2025 Buick Enclave Review: GM's Family Feud Pays Dividends For You & Me

Buick has some of the same problems that its General Motors stablemates have, and some quandaries that are entirely unique to the brand. As with other GM products, Buick has to compete against the entire planet in the incredibly competitive SUV sphere, and then against itself in the form of Chevrolet and GMC. Unlike Chevy and GMC, Buick, as a brand, sits in a bit of a weird spot within GM's repertoire. It's not an everyman's brand like Chevy, nor an aspirational one like a Denali trimmed GMC, or a dedicated luxury brand like Cadillac. Buick just kind of exists as its own thing.

Over the past model year, Buick has revamped its entire look with a new badge and new design language on its entirely SUV-isized lineup. The biggest of which is now the Enclave, which arguably sounds more like how you would describe a group of mole people who live under the Earth's crust than a family oriented SUV.

I was tasked with reviewing a 2025 Buick Enclave Avenir, and despite having GM products occupy a significant portion of my mental bandwidth, it was actually the first new Buick I had ever driven.

On the inside, the Buick Enclave is just a GMC Acadia and Chevy Traverse. It has the same 2.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder that generates 328 horsepower and the same general seven seat arrangement. On the outside, however, it couldn't look more different than its blue collar cousins.

The new Buick design is spearheaded with an entirely new emblem, that blends in so much with the sheet metal that it almost disappears. Far more noticeable is the huge gaping maw on the front that's somewhere between a particularly angry Lexus and an orca that's in the process of eating a chainlink fence. I don't want that to be a knock against the new look Buick has settled on, I actually like it a lot. It's just a jarring juxtaposition when you compare it to your great aunt's Buick Regal that she would double park in front of the post office while mailing out birthday cards.

In the spirit of full transparency, my time with the Buick only lasted four days as opposed to the full week I'd typically expect. That truncated time was due to an error code that the Enclave's all-wheel drive system threw. However, I still managed to get a lot of time behind the wheel.

Much like the GMC Acadia, the Enclave is a fantastically uneventful vehicle to drive. It doesn't kick you in the face like a big performance SUV, nor does it try to overstimulate your brain with features and gizmos like you might see on a Mercedes or BMW. The cabin is almost serene in how little there is immediately going on, and it's a nice change in pace when compared to something like a BMW X6.

Over the weekend I had the Buick, I went on a hike with a friend who could only be described as "indifferent" in her attitude towards cars. She described the huge blue Enclave as "a boat on wheels." I think I can interpret that as a compliment. Still, it was a worthy chariot when traipsing around the parks and scenic areas of Maryland. 

Never once did the Buick get tiring to drive. The infotainment system gave me no grief; the seats did their best at keeping me and all of my passengers coddled and comforted. Keeping with the oceanographic terminology, it's like riding around in the mouth of a friendly whale, only with noticeably less fish, baleen, and people named Jonah.

This Enclave was decked out with Buick's "Avenir" package which, like GMC's Denali trim, blings out the SUV a fair amount. It adds heated and ventilated front seats, a heated second row of seats (sorry third row, no heat for you), a big ol' panoramic sunroof, a 16-speaker Bose sound system, an a whole lotta' leather. For what it's worth, "Avenir" is the French word for "future." While a large kinda-sorta luxury SUV from Buick isn't necessarily futuristic, it's certainly a forward looking vehicle at least towards Buick's future.

328 horsepower under the hood certainly isn't lacking and the Buick can in fact get out of its own way, in the same way that the Acadia can, but it isn't going to win any drag races or endurance races (it only gets 21 miles per gallon). Still, it's plenty for the highway on-ramps or any country roads that may take you home.

Now, with the comfort and features comes a fairly steep price tag. The base price of a 2025 Buick Enclave Avenir is a cool $58,000 on the dot. Throw in GM's Super Cruise driver assistance package — as shared with other high-end GM family models – and that adds $3,730 to the total. All-wheel drive (yes, it can be optioned as front-wheel drive only) tacks on another $2,000. The $1,395 destination charge brings the bill to $65,125. That's roughly a thousand dollars more than a similarly equipped GMC Acadia Denali.

If you start checking options boxes on a 2025 Chevy Traverse, the third option in this mechanically identical SUV trio, the price is roughly the same as well. That leaves you with really only an aesthetic choice to make if you absolutely need a GM-manufactured mid-size three-row SUV for somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000. Will anyone reading this be in that exact scenario? You never know.

For the sake of comparison, a three-row Expedition MAX from GM's arch-nemesis Ford has no issue eclipsing $70,000 or even $80,000 in price, so the segment of mid-size to full-size SUVs itself isn't too concerned with price. 

Overall, this 2025 Buick Enclave Avenir finished in a positively nautical "Ocean Blue Metallic" was a dream to drive. The relatively no-nonsense interior and infotainment system was straightforward, not to mention passenger-focused in a way that didn't distract you with goofy features you'll never use but look good on an options list. If I had one quibble with the usability of the Enclave, it was dealing with the optional Super Cruise system. It requires a number of button presses on the steering wheel in a certain sequence that isn't immediately clear to people who aren't familiar with GM's hieroglyphics that denote adaptive cruise control, driver monitoring system, and the like.

The Enclave is big, it's reasonably expensive, but right within it's own segment's wheelhouse, and it's as nautical as all get-out. But all those features combine together for a great SUV that, while not dazzling anyone with any particular specification of bell and/or whistle, will support them during the long drives.