Buick
Attractive in an amorphous way, the 2016 Cascada convertible is Buick's first drop-top in 25 years. It does the leisurely, big American convertible drive thing well. At almost two tons, it should.
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General Motors has been on a bona fide roll lately. Releasing good products like the latest Corvette, Camaro, the revitalized Volt. Waking up the dormant mid-size truck segment. Genuine leaders like Cadillac's ATS have shown the world that there's life aboard the S.S. GM and that the once-beleaguered giant has learned and refocused after staring death in the face. Which brings us to the Buick Cascada convertible.
"Good enough" is not enough in today's marketplace. "Good enough" means you're quickly exposed to predators. The Cascada looks raffish and daring, but it also sits on the old GM of Europe's Delta front-wheel-drive family. And GM's European division often shows a flair for the more sophisticated in chassis engineering. But like weather patterns, fashion, and certainly technology, goalposts move. GM's Alpha architecture (as used in the Cadillac ATS) is more capable, rigid and space-efficient than the Delta platform. Planting the new Cascada—looker though it may be—on an aging platform is an Old GM decision when New GM decisions have brought about highly sophisticated and worthy products. The Cadillac ATS, the new Camaro, Corvette, the revised Volt, and a healthy list of others have injected a sense of an actual renaissance within the company headquartered at a place called The Renaissance Center in Detroit.
What’s worse is that GM also skimped where it's most visible to owners: inside. The interior design crew coughed up dozens of buttons and dials (we stopped counting at 40) for the center stack's ventilation, audio, and ancillary adjustments you deal with everyday. To choose between satellite and terrestrial radio, you must dive into several sub-menus in the touchscreen display, in a forced carousel of sorts past AM, FM, plugged-in media devices, and then SiriusXM. The screen itself is glare-prone and hard to read, while buttons on the lower portion of the screen are often blocked or hard to select. The central instrument panel's LCD display is not able to give turn-by-turn directions when Navigation is active, either. The rest of the world and especially in this entry-premium segment has moved to multitasking digital buttons and high-res graphics. All the forward collision and lane departure technology in the business—of which the Cascada has both—can't make up for a 20th Century interface. It's like having to use a VT-100 terminal for e-mail and word processing.
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