Review: 2018 Buick Regal TourX Wagon

I grew up in American station wagons. In the child-ridden Detroit suburbs of the 1970s they were ubiquitous, as common as Sherpa-lined jeans jackets and halter-tops. Nearly every family had one. So it made perfect sense for me to test out the Regal TourX—Buick’s first wagon in nearly a quarter-century—when I was home in Detroit recently to cover the Motor City’s big annual Auto Show. The locale’s combination of hideous winter weather, potholed streets, and familial schlepping duties only enhanced the match of car and place.

The TourX comes wrapped in a very handsome package, with sneering LED running lights, a tight beltline crease, pressed-in flanks, and a rounded fastback hatchback that are all reminiscent of the class-leading Mercedes-Benz E-Class Estate. All of these design features enunciate the length of the wagon, which is actually quite significant. It’s not only a couple inches longer than the Benz, it’s more than a foot longer than a Volvo V60. In fact, it’s just 2.5-inches shorter than the baleen Porsche Panamera Sport Turismo.

Buick

This lovely appearance is marred only by the cheap black plastic trim pasted around the wheel wells. This blight on all-wheel-drive wagons can be traced epidemiologically to the Subaru Outback, but it has now spread virally to nearly everything in the category from the VW Golf AllTrack to the Audi A4 AllRoad. These fender liners work okay in dark colors, like the greenish-grey “smoked pearl metallic” slathered on our test car, but they have a tendency to make the wheel openings look a bit gape-y, an issue that isn’t aided by the psychedelic-pinwheel-screensaver design of the Buick’s rims. Don’t look directly at them while they’re moving, or you’ll end up hypnotized or nauseous.

The cockpit is far more serene. Not only is it quiet, part of Buick’s commitment to best-in-class noise-mitigation in every vehicle category in which it competes. There’s also a lack of the frenetic and mismatched materials selection that plague so many recent General Motors cars—just a single color of leather with some contrasting stitching, and (fake) wood. Moreover, the actual layout of the controls is sensible and logical, and delightfully analog, with straightforward knobs for things like climate and entertainment systems, a mechanical-feeling shifter for the 8-speed transmission that doesn’t introduce unnecessary guesswork into going from park to reverse to drive, and a simple infotainment touch-screen featuring standard Apple CarPlay (or AndroidAuto.)

Buick Regal

Our tester had the optional $1,000 stereo package, which we’d skip, since all of that is better on our phone and CarPlay mirrors all of that on the screen. It also had nearly $3,000 worth of driver assistance technology, which we’d also probably skip since we know how to drive. We might be tempted by the $1,200 sliding glass panoramic roof, which brings light into the cabin, a near-necessity in the heinous dinge of a Detroit winter. That would drop the list price to under $37,000, which seems like a bargain when you consider items like all-wheel-drive, heated power seats, heated steering wheel, remote start, power liftgate, and a 4G wifi hotspot are all standard.

The interior is also comfortable, and quite cavernous, especially in the way-back. The long area behind the hatch can swallow things so deeply that you may require an endoscope to reach some of your cargo. And if you power-fold down the rear seats, you’ll end up with enough space for anything a Costco run can throw at you. We think you can easily fit a couple trail bikes back there. It seems like you might even be able to squeeze in a kayak, but we didn’t have a kayak or a tape measure. Anything that won’t fit inside can be strapped up top to the aluminum roof rails.

All of this wagony goodness weighs things down a bit, so in this 4,200-pound package, the turbocharged four-cylinder engine isn’t exactly an Autobahn-burner. But it’s torquey and potent enough for all of your driving duties, and will kickdown rapidly enough when you floor it to readily handle highway onramp merges, even in Detroit, where everyone cruises above 85 mph. With Blizzak snow tires mounted to the Regal’s mesmeric rims, we were able to plow through anything that the Michigan winter threw at us, which included snow, sleet, ice, freezing rain, and some weird contractions we’d never heard of like, “slew.” Cornering and road-handling is well above average, and surprisingly stable, even with passengers. (My niece giggled quite often as we took on cloverleaves, which is a good sign. She likes to go fast.)

Brett Berk

With the only TourX in America, we also felt kind of special behind the wheel, especially surrounded by our peers in the world of automotive journalism, a community in which wagons are fetishized far beyond their sales numbers. “Were you at the Detroit Institute of Arts yesterday,” one of my peers asked, excitedly, when I ran into him at the motor show. “I saw that TourX wagon parked on the street out front.”

We imagine that owning a Regal TourX would give an ordinary owner a similar sensation of near-celebrity. Wagons are making a slow but steady comeback, especially among discerning, higher-income buyers. Audi, Volvo, Porsche, and even Jaguar are getting into the game here. In a sea of crossovers and SUVs, instead of being the presumed choice, the wagon is now a way to stand out from the crowd. I just bought a wagon, the VW Golf AllTrack, the only wagon in America with a manual transmission. But if I were looking again, now, this TourX would be on the very shortlist.