non refund deposit / reliability concerns

Christina, for several years, the J.D. Power and Associates initial quality and long-term reliability surveys have ranked Buick ahead of Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Infiniti, and all of the European nameplates -- second only to Lexus. Buick has likewise ranked consistently better than all of the other U.S. nameplates. I suspect that you will find that a Buick would be significantly less costly to maintain and repair than your Infiniti.

This is a case where the perception of many car buyers is not accurate. We've all heard for so many years that imports are better that it requires a shift in thinking to realize that many domestics are competitive in terms of quality. Many people lump all American cars together. Car buyers are perfectly willing to differentiate between the quality of a Toyota and a Mitsubishi; they should be equally willing to recognize that a Buick is different from a Dodge or Jeep. The Buick is typically a more reliable vehicle.

Since this site probably represents more enclave owners than any other (as far as I can find), I would highly recommend you do exactly as coopermine suggests. As soon as you get your Enclave, post a note here about being our newest owner, go directly to http://www.truedelta.com and sign up! This is an extremely valuable resource since it collects and collates all of our Lambda issues into one database and shares that with GM. We'll not only see how our reliability compares with other cars, but we'll be providing extremely valuable feedback directly to the manufacturer on issues that affect us in the most comprehensive way possible.

I've been registered with my acadia there since I got it and it's very fast and easy. It takes literally seconds per month to fill out the simple form, so there's really no reason not to do it.

Thanks for mentioning the research, guys. I'll have reasonably solid results in August. I posted some preliminary results for the Acadia and Outlook yesterday, but they're based on an insufficient sample, and thus asterisked. Those early results show the repair rate a bit high, a bit under one repair trip per year on average. But repair rates often start out a bit high for first-year vehicles then quickly improve as the manufacturer finds and corrects initial problems. By now they've likely ironed out a few such things with these vehicles.

I'd be more concerned if the repair rate was very high right off the bat, which it isn't.

I should note that my repair rates excludes reflashes, which have been pretty common with these vehicles. But I exclude those because they're almost as simple and quick as software updates for your computer--the main difference being you have to go to the dealer to have the reflash performed--and increasingly common.

One person recently suggested to me that reflashes will eventually take place through OnStar. I can see that happening.

The latest results:

TrueDelta Vehicle Reliability Survey results