. I was also one of those kids with a huge box of Hot Wheels and impressive collection of home-made Lego hot rods. I asked my parents for a Power Wheels Porsche 911 for Christmas for years, though the best I got was a pedal-powered tractor. I drove the wheels off it. I used to tell my friends I’d own a “slug bug” one day. When I was 15, my dad told me he would get me a car on the condition that I had to maintain it. He came back with a rough-around-the-edges 1967 Volkswagen Beetle he’d picked up for something like $600. I drove the wheels off that thing, too, even though it was only slightly faster than the tractor. When I got tired of chasing electrical gremlins (none of which were related to my bitchin’ self-installed stereo, thank you very much), I thought I’d move on to something more sensible. I bought a 1986 Pontiac Fiero GT and got my first speeding ticket in that car during the test drive. Not my first-ever ticket, mind you. That came behind the wheel of a Geo Metro hatchback I delivered pizza in during high school. I never planned to have this job. I was actually an aerospace engineering major in college, but calculus and I had a bad breakup. Considering how much better my English grades were than my calculus grades, I decided to stick to my strengths and write instead. When I made the switch, people kept asking me what I wanted to do with my life. I told them I’d like to write for a car magazine someday, not expecting it to actually happen. I figured I’d be in newspapers, maybe a magazine if I was lucky. Then this happened, which was slightly awkward because I grew up reading Car & Driver, but convenient since I don’t live in Michigan. Now I just try to make it through the day without adding any more names to the list of people who want to kill me and take my job.
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