The 2009 Buick Lucerne may not cover all the bases, but it’s still a solid bet.

The 2009 Buick Lucerne is a capable sedan with smooth, clean aesthetics and excellent driving manners. It’s smooth and quiet on the road, but it features precise handling and a chassis that can tackle curving roads with ease. It’s stylish, comfortable, and simple on the inside.

The Buick Lucerne is available in a variety of trim levels. With the Premium Ride Suspension, the Lucerne CX is tuned like a conventional Buick. The Lucerne CXL has a stiffer Ride and Handling Suspension than the Toyota Avalon and Lexus ES 350, and is designed to compete with them. We thought it to be a fun car to drive, with responsive handling and plenty of power.

The 2009 Buick Lucerne is a notable full-size sedan built on Buick’s usual themes of conservative style and interior comfort, at least in recent years. It is the embodiment of classic American-made luxury, with plenty of seating and storage capacity, one of the quietest cabins in its class, and a choice of V-6 and V-8 engines.​​

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The exterior style of the Lucerne is sleek, with rich lines and a prominent face centered on a chrome-rimmed grille. Buick’s iconic grille, with vertical chrome bars framing pairs of dazzling multi-lens headlamps, is featured on the sleek body. A body-colored fascia with split air intake holes and circular fog lamps sits beneath the grille.

The headlamps’ distinctive curves are drawn in taut lines backward to the base of a raked windshield by a canted hood. Smoothly rolled shoulders and arched wheel wells are visible on the sides, with body-colored trim strewn across the double doors. Engine size is indicated by chrome-coated portholes on the front fenders, which are a Buick tradition – three portholes for the V6 and four for the V8. The roof’s line is a smooth arch that tapers inward.

The Lucerne’s unit-body structure has a long wheelbase of 115.6 inches, and those extra inches show up in the passenger compartment with more backseat legroom (there’s up to 41 inches of rear legroom). The Lucerne’s interior exhibits an exceptional level of tranquility in terms of noise, vibration, and harshness reduction (NVH). The upshot of surrounding the passenger compartment liberally with sound-deadening material appears to be that all exterior NVH is locked outside.

Buick marketing team refers to the effort to control NVH within Lucerne as QuietTuning, and it indicates a level of refinement more suited to elite premium cars. For the interior and exterior setting, the QuietTunig comes standard for all 2009 Buick Lucerne models. QuietTuning is designed to drastically reduce and absorb undesired road, wind, and powertrain noise, the major intent is providing leading levels of the interior cabin silence.

The QuietTuning package includes thick laminate layers on the windshield and all four side windows, composite nylon baffles inside all structural roof pillars, rocker panels, and cross-car braces. Also included is a multi-layer steel laminate dashboard design, noise-reducing exterior rearview mirrors, and low-profile windshield wiper blades.

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Customers want more technology, comfort, convenience, and safety & security features from a premium full-size car, and the Buick Lucerne has consistently delivered. More standard features and a more powerful V-6 engine in CX and CXL models that can run on E85 ethanol have been added for 2009.

The CX, CXL, and the top-of-the-line Super, which debuted in mid-2008, are the Lucerne models for 2009. “The Lucerne family illustrates Buick’s continuous commitment to meeting or exceeding buyer expectations in premium and near-luxury passenger cars,” said Susan Docherty, vice president of Buick-Pontiac-GMC. “Their fluid design, luxury furnishings, technical sophistication, and on-the-road performance are all spot on.”

A more powerful 3.9L V-6 engine powers the Lucerne CX and CXL variants. It produces 227 horsepower and 237 lb-ft of torque, according to SAE certification. The 3.8L V-6 it replaces, produced 197 horsepower and 227 pound-feet of torque. Despite the increase in available horsepower, the new engine is expected to improve fuel economy by one mile per gallon in both city and highway driving.

The 3.9L V-6 engine is FlexFuel capable, which means it can run on 100% gasoline, up to 85% ethanol, or any combination of the two. The Buick Lucerne is now available with an E85-capable engine for the first time.

For such a spacious, secure-feeling sedan, the 2009 Buick Lucerne offers a decent crash-test score. Electronic stability control, an active safety device that helps avoid accidents, is not included in the base CX model, which costs moreover $30,000. There are, however, some high-tech active-safety choices for redeeming the top-of-the-line model.

For a big car, the crash-test ratings are strictly middle-of-the-road. The 2009 Buick Lucerne received four- and five-star ratings in crash testing conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), as well as “good” and “acceptable” frontal and side impact protection ratings from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

The addition of a Super trim level to the Buick Lucerne full-size sedan for the 2009 model year is the most significant change. This flips the Lucerne story on its head. The Lucerne was a Cadillac DTS at a 38 percent discount when it debuted in 2006. Similarly, today’s base Regal costs around 35% less than the lowest DTS. It boasts the Caddy’s large accommodations and reasonably quiet cabin, as well as a 3.8-liter V-6 engine and interior quality that’s above average, not quite up to Cadillac standards. For $29,920, you can purchase a better-equipped Lucerne CXL.

Source: Cars–USNews, Cars, MotorTrend

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