GM’s 2025 Buick Enclave SUV upgrades and design

WARREN, Mich. — General Motors has redesigned Buick’s flagship Enclave SUV as the latest testament to the reinvention of the nearly 125-year-old brand.

The 2025 Enclave’s updates — from new exterior technology to a redesigned interior — round out Buick’s refresh of its current four-car lineup. In 2022, Buick unveiled a radical concept car called the Wildcat, setting off a new design direction for the brand.

While the Enclave is the latest current Buick vehicle to receive the Wildcat treatment, it may not be the last. GM is expected to expand the Buick lineup with a new electric vehicle as soon as this year and is conducting several “design studies” to determine what’s next for the once-dominant American brand.

“I’m very excited about what the brand is becoming again,” GM President Mark Reuss said during a press event at the company’s innovation and technology campus in suburban Detroit. “(It’s) a talented team, talented execution, international.”

Reuss, who began his career with Buick as a transmission controller, said the design team, led by Bob Boniface, has done a great job of “bringing life back into Buick design.”

The 2025 Enclave is longer, wider and longer than the current model. It also has a sharper exterior design, including a larger front grill and Buick’s new “marker rearview” lights.

“(It’s) the flagship of the Buick brand,” said Boniface during the media event. “We talked a lot about the visual DNA and here you see, how it translates into our biggest car in the range … it’s a great use of advanced language.”

The rear end looks more like a truck, with more angles and wider tail lights on an SUV.

Inside is a newly redesigned interior that features a “floating” center console that doesn’t attach to the car’s front instrument panel. It also includes a standard 30-inch diagonal, curved infotainment screen.

Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free highway driving system, will be offered on each of the Enclave’s three models: Preferred, ST and Avenir. Also standard are heated front seats, wireless charging and other safety and convenience features.

GM is ditching the current V6 version of the Enclave for fuel economy reasons in exchange for a standard 2.5-liter turbocharged engine with 328 horsepower and 326 pound-feet of torque.

The automaker said pricing for the 2025 Enclave will be announced closer to when the car goes into production at the plant in central Michigan. Starting prices now range from about $43,300 to more than $60,000.

Company executives and spokespeople declined to confirm the timing of the new EV, saying it could launch in 2025. brand website it still says the car’s expected availability is 2024.

Duncan Aldred, Buick’s global vice president, called the brand’s development “a miraculous turnaround.” He declined to comment on any additional hits to Buick’s American lineup in the coming years.

“As you can see, there’s a lot of energy, enthusiasm, enthusiasm; people are continuing to do things, and it informs the future,” said Aldred, who also heads GM’s GMC brand. “You’ll have to watch this space to see what happens next.”

GM is generally evaluating its product portfolio amid slower-than-expected adoption of electric vehicles and changes in government fuel emissions to better include hybrids and plug-in hybrids as well as EVs.

In 2022, Buick announced plans to offer all-electric vehicles by 2030. (GM as a whole previously announced a goal of offering EVs to consumers by 2035.) Aldred, echoing earlier comments from GM CEO Mary Barra, said the future of that brand. regarding EVs will be based on customer needs.

Buick’s US sales increased by 16.4% in the first quarter, adding to the 61.4% increase in total sales last year compared to the normal results in 2022.

Despite the growth in sales last year to 167,030 units, the result remained about 40,000 units lower than in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic caused supply and production problems.

Much of Buick’s growth came from the benefit of additional sales from the new entry-level Envista, which was the brand’s third best-selling vehicle in the first quarter of this year at nearly 10,000 units.

Buick has also been growing its lineup and increasing average purchase prices for its latest “Avenir” models across its lineup. Avenir models represented about 25% of Buick’s sales in the first quarter of this year.

Aldred said he believes Buick can continue to grow U.S. sales with its new lineup of vehicles, especially as production of the Envista ramps up and the 2025 Enclave arrives on sale this summer.

“When it does, we believe we will have the newest portfolio in the industry at that time,” Aldred said. “Every car, it works very, very hard.”

That’s not the case in China, where Buick and other non-domestic brands have been struggling. Sales of Buicks in China are set to decline by about 40% to 517,000 units from 2019 to 2023. That’s accompanied by 32% decrease in sales at the time for GM in China, where the popularity of local automakers is growing.

“The market has changed dramatically … in terms of the number of products being sold,” Aldred said. “It’s increasing the market, it’s doing that, but Buick remains healthy and successful there.”