Yahoo Autos 2024 Buick Envista Avenir Interior Review: A real winner from Buick
The 2024 Buick Envista is the first Buick product I’ve driven in recent history that’s kept me thinking about it for much longer after handing the keys back. Much of that credit is due to Buick pricing it so low, but it’s not like there aren’t other cheap cars out there. The difference, of course, is that the Envista is both affordable and a really good car at the same time. You can read about how effective the tiny and frugal 1.2-liter turbo engine is in our First Drive, or get the full download about the various trims in our Buying Guide, but here I’m going to focus on its impressive interior in its most exemplary form.
My test Envista pictured throughout is the Avenir trim, which is the top-shelf, priciest model, and yet it still only starts at $29,695. That feels like a steal in today’s ever-expensive car market given its size and level of equipment. So, what’s the catch?
First impressions are wildly positive when I settle into the Avenir’s comfortable, heated leather seats and run my hands along the soft leather of the heated flat-bottom steering wheel. Then I check out what’s in front of me and notice the dual-screen layout housed cleanly in a single slab in the dash. The 11-inch touchscreen infotainment system is barebones as it gets from a software and user interface perspective, but that simplicity is somewhat refreshing. You get wireless Apple CarPlay/Android Auto, along with good enough hardware that everything runs fluidly and responds quickly to touches. The 8-inch digital instrument panel is verging on being too simplistic in favor of minimalism, though. Many of the typical gauges you might see in a cluster are instead tucked into a menu on the infotainment display, and customization of that cluster screen is similarly limited. It’s functional, but there’s room for improvement or at least customization.
The Pebble Gray and black two-tone look of this Avenir model is rather dashing combined with the Cinnabar Metallic exterior paint, and “Avenir” being stitched into the headrests is an upper-class touch. Also appreciated is the soft dash in front of the passenger with pretty stitching and an intriguing crease-like pattern in the material. This carries through into the doors and the door armrests, which are also padded, something you don’t get in the brutally hard doors of this car’s platform mate, the Chevrolet Trax.
Everybody inside the Envista gets to enjoy a rather quiet cabin for this car’s lower-market segment, in part due to active sound tuning that helps reduce road noise. It being equipped with a turbocharged inline-three-cylinder results in an engine note that is neither loud nor displeasing to the ear, which we can partly thank its six-speed automatic for – no CVT groaning! So, it doesn’t sound or look like a budget vehicle, even if its price says it is.
